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Unable to sync intercom with salesforce record id/account id

  • 18 July 2023
  • 4 replies
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M
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Intercom is telling us that they dont support a sync using salesforce’s default record ID! How does everyone else work around this severe limitation? I cant imagine changing our business processes and adding a new unique field just to get data synced. Adding a new unique field is not a big thing but we would have to change our sales processes to now update a field upon account creation :( 

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Best answer by aykut.aydin 27 July 2023, 07:10

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aykut.aydin
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Hey @Monish 👋 Ayk here from the Support Engineering team at Intercom

 

As you also mentioned, it is currently not possible to use Salesforce’s record ID to sync the Company/Account data. This can be a great request to share in our ideas exchange page. 😊

 

At the moment, the most common use case for this is to use the Account Number attribute as an identifier. But yes, as you said, you will need to make sure that field has a unique value for each Account you have on SFDC. If duplicates exist, the one that was most recently updated will be synced.

 

You can also find more information on this here.

 

Hope this clarifies!

 

 

 

Ayk | Support Engineer at Intercom
I

Aha @Monish - thank you, you’ve saved me looking blankly at why the Contact, Lead etc IDs do not show in Intercom for more hours than I have already.

Can I ask how you, or perhaps others, have overcome this issue because Contact ID and Lead ID are the unique identifier perfect for this process. We’ve tried a Formula field to duplicate these IDs, but Intercom doesn’t pick these up either.

Keen to understand how others have overcome this given it’s stated as the preferred option over Email.

Thank you again, Ian.

M
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You’re welcome @Ian Maison . We haven’t found a workaround yet. This is a severe limitation on Intercom’s side since they expect customers to build a new field and associated processes around it when its just easier to use the out-of-the-box field. Additionally, creating a new field also means we will have to update all existing instances and build a new process to that our sales and ops team have to follow. 

This is really bad, no horrible, design!

I

Excellent - thank you again @Monish 

Agreed that it’s a limitation as “Unique ID” is worded as the preferred option, but if the most obvious Salesforce Object IDs for this very use case cannot be used then it’s not preferred. We added a Formula Field in this case, but again this is not picked up for the reason I assume that Intercom does not pick up this field type (as documentation suggests).

As you indicate, adding a new field that requires us to then update all other records is not an option because the ID/s that are best for this truly are the unique Object IDs.

I think I will just stick with Email in this case, however I wanted the “preferred ID route” because emails can change, and be potentially not be unique - so was thinking to avoid longer term issues of incorrect data.

I’d certainly be interested if anyone else has experience or overcome this problem as Salesforce CRM must be a common use case for Intercom users.

Thank you, Ian.

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