Leveraging Intercom to Have Conversations in Slack

At Manifestly, engaging in conversations with our users is crucial for us. To do this, we use (and 💙) Intercom. Through these conversations, we learn what people love. We see what we could improve. And we discover new ideas for making our service even better.

Since releasing our Slack App in 2016, a growing percentage of Manifestly users never come to our website, they use Manifestly entirely in Slack! And that’s great, except our Intercom widget doesn’t exist it Slack. We wondered how we could have those conversations without having them leave Slack.

As individuals, we’re not members of their Slack team. Where are we? We’re over here in Intercom. Wait a second! We’re not in their Slack, but our bot is.

That got us thinking…

What if we used our bot to send their attempts to have a conversation with us from their Slack to our Intercom? And then we use an Intercom webhook to catch relevant replies from us in Intercom and relay those messages back to them in Slack?

We took our existing feedback command and made it more of a conversation command:

That message sent to our Slack bot goes into our Intercom:

When we respond, the response is managed by Intercom. And all those replies from us now fire off a webhook that we can use to complete the integration with Slack. If the reply is part of a conversation initiated in Slack, we send the message back to the original user in their Slack. So this reply:

Ends up over in their Slack:

In addition, there’s a Reply button, which keeps the conversation between your Slack and our Intercom going as long as needed.

We think that’s pretty sweet. We’d like to thank Louie Penaflor for this idea (and many others).

And of course, we couldn’t have done this without Slack and Intercom.