3 handy updates to our Bulk APIs

You asked, we listened👂

Earlier this week we posted a round up of all the updates we’ve made this year, one of which was improvements to our Bulk API.

This post goes into a bit more detail about 3 recent updates we’ve made:

1. Significant improvements to processing times
2. You can now add and update Leads in bulk
3. We’ve removed the need to worry about the processing order for Events and Users

1. Bulk jobs are now faster 🏃🏻

We’ve spent much time over the past few months improving the speed of our bulk processing, so we hope that you’re finding your jobs being completed much faster overall.

If you’re interested in knowing more about how the process works, you can check out our updated Bulk docs and our new overview/FAQ page which includes a flow diagram illustrating the process. We’ll continue adding to this over time, so do let us know if you have any questions not covered here.

2. You can now add and update Leads in bulk

Previously, you could only perform bulk operations for Users and Events, but we listened to your feedback and have made it possible to add and update Leads in bulk.

This isn’t yet supported in our SDKs (watch this space!) but you can use it in its raw form with you favourite SDK. Below is an example of how to do that, using the Ruby SDK to demonstrate.

Take a look at our docs at developers.intercom.com for more info on our Bulk APIs

Example: Updating Leads in bulk with the Ruby SDK

This example reuses most of the code from a previous post where we bulk updated users. The only difference now is that we will create the bulk data object and then pass that with a POST request:

Let’s say you want to check which of your leads has contact information. You can create a custom attribute called “contact info” which will be ‘true’ when a lead has either an email or phone number associated with it. You can check out the full code here.

As always, if you have any issues getting this setup with the SDKs let us know, we’re always happy to help 😀

3. Improvements to ordering of bulk operations

And the final little treat for you before the holidays…

We heard your concerns about the order of bulk jobs — namely that they aren’t necessarily processed in the order you submit them, so an event operation could fail because it was processed before a user is created by a separate operation.

Now, if no user exists when a bulk event operation is processed we create a user template. If a user create operation is received after the event operation, it will simply update this ‘template’ user with all the relevant details and still associate the events with that user.

This means you don’t have to worry about the ordering of these type of bulk jobs anymore 🎉

Thanks to everyone who gave us feedback that led to these changes — we always love hearing from you and hope these updates make your work easier.

If you’re interested in building on the Intercom platform, take a look at our Developer Hub to get started.

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