Introducing Hull’s Intercom integration
Combine your customer profiles and actions, then sync it across all your tools with Hull + Intercom
This is a guest post by Intercom Platform Partner Hull.
Hull’s Intercom integration comes after many of our own customers and leads have asked for an Intercom connector. The idea is to share data from Intercom to other tools, and use data elsewhere to upgrade Intercom profiles and segments.
In short, we take the data that sales, marketing and customer-facing people need, and put it in the tools they use. Natively. Quickly. No code required.
The Perfect Partner for Intercom ♥
Intercom is one of those few MarTech products that can totally unite teams around the same set of data. With the various products like Acquire and Engage, it puts marketing, support and sometimes sales on the same page within the same software.
Chances are, if you use multiple Intercom products, you’ve had the “ah ha!” moment using a common profile between different teams — not having multiple different tools, with different data, siloed away somewhere. The same sort of “ah ha!” you might have had internally with something like Dropbox.
But, Intercom isn’t all things to all people - Des Traynor (Intercom’s Chief Strategy Officer and co-founder) writes extensively about how this is a deliberate product strategy at Intercom. Even ‘perfect’ companies who diligently use all of Intercom’s products across their whole organisation need other tools. Whether it’s sending messages through other channels like email, ads or a website, or informing other teams in Salesforce or your analytics tools, your customer data is needed elsewhere too.
Our data shows this — modern businesses depend on multiple services to manage their sales, marketing and customer success. But the data within those tools often remains locked away and unconnected.
Hull combines and then shares a single customer profile across all your tools
Hull starts by connecting your many sources of user actions and profile data and combining them into one profile. For most of these tools, this takes just a few clicks to login and plug them in.
Using all those data points from different services, you can then create advanced segments to sync to all your other tools in real time — including Intercom and Mailchimp lists, Optimizely and Facebook Custom Audiences, and even Slack channels.
You can create segments from properties, events and event properties (like “how long after signup did this happen?” and “where did this action take place?”). That means you can create segments like this:
- Created 2 or more documents
- … between 2 and 5 days after signup
- AND Who have >1 day of their free trial remaining
- AND Who have not ever visited help.yourdomain.com
- AND are subscribed to emails in Intercom, Mailchimp and HubSpot
- AND have not been contacted by sales (as noted in Salesforce)
You can create this segment in Hull (in a similar point-and-click way you do with Intercom) and share every contact profile in that segment (including every property and event on that profile) across to Intercom and all your other tools. Hull will keep this segment and each profile up-to-date in Intercom every time any of the segment’s contacts is updated.
Building the Hull-Intercom Integration
We keep the same focus on flexibility on the technical level — all of our integrations are implemented as microservices. The sales, marketing and customer success teams using customer data need visibility into how that data gets processed — and since every business is different, the ability to extend and change how that process works is important.
To make that possible, all our integrations are available as open source projects on our Hull Github organization. If you need to know in detail how your data is processed, then you can go straight into the code to find out. If there’s a missing feature in our Intercom (or any other) integration, you can fork the repository, deploy it in one click on Heroku or host it anywhere. Alternatively, you can submit a pull request — we will be happy to consider merging it upstream.
The code of our Hull-Intercom integration shows how we work with the Intercom API. Some Hull clients have hundreds of thousands of users, and so our integrations need to be able to push and pull large volumes of customer data quickly and efficiently. Using a combination of single API calls and the Intercom Bulk API calls allows us to do it beautifully — just like Intercom itself 😀
We found the details of the Intercom API presented in a helpful way in their reference documentation. In case we had any questions or doubts, their super friendly support staff were always willing to help and meet our needs.
Connect Intercom to Hull
Your team doesn’t need a developer to setup Hull — no code, no engineering required. You can install the Intercom integration in a few clicks, and start seeing your data into Hull as fast as Intercom’s API will send it.
If you’re interested in this integration, take a look at our Intercom ‘recipes’ here and request a demo so we can walk you through the platform.
If you’d be interested in extending our Hull-Intercom integration, you can fork it on GitHub. Let us know if you have any questions, ideas or feedback. We’d love to support your work with Intercom.
Thanks to the team at Hull! If you want to know more about integrations with Intercom, visit our integrations page or find out more about the Platform Partner program.
