Integrate with Intercom

Integrate with Intercom to provide a complete chat, email, and help center tool for your members and visitors.

Laurie Garcia avatar
Written by Laurie Garcia
Updated over a week ago

We have a direct integration with Intercom that allows you to plug in a powerful instant chat, email, and help center service to your school. We use Intercom ourselves and love it!

Integrate your Intercom account with Pathwright

To get started, create an account with Intercom here: https://www.intercom.io/. You can see their products and pricing here: https://www.intercom.com/pricing. Here are three of their products that you will likely find most helpful:

  • Inbox - lets you respond to incoming messages by in-app chat or email.

  • Outbound - lets you send targeted in-app and email messages. 

  • Articles - provides you with a Help Center just like this one. 

To integrate your school with Intercom, open the Account Settings from the menu or Dashboard and go to Connect other apps > Integrate Intercom.io. You'll see a place to enter your Intercom App ID. 

Enable deeper integration with your Access Token

Here are step-by-step instructions for setting up your Access Token: https://developers.intercom.com/docs/personal-access-tokens

When you set up your Token, you will be asked to choose between two levels of scopes (i.e. permissions). We recommend selecting Standard Scopes

If you have an Access Token set up already, you'll see it here. 

To add your Access Token to your Pathwright account, log in with admin access, open the menu in the upper left corner, and select Settings -> Connect other apps -> Integrate Intercom.io. 

Under the last option, "Enable closer integration with Intercom," paste your Access Token from Intercom into the "Intercom Access Token" field and save. You're all set! 

Enable Identity Verification

Intercom provides Identity Verification to keep your conversations secure and ensure that no one can impersonate your users in the chat. You can add the Secret Key that Intercom provides to your Pathwright account to complete the Identity Verification setup. 

To find the "Intercom Secret Key" field, open the Account Settings from the menu or Dashboard and go to Connect other apps > Integrate Intercom.io. You will see a place to enter your Intercom Secret Key. 

Follow the link provided there and it will take you to a page in your Intercom account where your Secret Key is provided. Copy and paste that into the field in your Pathwright settings and you should be set. Intercom advises loading the Messenger after the update to check that setup was successful. 

💬 Using the in-app chat

If your chat icon is not showing, you may have accidentally hidden it, as indicated in these instructions. You will want to have "Users" and "Visitors" selected in order to show the messenger to everyone. Deselect "Visitors" if you only want to use the chat with logged-in users. (If both are deselected, learners cannot send messages and will not receive your messages.)

The Intercom chat icon will now appear in the bottom right corner of your site for learners. Whether or not they have to log in first will depend on what products you have and your messenger settings (above). 

When learners click this icon, it will bring up their chat screen. Users can receive and initiate messages. 

You (and your team) can monitor and respond to chat messages from your Intercom account. 

When you are signed into your school as an admin, you'll still see Pathwright's chat feature so that you can chat with us, but rest assured that learners will see yours instead. 

Attributes shared with Intercom

When your Pathwright account is linked with your Intercom account, we'll send the following attributes automatically:

  • user_id

  • email

  • name

  • avatar image

  • created_at (date that school membership was created)

  • role (school roles are Member, Admin, and Library Editor)

  • is_subscriber (if your school uses subscription plans)

The following two attributes apply if you have set up an opt-in consent checkbox as detailed here:

  • consent_snapshot (the opt-in description at the time that the user consented)

  • consented_at (time stamp of when the user consented)

If you license content from your account to users in other Pathwright accounts, then the following attributes apply:

  • is_school_owner (user is the Admin who created the Pathwright account)

  • is_school_admin (user is an Admin in the Pathwright account)

  • is_school_staff (user is a staff member in the Pathwright account, which includes anyone in the role of Admin, Library Editor, Mentor Group Admin, or Course Editor)

  • is_licensing (this refers to accounts that are licensing content created by another account)

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