Moving from Intercom
Moving from an enterprise platform to something priced for a small team.
Should you actually move?
Read this bit before the steps.
Almost everyone leaving Intercom for us is leaving on cost, not on capability. Intercom is very good. It is also priced per seat with usage charges on top, which stops making sense when you are five people who want a chat widget.
If your support team runs on Intercom’s reporting, workflows and AI deflection, moving here is a downgrade in those areas and you should know that going in.
The full comparison with Intercom has a section on where they beat us.
What comes across, and what does not
There is no importer. Nothing is silently pulled from Intercom, and your old conversations do not appear in the Talkfront inbox. Plan for that rather than discovering it on the day.
You keep
- Your contacts, via their data export
- Your conversation transcripts, as an archive
- Identity verification: Intercom’s user hash and ours are both HMAC-SHA256 over the user id, so your server code barely changes
- Custom attributes, which map onto ours directly
You lose
- Conversation history inside the product
- Fin and any AI resolution you rely on
- Workflows, assignment rules and SLA tracking
- Product tours, outbound campaigns and the help centre
- Reporting. Analytics here is on the roadmap, not in the product
The move, in order
About an hour of real work, most of it making the widget look like yours. The order matters more than the speed: nothing touches your live site until step five.
01
Create the workspace and add your site
Sign up, add the domain chat runs on, and copy the site key. Nothing is live on your site yet.
02
Make it look like the widget you have now
Set the colour, position, greeting and avatar in the customiser. Draft and published settings are separate, so you can get it right before anyone sees it.
03
Set your hours and your team
Add operating hours and the closed-hours message, then invite your agents and set their roles. Do this before the swap, not after the first chat arrives.
04
Export everything from your old tool
Contacts and transcripts, while you still have a paid account. Keep the files: they are your archive, because history does not transfer.
05
Swap the snippet
Remove the old script tag and add the Talkfront one. One deploy, one line. Pick a quiet hour rather than a Monday morning.
06
Watch the inbox for a day
Send yourself a test chat from a phone and a laptop, check notifications reach the right people, and make sure the closed-hours message fires when it should.
07
Cancel the old subscription
Only once a real customer conversation has come through Talkfront and been answered. Not before.
Things that catch people out
Specific to leaving Intercom.
Export before the renewal date
Access ends when the subscription does. Get your data out with time to spare, not on the last afternoon.
Your identity hash needs one change
Same algorithm, different secret. Point your server at your Talkfront site secret and the signed identify call works as it did.
Check what else has the snippet
Intercom often ends up in a tag manager, a mobile app and a help centre as well as the site. Find every install before you assume you have swapped them all.
Stuck on any of it? Email support@talkfront.app and we will walk through it with you. We would rather spend an hour on that than have you give up halfway and end up paying for both.
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