How to set up an Intercom workflow to qualify leads (2025 guide)

You’ve probably seen it happen. A promising lead lands on your site, starts a chat, but their question sounds like it's for the support team, so they get dumped into the general queue. Your support folks are swamped, the conversation gets buried, and by the time anyone spots the sales opportunity, the lead has moved on. It’s a clunky experience that costs you real money.

Catching and qualifying leads the moment they show interest is the name of the game, and doing it right in the chat window is usually the fastest way. Intercom has its own tools, like Workflows, to help you build these automated paths. They’re a decent place to start, but as you'll see, they come with some pretty big trade-offs.

This guide will walk you through setting up a basic Intercom workflow to qualify leads before support handoff. We’ll also get into the weeds on where this approach falls short and show you a more integrated way to get this done for your sales and support teams.

The basics of an Intercom workflow

Before we jump into the how-to, let's make sure we're all speaking the same language.

What is an Intercom workflow to qualify leads before support handoff?

Intercom Workflows are basically a drag-and-drop tool for mapping out conversations and internal tasks. Think of them as a simple flowchart for your customer chats. Their main job is to ask a series of questions, gather some info, and send the conversation to the right person or team based on simple "if this, then that" rules.

Defining lead qualification

Lead qualification is just the process of figuring out if a prospect is a good fit for your product and if they're actually ready to talk to a salesperson. It’s all about separating the people just browsing from those who are ready to buy.

You'll hear a couple of terms for this:

• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): This is someone who's shown some interest (maybe they downloaded an ebook) and generally fits your customer profile. They're on the radar, but not necessarily ready to pull out their credit card.

• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): This is a lead who's been properly vetted, usually through a direct conversation, and you've confirmed they have a real need, the budget, and the authority to buy. They're ready for a sales call.

The whole point of an automated workflow is to turn website visitors into MQLs or even SQLs without a human having to step in every single time.

Why use an Intercom workflow for lead qualification?

Sending potential buyers down a different path from your existing customers makes a huge difference. Here's why:

• Your sales team gets way more efficient. Reps can spend their time on high-intent leads that have already been vetted, instead of sifting through every chat that comes in.

• It’s a better experience for the customer. Prospects get answers quickly and are passed to the right person without having to explain their situation three times.

• It gives your support team a break. Sales questions stop clogging up the support queue, so your agents can focus on helping customers who actually have problems.

How to build an Intercom workflow for lead qualification

Building a workflow in Intercom isn't so much a technical challenge as it is a strategic one. Here’s a quick rundown of the steps involved.

Step 1: Define good leads

Before you build anything, you need to sit down with your sales team and agree on what a "qualified" lead actually looks like. If you skip this, you’re just automating a messy process.

You'll want to gather info like:

• Company size: (e.g., 1-10, 11-50, 50+ employees)

• Their role: Are you talking to a decision-maker or someone just kicking the tires?

• Their problem: What are they trying to solve with your product?

• Their timeline: Are they looking to buy this quarter, or just doing research for next year?

Step 2: Map the chat flow

Once you know what you need to ask, you can hop into the Intercom Workflows builder and start mapping out the conversation. This just means creating a path of questions and different branches based on their answers.

A screenshot of the Intercom workflow builder, which allows users to map out conversational paths for lead qualification before support handoff.

For instance, you could start by asking their main goal. If they choose "Get pricing," you can send them down a sales path. If they say "Fix an issue," you can point them toward support.

Step 3: Use rules to route conversations

This is where the automation really kicks in. At the end of your question path, you’ll set up rules to decide what happens next.

For example, you could create a rule that says: If "Company Size" is "50+ employees" AND their "Problem" is "Improve sales efficiency," then do this:

1. Tag the chat as "hot-lead".

2. Assign it to the "Sales Team" inbox.

3. Ping the #sales-leads channel in Slack.

If a prospect doesn't tick your boxes, the workflow can just send them to the general support queue, give them a link to a demo, or show them some relevant help articles.

The catch: Where Intercom workflows fall short

Getting a basic workflow up and running in Intercom is a solid first move. But a lot of teams find they hit a ceiling pretty fast as their needs grow. Here's where the built-in tools can start to feel a bit creaky.

Intercom workflows only pull from one knowledge source

Intercom's AI bot, Fin, and its workflows are built to get information from one main place: your public Intercom Help Center.

A diagram illustrating how a basic Intercom workflow is limited to a single help center, whereas an integrated AI can pull from multiple knowledge sources for better lead qualification before support handoff.

But let's be real, your most useful knowledge is probably all over the place. It’s in past support tickets, internal notes in Google Docs, detailed guides in Confluence, and recent Slack threads. A rigid workflow can't tap into any of that, which means it chokes on tricky questions and ends up giving generic answers. It’s just following a script.

Setup is manual and not smart

Workflows are built on rules you have to define yourself. You have to sit there and map out every possible conversational turn and try to guess what a user might ask.

This gets messy to manage, especially as you grow. The workflow can't learn or adapt on its own. It doesn't understand what a user means, only the buttons they click. A different approach, like the one used by eesel AI, involves learning from thousands of your past tickets automatically, so it gets the context of your business from day one.

You can't properly test your workflow

With Intercom Workflows, you can't reliably see how your automation will work with real conversations before you push it live. You're pretty much forced to test it on your actual customers.

That's a risky game. A buggy workflow can create a terrible experience, frustrate good prospects, and lose you sales. You’re flying blind. Some modern AI platforms, like eesel AI, have a simulation mode that lets you test your setup on thousands of your old tickets. This way, you can see exactly how it will perform and even calculate your potential ROI before it ever talks to a customer.

Pricing can get weird

Using Intercom’s AI features like Fin often comes with a $0.99 fee for every single conversation the AI resolves. And that's on top of their already pricey per-seat plans.

This pricing means your costs go up as you do better. If you have a great month and qualify a ton of leads, you could end up with a much bigger bill than you expected. It makes budgeting a headache and basically penalizes you for growth.

A better approach: An integrated AI agent

Instead of ripping out your helpdesk and starting from scratch, you can add an intelligent AI layer that solves these problems. An AI agent like eesel AI plugs right into Intercom to give you a smarter, more flexible, and more affordable way to qualify leads.

Get up and running in minutes

While Intercom's setup can feel a bit involved, eesel AI is designed to be simple. You can connect it to your Intercom account and other knowledge sources with a one-click integration. You can have a working AI agent ready to go in minutes, and you don't even have to talk to a salesperson.

Bring all your knowledge together for smarter chats

This is how you fix the biggest problem with native workflows. eesel AI doesn't just read your help center. It trains on all your scattered information, including:

• Past Intercom tickets: To learn your brand's voice, common questions, and what answers actually work.

• Internal wikis: It connects right to Confluence, Google Docs, Notion, and dozens of other tools.

• Macros and saved replies: To keep every answer consistent and on-brand.

What you get is an AI that can handle complex questions and qualify leads with a level of understanding a scripted workflow just can't touch.

Get full control with a customizable engine

With eesel AI, you're not limited to simple "if/then" logic. You get complete control over the automation.

You can use selective automation to decide which conversations the AI handles. For example, have it qualify leads on your pricing page but send everything else to a human. You can also set up custom actions. Your AI agent can do more than just ask questions; it can check a user's subscription status in your database, look up company details in your CRM, or even pull product info from a Shopify store before passing the conversation to sales.

Test with confidence and get predictable pricing

eesel AI was built to solve the other big headaches, too. You can use its simulation mode to get a clear picture of resolution rates and cost savings before you ever go live.

And when it comes to price, the model is straightforward. Unlike the per-resolution models that charge you more for being successful, eesel AI's pricing is based on a set number of interactions. Your bill is the same every month, so you can actually budget for it.

Intercom workflow pricing

To build any kind of serious automation in Intercom, you’ll need to be on their more expensive plans, and even then, the AI features cost extra.

Pricing sourced from Intercom's pricing page in 2024.

Beyond a basic workflow: Using intelligent agents

While setting up a basic Intercom workflow to qualify leads before support handoff is a fine place to start, it's a rigid solution that most growing teams will outgrow. Relying on a single knowledge source, the manual setup, the lack of good testing, and the unpredictable pricing all create big hurdles to scaling up.

A more modern approach is to add an intelligent layer to the tools you already have. eesel AI integrates with Intercom to give you a flexible, powerful, and cost-effective way to automate lead qualification. It connects all your knowledge, learns from your past conversations, and gives you the control to build workflows that are actually smart.

Ready to give your Intercom lead qualification a boost? Try eesel AI for free and see how our AI Agent can unify your knowledge and automate conversations in minutes.