Migrate from Intercom

This guide walks through a full Intercom migration. The migration is non-destructive: Intercom keeps running until you flip the chat widget and email DNS to Ochre. Most teams finish in 4 to 24 hours of unattended import after a 1-hour setup.

What gets migrated

• Conversations — full message threads including replies, internal notes, and admin actions.
• Contacts — every user and lead with email, name, custom attributes, and company associations.
• Companies — including custom attributes.
• Macros — Intercom saved replies become Ochre saved replies.
• Attachments — inline images and file attachments.
• Conversation IDs — preserved as aliases. Old Intercom links like app.intercom.com/inbox/conversation/12345 resolve via Conversation aliases.
• Tags — preserved.
• Custom attributes — mapped to Ochre Custom fields.
• Admins — matched by email to your invited Ochre users.

What does not migrate

• Workflows and bots. Recreate using Routing rules and the AI agent.
• Articles. Migrate from Notion or GitBook, or import directly. See Connecting Notion.
• Series and outbound messages. Ochre is inbound-first. Outbound campaigns belong in your marketing tool.
• Product Tours, Surveys, and Banners. Not in Ochre.
• Operator AI. You will configure Ochre's AI agent fresh. Start at AI overview.

Before you start

You will need:

• An Intercom workspace owner account.
• An Intercom access token. Generate one in Intercom: Settings, Developers, Authentication, Manage tokens.
• An Ochre owner or admin account.

Step 1: Connect Intercom

In Ochre, open Settings, then Migration, then Intercom. Paste your access token. Ochre validates the token and runs a dry-run scan that returns:

• Conversation count.
• Contact and company counts.
• Macro count.
• Attachment volume.
• Estimated import time.

Step 2: Map admins

For each Intercom admin, choose:

• Match to existing Ochre user.
• Invite as new user with a role (admin, agent, or light agent).
• Skip. Historical attribution is preserved by email but the person has no live account.

Pricing reminder: light agent seats are free. If a former teammate left the company, skip them. See Inviting your team.

Step 3: Map custom attributes

Intercom contact and conversation custom attributes map to Ochre custom fields. Review and adjust:

• Strings to text.
• Numbers to number.
• Booleans to boolean.
• Dates to date.
• Lists to single-select dropdowns (multi-select if you have an Ochre multi-select field).

Get the mapping right now. Changing field types after import requires manual cleanup.

Step 4: Choose what to import

Select:

• Date range. All time, last 2 years, or last 6 months. Most teams choose last 2 years.
• Conversation states. By default everything (open, closed, snoozed). Exclude closed older than X days for a leaner archive.
• Channels. Intercom Messenger conversations and email conversations are imported as separate Ochre channels.

Click Start import.

Step 5: Wait

Throughput is roughly 30k conversations per hour with attachments. Multi-million conversation archives need a coordinated parallel import. Contact Support contact before starting.

You can keep using Intercom during the import. The Migration page shows live progress.

Step 6: Verify

When the import finishes, spot-check:

• Conversation counts match Intercom for the date range.
• A handful of conversations end-to-end (messages, internal notes, attachments, attribution).
• Customer search finds the right contacts and companies. See Customer search.
• Old Intercom conversation IDs open the right Ochre conversation via aliases.
• Macros work as expected.

Step 7: Cut over

The cutover for Intercom has two parts: the chat widget and email.

Chat widget

1. Embed the Ochre widget on your site. See Embedding the widget.
2. Remove or comment out the Intercom Messenger snippet.
3. Verify a test conversation lands in Ochre.

You can run both side-by-side for a day if you want belt-and-suspenders. Visitors who already have an open Intercom conversation will keep replying there until they refresh and pick up the new widget.

Email

1. Update your support email's MX records to point at Ochre. See Custom domain email.
2. Disable Intercom's email collector for that address.
3. Watch new email lands in Ochre, not Intercom.

Step 8: Wind down Intercom

Leave Intercom read-only for at least 30 days. Most teams cancel at 60 days. Cancellation in Intercom does not affect your Ochre data — your conversations are stored in Ochre, not relayed.

Common gotchas

• Bot conversations. Anything sent by Intercom's Operator bot imports as an internal admin named Intercom Bot. You can hide it from reports.
• Duplicate contacts. If a contact exists by both email and external_id, Ochre merges. See Customer merge.
• Lead vs user. Intercom leads import as Ochre customers without a sign-in. Promote them later if needed.

If something goes wrong

• Migration stuck. See Migration stuck.
• Missing attachments. Re-run the attachments-only sync from the Migration page.
• Wrong attribution. Remap admins and run an attribution-only re-sync.

Next steps

• Quick start — finish workspace setup.
• AI overview — replace Operator with Ochre's AI agent.
• Embedding the widget — install the Ochre chat widget.