Overview
This article provides recommended settings for Intercom <> Salesforce sync.
Intercom’s integration with Salesforce is contained completely within Intercom, so you can handle the integration entirely yourself.
The highlights of Intercom sync include mapping Leads and Users in Intercom to Leads and Contacts in Salesforce, including their message history.
We do not recommend account syncing at this time.
Requirements
Ask Swantide to give whoever is connecting the application temporary admin access for the authorization.
Other Requirements
An Intercom Messages Pro or Inbox Pro trial or subscription (with full admin permissions)
The user connecting intercom needs admin access on Intercom
Install and Connect Salesforce in Intercom
In Intercom, go to the App Store and log in. Search for the Salesforce App and click Install.
You will be prompted to authenticate Salesforce.
Once installed, stay in modal and go to the setting’s tab listed below:
Settings
We recommend customization of the following sections as defined below:
Manage API usage
Sync lead and contact data
Set up cases
Maintain lead and account ownership
We recommend skipping configuration for the following sections:
Sync Account data
ROI reporting
Manage API usage
This setting will give you a glimpse into API calls being made to Salesforce. Generally, we haven’t seen issues with Intercom causing a high number of API calls, but it’s good practice to keep a limit because as your team scales and you continue to integrate more tools, it will continue to become an issue.
Our recommendation would be to set the limit 20,000.
Sync Lead and Contact Data
Choose to use email address as the unique identifier to map Intercom leads and users with Salesforce leads and accounts.
Below that you’ll be able to define a mapping of individual fields for leads and contacts between Salesforce and Intercom. You can sync data both ways between the two, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you should! Here is a detailed guide about how the data sync works.
Important: Think carefully about what data needs to move between the two and the business use cases for having data from one surfaced to the team working in the other. Remember individual user data from intercom does not equal a 1:1 of contacts engaged in the Sales Process and in most cases you do not want all users in Salesforce. Feel free to ping the Swantide team if you’d like to chat about this more or want advice!
Set up cases
This will sync messages in Intercom with the corresponding lead or contact in Salesforce. The message will show up as a “Task” object in Salesforce in the same thread where you see emails synced. (In the middle column of Contact, Lead, and Account pages).
Turn on “Automatically Create Salesforce Activities”
For most of our customers, “Case” objects are not used or turned on in SFDC. As a result, the second two steps in this setting aren’t relevant and won’t actually be used by your team. Therefore we recommend the defaults for ease of set up:
Assign case owner: Select “Use my Salesforce Configuration” for case assignment
Since “Salesforce case record type configuration” aren’t enabled in your SFDC, select “Create custom form”
Maintain account and lead ownership
To sync all accounts into Intercom, we recommend choosing the “All Accounts” list
Decide for you team/ business process if you want to respect the lead creator from intercom when it’s synced to Salesforce
Map Intercom users to SFDC users