Intercom
Capture conversations and let the agent act in Intercom
The Intercom integration captures conversations from your Intercom workspace in real time and gives the Modem Agent the ability to search conversations, reply to customers, manage tags, and more.
Prerequisites
- Admin access to the Intercom workspace you want to connect
- A Modem organization
Setup
Start the connection
Go to Settings → Integrations → Intercom in your Modem dashboard and click Connect Intercom.
Authorize Modem
You’ll be redirected to Intercom to authorize the Modem app. Review the permissions and click Authorize.
After authorization, Modem automatically begins a historical backfill of past conversations and starts receiving new conversation events via webhooks.
What Gets Captured
Conversations
Modem captures conversation activity as it happens via webhooks:
- New conversations created by users
- User and admin replies (including internal notes)
- State changes: opened, closed, snoozed, unsnoozed
- CSAT ratings and customer remarks
- Tags on each conversation, refreshed with the next conversation event (adding a tag on its own does not trigger an update)
- Fin AI involvement: whether Intercom’s Fin AI agent participated in the conversation
Contacts
Modem looks up the Intercom contacts (users, leads, and visitors) who author conversations and links them to Modem people by their Intercom identity and email address. This gives you a unified view of each person’s activity across Intercom and your other connected sources.
Historical Backfill
When you first connect Intercom, a historical backfill of past conversations starts automatically. This runs in the background and does not block real-time webhook processing.
Agent Capabilities
The Modem Agent can interact with your Intercom workspace using the intercom_api_request tool. This gives it flexible access to Intercom’s REST API.
What the agent can do
- Search conversations by keyword, tag, or contact
- Read contact details including user, lead, and visitor profiles
- Reply to conversations (requires write access)
- Add and manage tags on conversations (requires write access)
- Add internal notes to conversations (requires write access)
- Close, snooze, or reopen conversations (requires write access)
Example prompts
Troubleshooting
Conversations aren't appearing
- Verify the integration is connected in Settings → Integrations → Intercom - Allow a few minutes for webhook delivery and processing - Check that the conversation type is supported (user conversations, not outbound messages)
Historical conversations are missing
A historical backfill starts automatically when you first connect Intercom. If it appears incomplete, try disconnecting and reconnecting the integration, or contact support@modem.ai.
Agent can't reply or tag conversations
Agent write access is disabled by default. An admin must enable Allow AI agent to write to Intercom in Settings → Integrations → Intercom. The workspace must be connected with full access, and your email must match a teammate in Intercom. Teammates added after you connected need a reconnect before Modem recognizes them.
Contacts aren't linking to people
Contacts are matched to Modem people by their Intercom identity first, then by email address. A contact without an email in Intercom still gets a person profile, but it won’t be merged with that person’s activity from other sources.
Disconnecting
To disconnect Intercom:
- Go to Settings → Integrations → Intercom
- Click Disconnect
This stops new data from being captured. Historical data remains in Modem after disconnecting.