A complete guide to the Intercom SMS Twilio integration

Texting is one of the quickest and most direct ways to reach your customers. With open rates that leave email in the dust, it’s a channel that most businesses can't really afford to ignore. So naturally, Intercom’s SMS feature seems like a great way to bring this channel right into your helpdesk and keep all your conversations in one spot.

But while the idea is solid, the reality of the integration, which runs on Twilio, has some quirks you need to know about. This guide will walk you through exactly how it works, what it can do, and, most importantly, its often confusing pricing model and hidden limitations. Because to truly scale your support via text, you need more than just a new inbox channel; you need smart automation. Let's get into it.

What is the Intercom SMS Twilio connection?

First things first, it's helpful to know that Intercom's SMS feature isn't something they built entirely in-house. It leans on a partnership with a huge name in the communications world to handle the gritty details of sending and receiving texts.

What is Intercom SMS?

Intercom SMS is a feature that lets your support team send and receive text messages directly from the Intercom inbox you already use. The whole point is to create a seamless experience where a text from a customer shows up just like a live chat or an email. You can use it for proactive messages, re-engagement campaigns, or just to offer support on a channel that many customers actually prefer. By keeping all these messages together, your team gets a single view of every interaction, no matter where it started.

What is Twilio?

Twilio is what's known as a Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS). You can think of it as the engine under the hood that powers texts, calls, and video for thousands of apps. When you use Intercom's SMS feature, Twilio is the one doing the heavy lifting in the background. You don’t need your own Twilio account to get started, but you are subject to its pay-as-you-go pricing, which Intercom simply passes on to you. This little detail is key, and we'll circle back to it in a bit.

How the Intercom SMS Twilio integration works

On the surface, the integration is pretty simple. When a customer texts your business number, Twilio catches it and forwards it to Intercom. It then pops up as a new conversation in your team’s inbox. Your agents can reply right from there, and their message goes back through Twilio and lands on the customer's phone as a text.

A screenshot of the Intercom Messenger, showcasing how a new conversation appears in the inbox.

This setup lets you use some of Intercom’s own tools, like Workflows, to automatically send incoming SMS messages to the right team based on certain keywords. The promise is a smooth, omnichannel experience. For instance, a customer might start a chat on your website, walk away, and get an SMS alert when you reply, letting them pick up the conversation right from their phone.

But this is where you hit the automation wall. While Intercom can route these messages, its built-in tools can’t really understand what the customer wants or solve their problem on their own. This creates a bottleneck. Every text that isn't a "yes" or "no" still needs a human to step in, unless you pay for a pricey add-on like Intercom’s own AI, Fin.

A good omnichannel strategy needs consistent, smart automation on every channel. An AI platform like eesel AI is built to plug right into the helpdesk you already have and do just that. It doesn't care if a question comes from email, a chat widget, or a text message, eesel AI makes sure your customers get the right answer, right away.

Understanding the pricing and key limitations

This is where things get a little messy. The convenience of managing texts in Intercom comes with a pricing model and a few drawbacks that can easily catch you off guard.

The unpredictable pricing model

Unlike a simple flat monthly fee, Intercom's SMS pricing is all based on usage, which can make your monthly bill a total guessing game. The costs, passed on from Twilio, are broken down into a few parts.

1. A monthly fee for each phone number you use.

2. A per-message fee for every text you send and receive.

3. The concept of "segments." This is the real kicker. A standard SMS is 160 characters. If your message (or your customer's) goes over that, it gets split into multiple "segments," and you get billed for each one. What’s worse, using a single emoji can slash the character limit to just 70, meaning a pretty short message could end up being billed as three or four separate texts.

This structure makes it almost impossible to predict your costs, since they hinge entirely on how much your customers write and how long your replies are.

Cost Component	Description	How It Hits Your Bill
Phone Number Fee	A fixed monthly charge for each SMS-enabled number.	This is your predictable baseline cost.
Per-Segment Fee	You're charged for every single SMS segment sent or received.	This is the most variable part and where costs can spike.
Message Segmentation	Messages over 160 characters (or fewer with special characters like emojis) are split and billed as multiple texts.	A single long message from a customer can cost you 3-4x more than you'd expect.

Functional limitations you need to know

On top of the cost, Intercom's own help docs point out several technical limits that restrict what you can actually do over SMS:

• Limited Media Support: You can receive images, but sending them is restricted because of how much it would cost. You can forget about sending GIFs or videos entirely.

• No Read Receipts: You can see if a message was delivered, but you have no idea if the customer has actually read it.

• No Group Messaging: This is strictly for one-on-one chats. You can't send a message to a group of people.

• US Number Type: In the US, Intercom only gives you toll-free numbers. It doesn't support 10DLC, which can affect deliverability for certain marketing or transactional messages.

The hidden cost: Manual work and stacked fees

The biggest cost of the Intercom SMS Twilio integration isn't just the message fees; it's the workload. When you open up a popular channel like SMS, your ticket volume is going to go up. Without good automation, that means you have to hire more agents.

Intercom's answer to this is their AI bot, Fin, which has its own steep price tag: an extra $0.99 per resolution. So, you're paying for every text segment sent and received, and then you're paying another dollar every time the AI manages to close a ticket. These costs stack up fast and basically penalize you for providing more support.

An overview of Intercom's Fin AI Agent, which adds per-resolution fees to the intercom sms twilio integration.

This is a totally different approach from a tool like eesel AI, which was built for predictable scaling. We believe in transparent pricing with no per-resolution fees. Our plans are based on your total support volume, so you can automate thousands of conversations across any channel, email, chat, or SMS, without dreading the end-of-month invoice.

Enhancing your workflow with AI

SMS is a great way to start a conversation, but modern AI is what turns that chat into an instant solution. By adding an intelligent automation layer on top of Intercom, you can solve the core problems of high costs and the inability to scale.

Go beyond basic routing with intelligent automation

Once a text lands in your Intercom inbox, a more advanced AI can jump in immediately. eesel AI's AI Agent integrates directly with Intercom and does a lot more than just sort tickets. It can:

• Understand Intent: The AI reads the customer's message to figure out exactly what they're asking for, whether it’s a simple question or a multi-part problem.

• Provide Instant Answers: eesel AI connects to all your knowledge, not just a public FAQ, but also internal guides in Confluence, Google Docs, and even the answers from your past tickets, to give customers accurate replies 24/7.

• Take Action: Good support isn't just about answering questions. eesel AI can be set up with custom actions to do things like look up order details in Shopify, check an account status in your own database, or add the right tags to a ticket before handing it off to a human agent.

Train on your history, test with confidence

Two of the best things about eesel AI are how it learns and how you can try it out with zero risk.

• Unified Knowledge: Unlike other AI tools that can take months of manual setup, eesel AI can train directly on your past Intercom tickets. From day one, it learns your brand’s voice, understands common customer issues, and knows what a good answer looks like.

• Risk-Free Simulation: Before you let the AI talk to live customers, you can run it in simulation mode. You can test it on thousands of your historical tickets, including all those texts, to see exactly how it would have performed. This gives you a clear picture of your potential resolution rate and helps you spot any knowledge gaps before you go live.

Move from conversation to resolution

The Intercom SMS Twilio integration is a decent tool for opening a direct line to your customers. It does a good job of pulling text messages into the Intercom inbox your team already knows, which helps create a more unified workflow.

However, its unpredictable pricing and the lack of smart, built-in automation put a pretty firm cap on how much you can scale. As your SMS volume grows, so will your costs and your team's manual workload. By adding a powerful and fairly priced AI platform like eesel AI on top of Intercom, you can turn this problem into an opportunity. You'll go from just managing more conversations to actually resolving them automatically, turning a potential cost center into an efficiency machine.

Start automating your support today

Ready to see how AI can boost your existing helpdesk without the wild pricing? eesel AI works seamlessly with Intercom to automate responses, draft replies for agents, and bring all your knowledge together. Start your free trial today and see how many tickets you can resolve on autopilot.