Noloco Chatbot using Intercom

Goal: Display a chatbot to your users, so they can talk to your team (sales, support, etc.)

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Intercom acts as an omnichannel support center. That means it can centralize all requests, no matter their origin. (email, chatbot, SMS, etc.) Your team only needs to use Intercom, the reply will be sent through the same canal the user used in the first place.

Benefits

Displays a Chatbot to your users, so they can ask questions to a support/sales team, etc.

Centralize requests

Automatically keeps contacts in-sync with Intercom CRM, which makes the life of your team easier

It is possible to track any user’s dimensions, if you’d want your team to have access to those information on Intercom (usually to make them more efficient)

Display the chatbot to specific users

Display different chatbots to different users, based on a criteria (e.g: user role)

Other advanced options:

Pre-qualify the user by asking additional information, before they write to you (chatbot)

Recommandations

If you want to give me this mission, I suggest asking yourself a few questions beforehand:

What teams need access to Intercom? Will they need different features? Do you need different chatbots depending on the user? Having a clear understanding of your needs will definitely help with the implementation. You might only want to use it for a Support team and things will be straightforward in such case. But you also might want to use it for Sales acquisition, depending on the user’s current step or role. Having a draft of those functional needs will definitely help me advise you better.

Do you need to keep users in-sync with Intercom CRM? What should be tracked? The integration will do it by default, but you might want to disable that behavior, or, on the contrary, to track specific metrics. If so, having a list of such metrics will help me do the job faster. Those metrics can also be added afterwards.

Average duration of the mission

Implementing Intercom in your Noloco app will take me:

2h for new customers, because I need more time to configure everything

Such as
Streamlined JS scripts deployment pipeline (CI/CD, GitHub), with a dedicated GitHub repository

1h for existing customers who have an existing GitHub deployment pipeline

This is an estimation, it can take more time based on various elements, such as how long do our meetings last, efficiency of our communication, etc. Tracking additional user’s dimensions takes more time to configure and test thoroughly.

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If you have never worked with me yet, I suggest starting with a simple implementation, see how it goes, and if you’re satisfied with my work we can talk about your advanced needs (multi-inboxes, additional properties tracking, etc.), which usually require more time to get right.

Pre-requisites

Here is a list of things I need to get started:

User access to Intercom (for testing):

Admin access to your Noloco app, necessary to configure the scripts and doing testing

This is not a blocker, and can be done later on, but it makes testing things easier to do it earlier

An airtable “Creator” account is useful for testing purposes

That’s not a blocker, you can create those test accounts for me, if giving me access to the database is an issue

Preview

Here is a short demo of what you will get once the integration is done.

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The video showcases Stacker instead of Noloco, but it behaves the same in Noloco, I just haven’t done a dedicated video for Noloco, yet.

👀 A peek behind the wheels - why do I even need a developer?

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I bill 1-2h of my time to bring this feature to you, with all the above-listed benefits. But how much does it really take, to do the actual work?

Tools like Chatwoot and Intercom can be quickly integrated into your app, by simply copy/pasting a code snippet, and that’s it! You’re done! But is it really that simple? 🤔

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as it seems.

Sure, you can simply copy/paste that code snipped and call it done. 👍 (guess what? Many so-called devs actually do that, without a thought about how this will impact your business)

Here is what you would NOT get if you simply use the code snippet Intercom provides:

Intercom does not know what a “user” is, and does not sync the user identity by default (email, name, etc.)

Actual knowledge of how Intercom works and how it needs to be configured is also critical, I configure your PostHog instance to:

Create custom attributes, based on the information you want to make available to your team
Configure the mapping for the custom attributes that are tracked

And many other things I consider “must-haves” for any business!

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All of this took quite a lot of work, and is very specific to Noloco and Intercom internal ways of working, to make sure they work well together and understand each other. 👉 Optimizing Intercom for Noloco took me slightly more than 8 hours of actual work. Just ask another dev for a time estimate that includes all the above-listed benefits, you’ll see for yourself how much time/money they’ll ask for 😉 🤔 Why do I only bill for 1-2h, then? Because I re-use my implementation across my many clients, it makes it acceptable to bill very little time for each client, I get it back on the long-run. Also, most clients wouldn’t find it acceptable to pay too much for something they might consider “simple”. 👉 My goal is to bring as much value as possible, as fast as possible. To do so, I make sure to spend as little time as possible on anything that has no value to you, and rather focus my efforts on building a tailor-fit solution for your business!