Intercom-Slack Integration with Thena: Everything You Need to Know

[govindkavaturi]

Is your entire support team using the Intercom app to handle support requests, but your customers are on Slack? We hear you.

When using Slack for customer support, agents regularly encounter the need to switch applications. Worse, they need to be on all customer channels in order to provide the support. The alternative is to ask your customers to leave Slack and ask them to use Intercom to get their queries answered.

Thanks to Intercom-Slack integration with Thena, you won't have to resort to any of these scenarios.

Read on to learn how Thena can integrate your Slack Connect with Intercom for efficient conversational ticketing.

What Is Thena’s Intercom Integration?
The Intercom integration with Thena lets you connect both Slack and Intercom applications and to synchronize conversations between these apps. Neither customer support agents nor customers are required to move platforms to interact.

This bi-directional integration allows companies to manage customers on Slack while their support teams remain on Intercom without switching context.

Why Do You Need to Integrate Slack With Intercom?
There are many reasons you need to integrate your Slack Connect with Intercom. However, the following three appear to be at the heart of it all.

1. To Eliminate Context Switching

Context switching can kill your team’s performance and result in inefficient workflows. According to one study, 43% of knowledge workers report that switching between different online tools and applications negatively affects their productivity and ability to concentrate.

Slack-Intercom integration allows you to overcome the need to hop between applications, making it easier to address customer queries seamlessly and efficiently.

2. To Ensure Long-Term Scalability

How can you scale your customer service over time? Not by ordering your support agents to join customer Slack channels. It is a risky choice on multiple fronts.

Firstly, you’ll set them up for failure as requests will get dropped. Secondly, your support agents will be unhappy and lost; worse, the process won’t scale as your business expands.

3. To Keep Customers on Slack

As previously discussed, your customers want Slack because they’re already on the platform. In other words, they’re familiar with the tool and its functionalities, so asking them to leave Slack for another app (in this instance, Intercom) would only create friction and frustration.

Slack-Intercom Integration Made Easy With Thena
Why do we need Thena? Isn’t there already an Intercom app for Slack that can handle our business logic?

From our experience, the Intercom app for Slack only functions under certain conditions:

• The customers must always come through the Intercom (web app/website). The app doesn’t cater to customers that interact with you on Slack.

• The support agent can reply from Slack to the customer (in Intercom). But every new request kicks off its own channel. As your organization grows, this will become unsustainable.

Therefore, if your clients are already using Slack and you have more than 30 Customer Slack channels, your support team on Intercom needs a solution. And here is when Thena comes into play.

On a Broad Scale, What Does Thena’s Integration With Intercom Mean?
Easier Conversations
Firstly, when a customer asks a question in Slack, an Intercom conversation is created at the click of a button. If you forget to create a ticket, the Smart Inbox feature ensures that the message is highlighted as a suggested request.

Agents Have More Control Over the Entire Ticket Lifecycle
Secondly, your support agents have much more control over the entire conversation within Intercom. They can manage ticket lifecycle (Open > In Progress > Close), escalate and share rich text, attachments, gifs, and hyperlinks without worrying about the communication flow between Slack and the Intercom app.

Customer request board
Customer request board
Kanban Board to Visualize Conversations
Thirdly, a Kanban board ensures that you can see all Intercom conversations either at a customer level or at your organizational level — all within Slack.

CSAT Feature
Fourthly, Thena has a CSAT feature, which means that whenever you meet your customers on the platform of their choice (Slack, for example), they’re more likely to give you feedback.

Effortless Escalation and Customer Request Tracking
And finally, as a customer-facing representative, you can stay in Slack and track the progress of customer requests, including past interactions. Thena also facilitates the internal escalation process if you need to do so.

Effortless Escalation and Customer Request Tracking
Escalation within Slack
But There’s More to Thena’s Integration With Intercom
The details and the explicit business benefits are what give Thena a competitive edge when it comes to integrating Intercom with Slack.

Onboarding New Clients and Adding Employees Made Easy
Have you landed a new client and created a Slack channel with them? On the first interaction for support, Thena will check if the Intercom Organization has been set up. If not — no problem. Thena will create it for you.

Likewise, when your customer or your organization has a new employee who gets added to the Slack Channel with you, Thena will automatically create a new Intercom user for that organization.

Colleague Tagging, Escalation, and Requests
Not all customer support requests can be handled smoothly. Sometimes you need to tap into the expertise of your colleagues, whether by tagging them or escalating support requests further.

Thena allows you to effortlessly tag a colleague to a Slack conversation thread while adding that user to the Intercom chat.

Furthermore, the Thena escalation feature enables a customer or your own team member to escalate a request in Slack, while suggested requests can be sent to Intercom in one click.

As an added benefit, Thena tags the CSM in Slack if the ticket is created by someone else, ensuring that CSM is always in the loop.

The Power of Configuration
Thanks to Thena, you get to configure how Intercom-Slack integration will work. From white-labeling and responding as the support agent to configuring whether you want to inform the user that a support agent will attend to them shortly, Thena does it all.

Conclusion
At Thena, we believe in seamless communication. With that in mind, our next focus is on integrating Thena’s Customer Satisfaction feature with Intercom. This will guarantee that you continue to receive feedback on conversations in which your customer is on Slack, and your support agents are on Intercom.