A practical guide to intercom follow up reminders (2025)

We’ve all been there. A customer starts a chat, asks a question, and then… radio silence. They just disappear. Keeping those conversations from falling into the abyss is a huge part of good customer service. Intercom has some built-in tools to help with this, but are they really enough?

This guide will walk you through setting up the native Intercom follow up reminders, point out where they fall short, and show you a smarter, AI-driven way to keep customers engaged without ever leaving your helpdesk.

What are Intercom follow up reminders?

At their core, Intercom follow up reminders are automated messages meant to ping users who go quiet in a support chat or who need a little nudge to finish something important. The whole point is to stop conversations from dying out, make sure people get their answers, and help guide them through things like onboarding.

In Intercom, you'll mainly see these reminders show up in two places:

1. For quiet AI chats: If a customer is chatting with Fin (Intercom's AI bot) and stops replying, a timed message can pop up to see if they still need help before the chat closes automatically.

2. For onboarding tasks: There's a feature called "Checklists" that lets you set up reminders to prompt users to finish certain steps, like filling out their profile or trying a new feature.

These are handy for keeping things moving, but they're pretty basic. They run on simple timers and rules. Real, effective re-engagement usually needs a bit more smarts, which is where you start to see the limits of these rule-based systems.

How Intercom's follow up reminders work

Intercom gives you a couple of different ways to set up these automated pings. Let’s take a look at how to get them running for both AI conversations and task-based checklists.

Setting up Intercom follow up reminders for inactive Fin conversations

When you’re using Fin, Intercom’s AI Agent, you have some control over what happens when a user goes silent. You can handle this right inside the "Let Fin answer" block in your Intercom Workflows. It's pretty straightforward: you just set a timer for how long Fin should wait before it considers a customer inactive.

Once that time is up, you can have it send a custom follow-up message. It's a nice way to give the customer one last chance to jump back in before the conversation is closed for good. You could send something simple like, "Just checking in, did you have any other questions for me?" This works alongside the auto-close settings, giving you a bit more control over the whole experience.

A view of the Intercom visual workflow builder, where users can configure Intercom follow up reminders.

Using checklists for task-based Intercom follow up reminders

If you're dealing with more structured things like user onboarding, Intercom's "Checklists" feature is what you'll want to use. Checklists are part of the Proactive Support Plus add-on, and they let you build a list of tasks for your users to tick off.

For any checklist you build, you can switch on reminder notifications. These will pop up for users at intervals you choose (like every 1, 3, or 7 days) until they either finish the list or the reminder period ends. This is great for guiding people through a process, but it’s more about task completion than it is about having a real conversation.

Limitations of native Intercom follow up reminders

While Intercom’s features give you a basic safety net for dropped conversations, they have some pretty big limitations that stop you from creating follow-ups that are genuinely helpful and aware of the situation.

• They're triggered by a stopwatch, not context

  The reminders are based on simple timers. "If a user is quiet for 5 minutes, send this message." They have no idea what the conversation was actually about. A truly smart system could look at the chat and follow up with something specific, like, "Hey, I'm still looking into that shipping question for you. I should have an update in a few minutes."

• They can't actually do anything

  Intercom's reminders can only send a message. That's it. A more advanced AI agent could connect to other systems to get work done. For example, it could check an order status in Shopify, see that the package has shipped, and proactively send the customer the tracking number. That solves the problem without the user even having to ask again.

• Their knowledge is stuck in a silo

  These reminders don't pull information from your other knowledge sources, like past tickets, Confluence pages, or Google Docs. They only know what's happening in that one specific workflow, which really limits how helpful they can be. A follow-up becomes way more powerful when it can include a link to the right help article or summarize a solution from a similar ticket.

A workflow diagram illustrating the limitations of siloed knowledge in native Intercom follow up reminders.

• The setup is pretty rigid

  You’re stuck configuring these reminders within specific features like Fin or Checklists. You can't really build complex, multi-step re-engagement plans that trigger based on what the ticket is about, who the customer is, or their past interactions.

• There are hidden costs and complexity

  Features like Checklists, which are pretty important for proactive support, are locked behind the "Proactive Support Plus" add-on. That means more money on your monthly bill for what feels like essential functionality.

Moving beyond basic Intercom follow up reminders: Proactive follow-ups with a customizable AI agent

If you want to move beyond simple, timed nudges, you need an AI that acts like a real extension of your support team. This is where a platform like eesel AI comes in. It plugs directly into your existing Intercom setup to give it a major boost, not replace it.

Here’s how a more advanced AI agent tackles the limitations we just talked about:

So, instead of just asking, "Are you still there?", an AI agent powered by eesel AI could say something like this: "I noticed you were asking about your refund. I've just checked our system, and it was processed this morning. You should see it in your account within 3-5 business days. Let me know if you need anything else!"

That’s the difference between a simple reminder and an automated resolution.

A full look at Intercom's pricing

It's important to get a handle on Intercom's pricing, because features are often split across different plans and add-ons. The cost is mainly based on how many seats you have, plus a per-resolution fee for their AI agent, Fin.

• Essential Plan: Starts at $29 per seat/mo. Fin costs $0.99 per resolution.

• Advanced Plan: Starts at $85 per seat/mo. Fin is still $0.99 per resolution.

• Expert Plan: Starts at $132 per seat/mo. And again, Fin is $0.99 per resolution.

The important thing to note is that some key features for proactive engagement aren't included in these base plans.

• Proactive Support Plus Add-on: You'll need this for Checklists, and it costs an extra $99/month.

• Fin AI Agent Pricing: You pay $0.99 for every single conversation Fin manages to resolve. This can make your costs hard to predict, since your bill is tied directly to your support volume. If you already use another helpdesk like Zendesk, you can get Fin as a standalone product, but it's still $0.99 per resolution with a 50-resolution monthly minimum.

This pricing model means that as your support volume goes up, so do your costs. For teams that need to stick to a predictable budget, a per-resolution model can be a real headache.

Move from basic Intercom follow up reminders to intelligent conversations

Setting up Intercom follow up reminders is a decent first step to reduce the number of abandoned conversations. The native tools for Fin and Checklists give you some basic, time-based functions to keep users engaged. But at the end of the day, these features are held back by their simple rules, lack of deep integrations, and siloed knowledge.

To deliver support that's truly proactive and helpful, you need an AI that can understand context, take action on its own, and learn from all of your company's knowledge. A tool like eesel AI integrates with your existing helpdesk to give you that next level of intelligence and automation, all with pricing that won't give you a surprise at the end of the month.

Ready to see what a smarter AI agent can do for your team? Start your free eesel AI trial today.