A practical guide to Intercom automation to assign conversations to teams using rules

Getting the right customer question to the right person is a classic growing pain for any support team. When you're small, manually assigning things from a shared inbox works just fine. But as you scale, that system starts to fall apart, and fast. Conversations get missed, response times slowly tick up, and agents spend more time sorting through the inbox than actually helping people.

Intercom is a popular tool for trying to tame this chaos. Its automation features promise to route conversations to the right place, but getting them to work perfectly can feel like trying to solve a puzzle. The setup isn't always straightforward, and a system based purely on rules has its limits.

This guide will walk you through exactly how to use Intercom automation to assign conversations to teams using rules. We'll cover how it works, a few common strategies, and the inevitable roadblocks you might hit. Then, we’ll look at a more flexible, AI-powered way to solve the same problem, without all the headaches.

Understanding Intercom

Intercom is a customer communications platform that brings together tools for support, engagement, and marketing. You can think of it as a central hub for talking to your customers, whether they're a new lead checking out your website or a long-time user who needs a hand.

It’s built around a few key parts: the Messenger (the chat widget your customers use), the Inbox (where your team manages all the conversations), and a set of automation tools like Workflows and their AI agent, Fin. The main idea is to give you one place to manage the entire customer journey, from the first "hello" to ongoing support.

A view of the Intercom messenger, the starting point for customer conversations that will be routed using automation rules.

How Intercom's automation works

If you want to automate routing in Intercom, you’ll need to get very familiar with a feature called Workflows. This is where you build the logic that tells Intercom what to do with incoming messages.

Workflows: The heart of Intercom's automation

Workflows are the engine behind all of Intercom’s automation. They’re basically a sequence of steps you define: a trigger kicks things off, conditions (your rules) decide which path to take, and actions make something happen.

It’s helpful to think of them in two main buckets:

• Customer-facing workflows: These are the ones that chat directly with the user, like asking a few questions to qualify a lead or suggesting a help center article.

• Background workflows: These work behind the scenes to keep your inbox from becoming a mess. They do the administrative stuff, like adding tags, applying SLAs, and most importantly for us, assigning conversations to the right team.

To get your conversation assignment sorted, you'll be building background workflows.

The Intercom workflow builder, where teams create the logic for routing conversations to the correct teams based on rules.

Setting up your triggers and conditions

Every workflow needs a trigger to start. For routing new conversations, the most common ones are "Customer sends their first message" or "Customer opens a new conversation." Simple enough. Once that trigger fires, the workflow looks at your conditions to figure out what to do next.

You can build rules based on all sorts of data, including:

• Customer data: You can route chats based on info you already have about your users, like their subscription plan, company size, location, or what language they speak.

• Message content: The workflow can look for specific keywords in the first message. If a message contains "billing" or "invoice," you can send it straight to the finance team without anyone else touching it.

• Team capacity: If your main support team is getting slammed, you can create rules to route conversations to an overflow team or a different channel to help manage the load.

Actions: Sending conversations to the right place

Once a conversation meets the conditions you've set, the final step is the action. In this case, it’s the "Assign to" action. You can send the conversation to a specific team inbox where any available agent can grab it, or even assign it directly to an individual.

For teams that want to spread the work out evenly, Intercom also has a round-robin assignment feature that automatically gives the next conversation to the next available agent on a team.

Common conversation assignment strategies

Once you get the hang of the building blocks, you can set up some pretty useful routing strategies. Here are a few common ways teams put this to work.

Give VIPs the express lane

A popular move is to give your most important customers a faster path to help. You can set up a rule that checks for a customer attribute, like "plan = Enterprise" or "MRR > $500". If a conversation matches, it gets routed straight to a senior support team or a dedicated account manager. This makes sure they get the white-glove service they're paying for.

Sort conversations by topic

This is probably the most common setup. By scanning the first message for keywords, you can automatically sort conversations by department. For instance:

• If the message mentions "pricing" or "demo," send it over to the Sales team.

• If it includes "bug," "error," or "API," it can go to your Tier 2 technical support team.

• If you see "refund" or "invoice," that one’s for the Billing team.

Manage a global, 24/7 support queue

For companies with customers all over the world, you can use rules to manage handoffs between different time zones. A rule based on the "Current time" or your office hours can make sure new conversations are always sent to the team that’s actually online, whether they're in Dublin or Sydney. This is a huge help in preventing questions from sitting unanswered overnight.

It's all based on a simple "if this, then that" logic. A new conversation comes in. First, the system checks if it contains "billing." If yes, it goes to Finance. If no, it checks if the customer is on an Enterprise plan. If yes, it goes to VIP Support. If no, it lands in the General Support queue.

The limitations and challenges of rule-based automation

A rules-based system is great… until it’s not. As your company and support volume grow, you'll likely start to see the cracks appear. Here are some of the common headaches teams run into.

• It gets complicated, fast: At first, you might only have a few rules. But soon you have rules for sales, billing, VIPs, different languages, and specific product features. Before you know it, you're staring at a tangled web of dozens of workflows. Figuring out why something went wrong becomes a nightmare, as conflicting rules can misroute conversations or, even worse, leave them floating in an unassigned queue.

• The rules aren't actually that smart: Rules are literal. They can't understand nuance, intent, or sentiment. A keyword rule for "billing" works perfectly if someone types the word "billing." But what if a customer writes, "my card was charged incorrectly" or "I have a question about my last payment"? A simple keyword-based system will miss these completely, sending a sensitive financial question to the general queue. The system relies on you predicting every single way a customer might phrase their problem.

• Getting full AI means a full migration: Intercom has its own AI agent, Fin, but to get the most out of their AI platform, you're often pushed to commit to their entire suite. If you’re happy with your current helpdesk like Zendesk or Freshdesk, being forced into a big migration just to get better automation isn't exactly ideal.

• It’s hard to test your work: When you build a new set of rules, you want to be sure they’ll work as planned. With Intercom, there isn't a simple way to simulate how your new workflows would have handled your last 1,000 conversations. You basically have to build them, push them live, and hope for the best, which feels a little risky when you’re dealing with customer experience.

Intercom pricing explained

Okay, let's talk about pricing, because this is where things can get a little tricky with Intercom, especially when it comes to automation and AI. The costs are split between licenses for your team members (seats) and how much you use the AI, which can make budgeting a challenge.

Intercom has three main plans, with prices based on paying annually: Essential at $29 per seat/month, Advanced at $85 per seat/month, and Expert at $132 per seat/month. The biggest variable, however, is the cost of their AI.

The Fin AI Agent is priced at $0.99 per resolution. A "resolution" is counted every time the AI successfully answers a customer's question without needing a human to step in. This usage-based model means your bill is directly tied to your support volume. If you have a busy month, your Intercom bill goes up. This approach can end up penalizing you for growth and makes your costs unpredictable.

This per-resolution fee is charged whether you use Fin inside the full Intercom suite or as a standalone agent on another helpdesk.

Plan	Per Seat / mo (Annual)	Fin AI Agent Cost	Key Automation Features
Essential	$29	$0.99 / resolution	Basic Workflows
Advanced	$85	$0.99 / resolution	Advanced Workflows, Round Robin
Expert	$132	$0.99 / resolution	Multibrand Workflows, SLAs

A simpler, more powerful alternative: eesel AI

If you're nodding along to the frustrations with rigid rules and surprise bills, you're not alone. Many teams are looking for a better way to handle this, which is where modern AI platforms like eesel AI come in. They offer a smarter and more flexible approach to automation.

Instead of demanding a full migration, eesel AI plugs directly into the tools your team already uses, including Intercom, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Slack, and others. This means you can get powerful AI features without having to rip out your current helpdesk and start over.

You can get started in just a few minutes. The setup is designed to be completely self-serve, so you can connect your helpdesk, train your AI on your own data, and go live without ever needing to talk to a salesperson.

And instead of making you write dozens of manual rules, eesel AI learns directly from your past support conversations. It analyzes thousands of your historical tickets to understand context, nuance, and your brand's tone of voice all on its own. It can accurately route and resolve a much wider range of questions from day one, because it’s learning from your real-world examples.

Plus, the pricing is straightforward. eesel AI offers simple, flat-rate monthly plans with no per-resolution fees. You know exactly what you'll pay each month, no matter how many questions your customers ask. This makes budgeting way easier and means your costs won't spiral as your business grows.

Final thoughts on Intercom's rule-based automation

So, there you have it. Using Intercom automation to assign conversations to teams using rules is a solid first step to getting your inbox organized. It’s a good way to bring some order to the chaos of a busy support queue. But, its reliance on manual, rigid rules can get complicated, and the per-resolution pricing model can lead to some unpredictable bills.

If you're feeling the limits of manual rules and want something smarter, more flexible, and easier on the budget, modern AI tools are worth a look. By learning from your actual support history, these platforms can handle routing and resolution with a level of nuance that rules just can't match, all while plugging into the tools you already know and use.

Get intelligent automation without leaving your helpdesk

Tired of wrestling with complex rules and unpredictable AI costs? eesel AI integrates with your existing helpdesk to provide smart automation that learns from your data. Start your free trial today and see how much time you can save.