A complete guide to Intercom Workflows in 2025

Let's be honest, running a support team can feel like a constant juggling act. You're dealing with repetitive questions, a mountain of tickets, and the pressure to give every customer fast, personal service. It’s a lot to handle. This is why workflow automation has become so popular for teams looking to save time, work smarter, and keep customers happy without burning out.

If you're using Intercom, you’ve probably seen their automation tool, Intercom Workflows. This guide will walk you through everything you need to know: what they are, how they work, what they cost, and, most importantly, where they might be holding you back. We'll help you figure out if it's the right tool for your team in the long run, or if you might need something with a bit more power under the hood.

What are Intercom Workflows?

So, what exactly are Intercom Workflows? In a nutshell, they’re Intercom's built-in tool for automating customer conversations and internal support tasks without needing to write any code. Think of it as a control panel for your automation, letting you design and launch automated sequences with a drag-and-drop builder.

The main job of a workflow is to string together a series of tasks, messages, and actions that run automatically based on rules you define. You can use them for simple things, like sending a new chat to the right department, or for more complex stuff, like building out an entire customer onboarding journey. These automations work across all of Intercom’s channels, live chat, email, social media, making them a core part of how you manage conversations.

How Intercom Workflows work

To get comfortable with Intercom Workflows, you just need to get a handle on three main building blocks: triggers, actions, and conditions. These three elements work together to create the logic behind any automation you want to build.

Triggers in Intercom Workflows: Where it all begins

A trigger is just the event that gets the ball rolling on a workflow. It’s the "when this happens..." part of your automation. Intercom offers a handful of triggers to choose from, so you can kick off an automation based on something a customer does or an action one of your teammates takes.

A few common triggers are:

• A customer starts a conversation for the first time.

• A teammate updates a ticket’s status (for example, from "Open" to "Resolved").

• A customer hasn't replied to a message after a certain amount of time.

• A new ticket is created.

Actions in Intercom Workflows: The 'what happens next' part

Actions are the "do this" piece of the puzzle. Once a trigger starts a workflow, actions are the specific tasks the system carries out automatically. Many of these run in the background without the customer even knowing.

Here are some of the most common actions you can add to your workflows:

• Assign a conversation: Send a ticket to the right team or person based on what it's about.

• Tag a conversation or person: Add tags to organize tickets, help with reporting, or even trigger other automations.

• Snooze or close a conversation: Keep your inbox tidy by automatically snoozing conversations that are waiting on a reply or closing tickets that are finished.

• Apply an SLA: Make sure high-priority tickets get a quick response by automatically applying a Service Level Agreement.

• Let Fin AI Agent answer: Pass the conversation to Intercom’s AI to try and answer the question.

Conditions and branches for Intercom Workflows: Making your workflows smart

This is where your automations start to feel intelligent. Conditions and branches use simple if/then logic to send a conversation down different paths based on specific criteria. It’s how you build automations that can handle various scenarios without feeling robotic.

For example, you could set up a rule that says: If a customer’s browser language is set to Spanish, then assign the chat to the Spanish-speaking support team. Otherwise, send it to the main support queue. This makes sure customers always get help from the person best suited to assist them.

Common ways to use Intercom Workflows

Once you get the hang of triggers, actions, and conditions, you can start building some really helpful automations. Here are a few practical examples of how teams use them to solve everyday support problems:

• Give your VIPs the white-glove treatment: You can create a workflow that checks if a new message is from a customer on your top-tier plan. If it is, the workflow can automatically apply a high-priority SLA and route it straight to a senior support agent. It’s a simple way to make sure your most important customers feel taken care of.

• Smarter ticket triage: Say a customer writes in about a possible bug. A workflow can scan their message for keywords like "bug," "error," or "broken." If it finds one, it can tag the conversation as an "Urgent Bug" and assign it directly to your technical support or engineering team to investigate.

• Clean up your inbox automatically: We’ve all had that nightmare of an overflowing inbox. You can build a workflow that automatically snoozes a conversation if a customer hasn’t replied in 24 hours. If another 48 hours pass without a response, it can close the ticket for you, letting your team focus on active issues.

• Streamline complex requests: For issues that require a lot of back-and-forth, you can automate the ticket creation process. A workflow can ask a few upfront questions to gather details, and once the customer provides them, it can create a formal ticket and send it to the right department, with all the necessary info already included.

Understanding Intercom Workflows pricing

It’s really important to know that Intercom Workflows aren’t available as a standalone product. You get access to them as part of Intercom’s broader customer service plans, and the more advanced automation features are only included in the pricier tiers.

But here's where things get tricky: the cost of their AI. The most powerful automations in Intercom are driven by its AI agent, Fin, and its pricing can lead to some serious sticker shock.

Here’s a quick look at the plans:

The detail to watch out for is the $0.99 per resolution fee for the Fin AI Agent. A "resolution" is counted every time the AI answers a customer’s question without a human agent needing to get involved. If you have a high volume of support requests, this usage-based pricing can make your monthly bill unpredictable and much higher than you expected.

The hidden limits of Intercom Workflows (and what to do about them)

While native tools like Intercom Workflows are a good place to start, they often have limitations that can frustrate ambitious support teams. If you’re trying to build a genuinely smart and efficient AI support system, you might hit a few walls.

Why your knowledge is trapped

Intercom’s AI works best when it learns from content that lives inside Intercom, like your help center articles. But what about all the other valuable information your team relies on? Your company’s knowledge is probably scattered everywhere, right? Think of those internal wikis in Confluence, design docs in Google Docs, or troubleshooting guides in Notion. Intercom can’t easily tap into that knowledge, which means your AI agent is working with incomplete information.

The modern way to handle this is to bring all your knowledge together. For example, eesel AI connects to all your company's apps and documents, wherever they live. It creates one single, reliable source of truth for your AI, which means it can give more accurate answers without you having to move all your content into one system.

An infographic showing how eesel AI connects to various company apps like Confluence, Google Docs, and Notion to create a single source of truth for its AI, overcoming the limitations of siloed Intercom Workflows.

The setup is a huge commitment

Building out good workflows in Intercom takes time, and to get the most out of its AI, you really have to go all-in on their platform. This can feel pretty restrictive, especially if your team already uses and loves other tools like Zendesk or Slack for different parts of your work.

This is where a tool like eesel AI feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s designed to be self-serve and integrates with the helpdesk you already have, rather than replacing it. There's no massive "rip and replace" project needed. You can connect it to Intercom, Zendesk, or Freshdesk in a few minutes and get started right away.

Unpredictable costs that punish you for growing

That $0.99 per resolution pricing model can feel like a tax on success. The better your AI gets and the more questions it answers for your customers, the more you have to pay. It’s like getting penalized for doing a good job. This makes it almost impossible to budget accurately and can discourage you from scaling your support automation.

Instead, look for a more straightforward pricing model. eesel AI’s pricing is predictable. The plans are based on the features you need and your overall volume of conversations, with no per-resolution fees tacked on. Your costs stay flat, so you can grow without worrying about a nasty surprise on your bill.

A screenshot of eesel AI's predictable pricing page, which contrasts with the per-resolution cost model of Intercom workflows.

No way to test with confidence

That nervous feeling you get before pushing a new automation live? It's real. How do you know if it’s going to work the way you want? What will its resolution rate actually be? With Intercom, you often have to launch it and just hope for the best.

This is a huge advantage of eesel AI, which comes with a powerful simulation mode. It lets you test your AI agent on thousands of your past support tickets in a safe, sandboxed environment. You can see exactly what its resolution rate would be, find gaps in your knowledge base, and calculate your potential ROI before a single customer ever talks to it. It’s a risk-free way to roll out AI.

A screenshot of eesel AI’s simulation mode, which allows teams to test their AI agent on past tickets and predict resolution rates before going live, a feature not available in Intercom Workflows.

The bottom line: Are Intercom Workflows the right choice?

So, what's the verdict? For teams that are already heavily invested in the Intercom ecosystem and just need to automate some basic internal tasks, Intercom Workflows are a decent starting point. They can handle simple routing and triage without much fuss.

But if your business needs a more powerful, flexible, and affordable AI solution, the limitations start to show pretty quickly. For teams that want to pull knowledge from all their company apps, work with the tools they already have, and deploy AI without financial surprises, it's worth looking at other options.

Your next steps

Workflow automation isn't just a "nice-to-have" anymore; it’s a must for any modern support team. But the right tool for you really depends on what you need when it comes to flexibility, knowledge integration, and cost.

If the thought of being locked into a siloed, expensive, and hard-to-test system gives you pause, it’s probably time to see what else is out there.

Instead of getting locked into one platform, think about adding an AI layer that connects all your knowledge and works on top of your current helpdesk. eesel AI lets you go live in minutes with an AI agent trained on your entire company's knowledge, with predictable pricing and a simulation mode to make sure you get it right from the start.

Start your free trial today.