A Practical Guide to Intercom Teams and Roles (2025)

It’s happening. Your support team is growing, which should be great news. But lately, your shared inbox feels less like a well-oiled machine and more like a crowded bus station during rush hour. Conversations get missed, brand-new agents are trying to tackle highly technical questions, and you’re starting to have that nagging feeling in the back of your mind about who has access to sensitive customer data.

If this sounds a bit too familiar, you’re definitely not alone. It’s a classic growing pain, and it’s the exact problem that setting up proper Intercom teams and roles is designed to solve. They’re the building blocks for bringing some much-needed order, security, and efficiency to your customer support world.

In this guide, we’ll get straight to it. We'll walk through what Intercom teams and roles are, how to set them up, and the best ways to structure them for your company. Just as important, we’ll talk about the ceiling you’ll eventually hit with a manual setup and how you can use AI to break right through it.

What are Intercom teams and roles?

When you boil it down, Intercom’s system for managing people is pretty straightforward. It all comes down to two main ideas: teams and roles.

Teams in Intercom are just what they sound like: groups of your teammates, usually organized by their job or specialty. You could have a "Tier 1 Support" team for frontline questions, a "Sales" team for leads, and an "Escalations" team for the really tricky stuff. The main purpose of teams is to help you direct incoming conversations and create different inbox views so the right queries end up in front of the right people.

Roles, on the other hand, are all about permissions. A role is basically a set of rules that determines what a teammate can see and do inside the platform. This is your go-to tool for managing security and ensuring agents only have access to the features they need to do their job, and nothing more.

Here’s a simple way to think about it: Teams put your people into the right groups, while roles decide what they're allowed to do once they're there. Every agent is part of a team, and each one is assigned a role that defines their permissions. Getting this combination right is your first big step toward a calmer, more organized support system.

Setting up your Intercom teams and roles

Getting your setup right from the beginning is key to keeping your workspace running smoothly and securely. Every company is a little different, but Intercom gives you a solid set of defaults to get started.

Default permissions

Right out of the box, Intercom gives you a few standard roles that fit most common support setups.

• Support agent role (limited): This is a pretty restricted role. Agents with this permission level can only see and interact with conversations that are directly assigned to them or their team. It’s a great option for new hires still in training, part-time staff, or specialists who only need to focus on a very specific set of issues.

• Support agent role (standard): This role opens things up a bit. These agents can usually see all conversations in the inboxes they have access to, view reports to track their performance, and help out with your knowledge base. This is the sweet spot for most of your core support team members.

• Support manager role: This role has much broader permissions. Managers can typically add or remove teammates, adjust workspace settings, manage billing, and configure automation rules. You'll want to assign this to team leads and managers who oversee the day-to-day operations.

• Super admin role: This role is the "keys to the kingdom." A super admin has complete access to everything in your Intercom workspace. It’s wise to be very careful with this one and limit it to just one or two trusted individuals who are responsible for the entire platform.

Creating custom roles

While the default roles are a good starting point, you'll probably find that you need more specific permission sets as your team grows. For example, a billing specialist doesn't need the ability to reconfigure your help center, and a developer who occasionally pops in to check an integration shouldn't see every customer conversation. This is where custom roles become incredibly useful.

Creating a custom role only takes a few steps:

1. Navigate to Settings > Workspace > Teammates > Roles.

2. Click the New role button and give it a name that’s easy to understand, like "Billing Specialist" or "Marketing View-Only."

3. From there, you just go through the list of permissions and check the boxes for exactly what this role needs to do, whether it’s viewing certain inboxes, exporting data, or managing API keys.

Keep in mind that the ability to create custom roles is often included in Intercom's higher-tier plans. If you're on a starter plan, you may have to make do with the default options for a while.

Best practices for structuring your teams and roles

Okay, so you know how to create teams and roles. Now let's talk strategy. The way you structure your organization in Intercom can make a huge difference in your team's efficiency and your customers' happiness.

Common structures

There’s no single "correct" way to organize your support teams, but here are a few models that have proven to work well for many companies:

• Tiered support: This is a classic for a reason. You have a "Tier 1" team that acts as the first line of defense, handling the initial triage and answering common questions. Anything more technical or complex gets escalated to a "Tier 2" team of product experts. This structure keeps your senior agents free to focus on the toughest problems without getting bogged down by password resets.

• Specialized teams: If your company gets a lot of questions about specific topics, creating dedicated teams can be a lifesaver. Think of teams like "Billing," "Sales," "Bug Reports," or even "VIP Accounts." This ensures that conversations are sent to the right experts from the very beginning, which means faster, more accurate answers for your customers.

• Language-based teams: For any business operating globally, this is non-negotiable. Setting up teams for different languages (e.g., "Support - Spanish," "Support - French") ensures that your customers can get help from a native speaker. It’s a simple change that dramatically improves the customer experience.

Workflow example: From initial contact to resolution

Let’s see how a good structure plays out. A customer starts a new conversation. Your automation rules might first send it to a general triage inbox. A Tier 1 agent quickly assesses it. Is it a simple "how-to" question? They answer it and close the ticket in minutes. Is it a tricky bug? They tag it and reassign it to the Escalations team. Is it a question about an invoice? It goes straight to the Billing team.

No matter the customer's issue, the ticket follows a clear path to the person best equipped to solve it. There's no confusion, no wasted time, and the customer gets a resolution without being passed around between departments.

A visual workflow showing how conversations are routed through different Intercom teams and roles from initial contact to final resolution.

Limitations: The challenge of scaling

Intercom teams and roles are great, but they do have their limits. They depend completely on manual setup and a rigid system of rules. While that works perfectly well when you're small, it can start to cause some serious headaches as your company and support volume grow.

• The manual triage trap: No matter how perfect your routing rules are, some conversations will always fall through the cracks. They’ll land in the wrong inbox or just sit there, unassigned. This means a manager or a senior agent has to spend part of their day playing air traffic control, manually reading and redirecting conversations. It’s a time-consuming task that slows down your response times.

• Rigid rules meet messy reality: Customers rarely describe their problems using the exact keywords you've programmed into your automation rules. A user might describe a complex technical bug in a way that your system misinterprets as a simple "billing question." The ticket gets sent to the wrong team, the customer gets frustrated, and your agents waste time trying to figure out where it should have gone.

• The onboarding mountain: For new agents, the learning curve can be steep. They don’t just need to learn your product; they also have to memorize a complex web of internal processes. Which team handles this? What tags do I need to apply? At what point should I escalate? This can significantly slow down how quickly they can start making a real contribution.

• Information silos: Using roles and permissions to restrict access is good for security, but it can also prevent agents from finding information that could help them solve a problem. The answer to a customer's question might be hidden in a past conversation handled by a different team or in a Google Doc they don't have permission to see.

How AI enhances Intercom teams and roles

If you’re starting to feel the strain of a rules-only system, AI is the natural next step. It doesn’t replace the structure you’ve built in Intercom; it makes it better by automating the manual work and adding a layer of intelligence that rules just can't provide.

This is the gap where a tool like eesel AI steps in. It connects directly to your helpdesk and works alongside your existing teams and roles to make them smarter and more effective.

• Automated, intelligent triage: Instead of just looking for keywords, eesel AI's Triage understands the meaning behind a customer’s message. It can analyze the context of the conversation and automatically route it to the right team (Billing, Escalations, etc.) and apply the correct tags, often without a human needing to look at it first.

• Instant help for agents: The eesel AI Copilot works like a knowledgeable partner for every agent on your team. It learns from your company's entire history of past tickets and all your knowledge sources to draft accurate, on-brand replies in just a few seconds. This is huge for onboarding, as it allows new agents to handle conversations confidently from day one.

The AI Copilot assisting an agent by suggesting replies, enhancing the efficiency of Intercom teams and roles.

• Breaking down knowledge silos: Permissions can accidentally wall off useful information. eesel AI works around this by securely connecting to all of your company's knowledge, whether it’s in Confluence, your internal wiki, or scattered across past conversations. It finds the right information and gives it to the agent, so they can solve the customer's problem without needing full access to every single system.

• Get started in minutes: This isn't some massive project that will take a quarter to implement. You can connect eesel AI to your Intercom helpdesk with just a click. And before you even turn it on for your customers, you can run simulations on your past tickets to see exactly how it will perform and get a solid estimate of your automation rate.

Intercom teams and roles pricing

Your ability to manage teams and roles in Intercom often depends on which subscription plan you have. Here’s a quick look at how their pricing is typically structured:

Plan	Price (per seat/mo, billed annually)	Key Features for Team Management
Essential	$29	Basic shared inbox. Lacks custom roles and advanced automation.
Advanced	$85	Multiple team inboxes, workflow automation builder, custom roles.
Expert	$132	All Advanced features, plus SLAs and multibrand support.

It's also worth noting that Intercom's own AI agent, Fin, is priced separately at $0.99 per resolution. This per-resolution model can make your costs unpredictable, especially during busy periods. This is a key difference from platforms like eesel AI, which offer straightforward plans without charging you for every automated resolution.

Source: Intercom's Pricing Page

Build your foundation, then automate it

Setting up proper Intercom teams and roles is a fundamental step for any support organization looking to operate with clarity and security. It's the foundation you need to bring order to your inbox and streamline your workflows.

But as you grow, you’ll discover that relying on manual rules and processes can only take you so far. It eventually leads to bottlenecks, slows your team down, and can negatively affect your customer experience.

AI automation is what helps you scale that solid foundation. It lets you keep the structure you’ve already built while automating the repetitive triage, routing, and reply-drafting that can bog down your team. This frees up your agents to focus on what they do best: handling the complex, high-value conversations where a human touch really matters.

Ready to see how it works? You can sign up for eesel AI and see how it can improve your Intercom workflows in just a few minutes.