An overview of Intercom Inbox Views and how to enhance them with AI

If your support inbox feels like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole, you’re definitely not alone. Important conversations get buried, urgent issues sit unanswered for too long, and your team spends more time digging through the clutter than actually helping people.

This is a classic growing pain for support teams, and it’s exactly why getting organized is so important. This is where Intercom Inbox Views come into play. They’re a native feature inside Intercom designed to bring some much-needed order to your team’s workspace by filtering and sorting conversations.

In this guide, we'll walk through what these views are, how you can set them up, and have an honest look at their limitations. We'll also explore how you can go beyond simple sorting and add a layer of AI to make your inbox genuinely intelligent. Because while views are great for tidying up, real efficiency comes from smart automation.

What is the Intercom Inbox?

Before we get into views, let’s do a quick refresher on the Intercom Inbox itself. Think of it as the command center for all your customer communication. It’s a shared space where every conversation, whether it’s from email, live chat, or a social media DM, lands in one unified feed.

The whole point of the Inbox is to give your team one place to manage customer chats. It's filled with handy tools for collaboration like internal notes and conversation assignments, and it has a clean interface that agents generally like using. But as your conversation volume picks up, even the most beautiful interface can get overwhelming. And that’s why organizational tools like Intercom Inbox Views aren't just a nice-to-have; they're essential for keeping your team focused.

A screenshot of the Intercom Inbox, showing the main conversation panel and the sidebar with customer details, which is the command center for customer communication.

What are Intercom Inbox Views?

So, what are Intercom Inbox Views? Simply put, they are saved filters that create custom, real-time lists of conversations based on rules you set. Instead of your team staring at one giant, unfiltered feed of every single conversation, they can toggle between different "views" to focus only on what’s relevant to them right now.

The main goal is to slice and dice your inbox into manageable pieces. This helps your team prioritize what’s urgent, keep an eye on specific topics, or just see the conversations assigned directly to them.

You'll run into two main types of views:

• Default Views: These come standard with Intercom. Think "All," "Unassigned," "Mentions," and "Your inbox." They cover the basics for most teams right out of the box.

• Custom Views: This is where you can really tailor things to your workflow. You can build your own views based on a whole bunch of filters, like conversation tags, SLA deadlines, assigned teammates, ticket types, or even custom data you’re tracking.

Ultimately, views are all about creating a less chaotic and more focused workspace for your agents. They help everyone cut through the noise and zero in on the conversations that need their attention most.

How to set up and customize your Intercom Inbox Views

Getting started with views is pretty straightforward, which is great because it means you can start organizing your inbox almost immediately. Let's walk through the steps.

Creating your first custom view

Making a new view is basically like building a recipe for the conversations you want to see.

1. First, head to your Inbox and look for the "Create view" option in the sidebar.

2. Next, give your view a clear, descriptive name and pick an emoji for it. This little touch helps make it easy to spot in a list, especially since the view will be shared with your team.

3. Now for the main part: adding your filters. You can filter by almost any data point, like "SLA due in less than 10 minutes" or "Conversation tag is VIP."

4. You can also combine filters using "And" or "Or" logic. Use "And" to get more specific (e.g., tag is VIP and SLA is about to breach). Use "Or" to broaden your net (e.g., tag is VIP or urgency is High).

5. Once you hit save, your new view will appear in the sidebar for your whole team to use.

Organizing your views with custom folders

If you get really into creating views, your sidebar can start to look a bit cluttered. That’s what folders are for. You can group related views together, for instance, a "High Priority" folder that holds views for VIPs, urgent SLAs, and negative feedback. It’s a simple way to keep everything tidy so agents can find what they need without scrolling through a long list.

Practical examples of useful views

To get your gears turning, here are a few examples of custom views that many support teams find really helpful:

• "VIP Customer" View: This is a classic. Create a view that filters for a specific customer tag or a custom attribute you use to flag top-tier clients. This helps make sure your most important customers always get the fastest service.

• "Negative Feedback" View: Set up a view based on tags like "complaint" or "negative_feedback." This gives managers an easy way to monitor customer sentiment and jump on problems before they escalate.

• "Fin AI Agent Handled" View: You can create a view to see all conversations where Intercom's Fin AI was involved. This is a great way for team leads to spot-check the AI's performance and see where it's doing well or where it might need some help.

• "Unassigned Tracker Tickets" View: This view can be used to list all tracker tickets (issues affecting multiple customers) that haven't been assigned to an engineering or product team yet. It’s a safety net to ensure nothing important slips through the cracks.

The limitations of relying only on Intercom Inbox Views

Alright, Intercom Inbox Views are obviously a great tool for getting organized. They bring order to a messy inbox and help your team focus. But it's also important to see them for what they are: a powerful manual tool. And when it comes to support efficiency, manual organization will only get you so far.

Here’s where you might start to feel the ceiling.

Views are reactive, not proactive

Views are great at showing you a list of conversations that already fit certain criteria, like an SLA that's about to breach. But they don't do anything to prevent that breach from happening. A view is like a dashboard warning light; it tells you there's a problem, but it doesn't automatically route the ticket, alert a manager, or draft a reply to fix it.

Views require manual upkeep

Your business is always changing. Your processes evolve, new types of tickets pop up, and teams get restructured. Every time something like that happens, someone has to go in and manually update, create, or delete views to keep them relevant. For bigger or fast-growing teams, this can turn into a real administrative headache.

Views lack deep understanding

A view can filter conversations by a tag, but it can't understand the nuance of what's being said. It can't tell if a customer is getting frustrated but hasn't used a specific negative keyword. It can't summarize a long thread for an agent who's taking over a conversation. It sees data points, not the context behind them.

Views don't reduce the workload

Views help you manage the work you have, but they don't do anything to actually reduce it. They won’t deflect common questions with an instant answer, help an agent find a solution in your knowledge base faster, or flag recurring questions that signal a gap in your help docs.

This is the point where most teams start looking for an AI layer to put on top of their helpdesk. A smart system can do more than just sort conversations into a list; it can act on them. This is where a tool like eesel AI comes in, integrating with your Intercom helpdesk to add a brain to its brawn.

Going beyond Intercom Inbox Views with eesel AI

For teams that have mastered views but are still hitting a wall on efficiency, eesel AI is the natural next step. It works with your existing Intercom setup, not against it, to automate the repetitive tasks that views can only organize.

• Automate your triage: Instead of an agent having to manually check a "Billing Questions" view, eesel AI’s AI Triage can automatically identify, tag, and route those questions to the finance team the moment they arrive. This flips the process from reactive monitoring to proactive, hands-off automation.

• Get a head start on replies: Imagine an agent clicking into their "VIP Customer" view and finding a perfectly good reply already drafted and waiting for them. The AI Copilot from eesel AI learns from your past resolutions and help docs to generate responses in your brand's voice, saving agents precious time on every ticket.

• Connect all your knowledge: Intercom views are stuck with the data that lives inside Intercom. But what if the answer a customer needs is buried in a Google Doc or a Confluence page? eesel AI connects to all of your company knowledge, wherever it lives, giving its AI agents the full context to provide complete answers.

• Test your setup with confidence: Rolling out new rules and automation can feel a bit like a guessing game. You set it up and hope it works as expected. eesel AI takes the guesswork out of it with a simulation mode. You can test your AI setup on thousands of your past Intercom tickets to see exactly how it will perform, what it will answer and what your resolution rate will look like, before you turn it on for a single customer.

An AI Copilot integrated within the Intercom inbox, drafting replies to speed up agent workflows, going beyond what standard Intercom Inbox Views can do.

A quick look at Intercom's pricing

To get the full picture, it helps to know how Intercom's pricing packages its features. The platform is mostly sold in three tiers, with pricing based on how many agent seats you need.

Here's a quick breakdown of their plans:

From organized to optimized

Intercom Inbox Views are a fantastic first step for any team trying to get a handle on their support volume. They provide the structure and focus you need to turn a chaotic inbox into a well-organized workspace.

But in today's world, manual organization has its limits. Real, scalable efficiency comes not just from sorting work better, but from intelligently automating it. Once you've organized your inbox, the next step is to optimize it.

That’s where eesel AI picks up where views leave off. It handles the repetitive triage, drafting, and resolution tasks, freeing up your team to focus on the complex, human conversations where they can make the biggest difference. It's all about making the jump from an organized inbox to a truly optimized one.

Ready to see how AI can transform your Intercom workflow? Start a free trial with eesel AI and see how our AI Agent can integrate with your inbox in minutes.