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The Intercom Messenger in your product and on your website
The Intercom Messenger in your product and on your website
Michaela avatar
Written by Michaela
Updated over a week ago

Once you install the Intercom Messenger, your website visitors and signed up users can easily contact you to have real-time conversations. 

And you can add apps to your Messenger home to help users and visitors get what they need, without having to start a conversation.

With Messages, you can also reach out to people automatically based on who they are and their behavior.


The Intercom Messenger inside your product

Once you install Intercom, on your web app, your logged-in users can get in touch to ask you questions. With Intercom Help Desk, you can respond to and manage users’ conversations from the team inbox

Note: If you don’t have access to the Help Desk, you’ll need to read and reply to conversations from the ‘conversations list.’ 

If you have our Messages product, you can also reach out to your customers inside your product based on behavior, profile and time and have real time conversations with them. 


The Intercom Messenger on your website

With our Help Desk product, you can have conversations on your marketing site and other pages with logged-out visitors. You can respond to and manage visitors’ conversations from the team inbox

Here’s how it works: 

  • Leads can provide their email address so they don't need to wait around for a reply. 

  • If you respond to a lead while they’re still on your site, they’ll get your response in the Intercom Messenger. If not, we automatically send your reply by email. 

  • When a lead signs up or logs into your app, the lead is converted to a user and their conversations and activity history are carried over. Your number of leads will not increase your per-user bill. 


Open the Messenger and start a conversation from a button or link

To trigger a conversation on a button you'll need to leverage the showNewMessage JS call that's described in the Developer Doc located here.
​
You can hook this onto the onClick event of your button/hyperlink so that whenever somebody clicks on it, we'll present the Messenger on a new conversation.


Booting Messenger after cookie consent

If you would like to implement private-mode Messenger, you will need to implement the following script to place the Messenger behind your cookie banners.
​
​Use Case: When cookie consent is required, but has not yet been granted:

Intercom will load but not boot. No cookies will be used. The user will not be able to see or interact with Messenger

window.intercomSettings = {

app_id: ‘abc123’,

disabled: true

}

Use Case: When consent is given, boot Intercom by running:

window.Intercom(‘boot’, { disabled: false });

Use Case: Consent is required, and has already been granted:

Intercom will boot as normal

window.intercomSettings = {

app_id: ‘abc123’

}


The Intercom Messenger on mobile

If you have a mobile website or web app, a standard Intercom install is all you'll need. 

If you have a native mobile app...


What’s next? 

Learn how Real time messaging works in the Messenger.


💡Tip

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