A practical guide to Intercom Cases in 2025

If you're running a support team, you know the drill. The pressure is always on to answer customer questions faster, more accurately, and without burning out your team. You've probably heard of Intercom Cases, the platform's answer to managing the trickier customer conversations that need a bit more attention.

On the surface, it seems like a neat, integrated solution. But is it really the best way to handle your support workflows, especially when it comes to automation?

This guide is here to give you the full picture. We'll break down what Intercom Cases actually are, how they work with Intercom’s own AI, and uncover some of the key limitations and pricing details that aren't always obvious. We’ll also look at a different, more flexible way to bring AI into your Intercom setup without getting locked into a system that works against you.

What are Intercom Cases?

First off, let's clear up a common point of confusion. If you're searching for a physical carrying case for an intercom system, you're in the wrong place! In the world of customer support, Intercom Cases are simply what Intercom calls its support tickets. Think of them like tickets in Zendesk or, well, cases in Salesforce. It's their term for a customer conversation that can't be solved in a quick chat.

These are the issues that need some follow-up, a bit of investigation, or collaboration with other people on your team. Cases are designed to make sure these more complex problems don't get lost in the shuffle of a busy inbox. An agent can track the issue from start to finish, loop in engineering or billing, and make sure the customer gets a proper resolution.

This is especially useful when you connect Intercom to a CRM like Salesforce. A simple chat can be officially turned into a case that gets logged against a customer's record, keeping everyone in the loop. It sounds great in theory, but as we'll see, the way this is all put together comes with some strings attached.

How to manage Intercom Cases

Intercom gives you a set of tools to create and manage cases, all with the goal of making your support workflow feel smooth. Let's peek under the hood at how it all works.

Creating Intercom Cases and setting up workflows

The basic process is simple: any conversation happening in your Intercom Inbox can be converted into a case. Doing this gives your agents a more structured way to handle the problem. From there, you can build workflows to automatically send cases to the right team. For instance, you could set up a rule that any message with the word "invoice" automatically gets assigned to the finance department.

This is helpful for basic organization, but you might find the rules a bit stiff. If you want to build more sophisticated logic, you'll have to spend a good amount of time in Intercom's automation builder. Even then, you're limited to the data and actions that exist purely within Intercom’s world.

How Fin AI handles Intercom Cases

Intercom’s own AI agent, Fin, is built to jump in and try to resolve these cases automatically. Fin reads through your help center articles and other knowledge you've stored inside Intercom to answer customer questions. It can close out simple conversations on its own, and if it gets stuck, it knows to pass the conversation over to a human.

The catch? Fin pretty much only works with knowledge that lives inside Intercom. It's a closed system. All that incredibly useful information tucked away in your company’s internal Google Docs, your engineering team’s Confluence space, or even the solutions hidden in thousands of past support tickets are invisible to it. This means Fin often lacks the deep context needed for tougher questions, which forces you into a big project of migrating all your scattered knowledge into their platform just to make the AI useful.

Connecting Intercom Cases with Salesforce

A big selling point for many is the Intercom and Salesforce integration. It lets your team create Salesforce cases right from an Intercom chat, which is great for keeping your support and sales teams aligned. You can even configure it to map specific fields and use different Salesforce Case Record Types (CRTs).

But if you dig into Intercom's own help docs, you'll find some interesting fine print. The entire setup is tied to the single user account that installed the integration. That means everyone on your team is stuck with the same permissions and configuration, which isn't ideal. There’s also no field validation, so if an agent enters data in a format that Salesforce doesn't like, the case creation can fail without any warning. This can lead to messy data and a lot of headaches trying to figure out why things aren't syncing properly.

The hidden challenges of Intercom Cases

While having a native ticketing system is convenient, there are a few significant challenges that can make Intercom Cases a difficult choice for teams that value flexibility, control over their tools, and predictable spending.

The expensive pay-per-resolution model

This is probably the biggest hurdle for most teams. With Intercom's Fin AI, you are charged $0.99 for every single case the AI resolves. It might not sound like much at first, but this pay-per-resolution pricing model can cause your costs to spiral out of control.

Think about it: as your business grows and your support volume increases, your bill goes up right alongside it. A successful product launch or a viral marketing campaign could suddenly leave you with a massive, unexpected invoice. In a way, you get penalized for your own success. This makes it incredibly difficult to budget for support costs and might even make you hesitant to fully automate your processes, since every resolution has a price tag.

The walled garden of Intercom

Intercom’s automation tools are capable, but they operate within a very controlled environment. You are limited to the triggers, actions, and integrations that Intercom decides to provide.

What if you want your AI to do something specific, like check an order status in your company’s internal database or refund a customer through an external payment API? You're usually out of luck, unless you're willing to build complicated and fragile workarounds. This lack of a truly open workflow engine forces you to bend your processes to fit Intercom’s mold, instead of having a tool that adapts to you.

Limited AI learning

For an AI to be genuinely helpful, it needs to have access to all of your company’s knowledge, no matter where it's stored. Fin AI is at its best when it's using the help articles you've built inside Intercom. But what about the goldmine of information in your team's Confluence pages, the project plans in Google Docs, the troubleshooting threads in Slack, or the answers sitting in your years of ticket history?

Getting all of that knowledge into Intercom is often a painful, manual process of copying and pasting. Because the AI doesn't have the full story, it ends up giving incomplete answers or escalating issues that it could have solved, creating more work for your team.

Intercom Cases pricing

Understanding Intercom's pricing is key, because your total cost isn't just a simple monthly subscription. It's a mix of your plan, how many agent seats you have, and how much you use the Fin AI Agent.

Here’s what you can expect, based on their official pricing page:

Plan	Price (per seat/mo, billed annually)	Fin AI Agent Resolution Cost	Key Features for Cases
Essential	$29	$0.99 per resolution	Shared Inbox, Ticketing System, Public Help Center
Advanced	$85	$0.99 per resolution	Everything in Essential + Workflows, Multiple Inboxes
Expert	$132	$0.99 per resolution	Everything in Advanced + SLAs, Multibrand Help Center
Fin AI Agent (Standalone)	$0.99 per resolution	$0.99 per resolution (50 resolution/mo minimum)	For use with other helpdesks like Zendesk.

Pricing info is from Intercom's pricing page and could change.

The big thing to notice here is the dual-cost structure. You pay for your team's seats, and you pay for every single resolution the AI handles. Let's do some quick math: say you have a team of 5 agents on the Advanced plan, and you automate 1,000 tickets in a month. Your bill would look something like this: (5 seats * $85) + (1,000 resolutions * $0.99) = $425 + $990 = $1,415 for the month.

This cost grows right alongside your ticket volume, turning what should be a predictable software expense into a major, fluctuating operational cost.

A better approach: eesel AI

Instead of ripping out your current setup and locking yourself into an expensive, rigid system, what if you could just add a smarter, more flexible AI layer right on top of Intercom? That’s exactly what eesel AI does. It connects directly with Intercom and your other tools, giving you complete control and transparent pricing.

Get up and running in minutes

Forget about long sales calls and complicated implementation projects that take months. eesel AI is completely self-serve. You can connect your Intercom account in a single click and see it working in minutes. There's no need to migrate your entire help desk or overhaul your team's workflows. eesel AI just slots right in.

Connect all your knowledge

eesel AI is built to break down knowledge silos. From day one, it can learn from your past Intercom tickets to pick up on your brand voice and understand how your team solves common problems. But more importantly, it connects to all the other places your knowledge lives: Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, Slack, you name it. This gives your AI agent the full context it needs to give accurate answers, without you having to manually build a whole new knowledge base from scratch.

Test with confidence and transparent pricing

Are you a little nervous about unleashing an AI on your live customer chats? You should be! That’s why eesel AI has a simulation mode. It lets you test your AI on thousands of your past tickets, so you can see exactly how it will perform and what your resolution rate will be before you flip the switch.

And best of all, eesel AI has clear, predictable pricing with no hidden per-resolution fees. Our plans are a flat monthly rate, so you can automate as many tickets as you want without dreading your next invoice.

Time for smarter automation

Effectively managing Intercom Cases is a huge part of delivering great customer support. But you shouldn't have to fight against rigid tools and unpredictable costs to do it well. While Intercom offers a built-in solution, its closed ecosystem and pay-per-resolution pricing can hold your team back.

By adding a flexible AI layer like eesel AI, you can supercharge your existing Intercom setup, connect all of your team's scattered knowledge, and take back control of your automation strategy. All with a price that actually makes sense.

Ready to see how it works for yourself? Start your free trial with eesel AI today.