Articles on: Moving to Crisp

Moving from Intercom

Considering a switch from Intercom to Crisp? Awesome! We're more than happy to help you with this guide that will let you understand the key steps for your migration.


Things you should know 📚




Crisp is focused on messaging


As you know, Intercom has numerous features -- from email marketing to product tours, chatbot and in-app messaging. It's a whole platform of products, and customer service is one of many things it can do.

Crisp is messaging focused so expect to have more conversations using Crisp. Through this guide, we'll make sure you set Crisp properly so you can easily handle more conversations.


We have a different approach to chat


Intercom treats all in-app conversations the same. Customers can start a conversation whether someone is available or not - and hear back in 1-2 minutes, 1-2 hours or 1-2 days. There's no real difference between a live chat and a conversation lasting for multiple days. Intercom offers the ability to create a conversation every time a customer come back.

At Crisp, we centralize every conversation into one unique thread. We think it's much easier for agents to look at previous conversations and search for the right information.


Understand the features 🧐



A lot of the terminology - like conversations - remains the same between Intercom and Crisp. If you've been using Intercom Inbox product, Crisp inbox won't take a lot of time getting used to. There are some differences to be aware of, though:

Tags - Intercom allows you to tag people and conversations. Crisp calls them Segments. No worries, it behaves the same as Intercom does.
Priority - Crisp doesn't have a star icon to denote priority. However, you can leverage feature like customer data to set priority and combine with conversation filters to display the most important conversations first.
Engage - Intercom offers a customer engagement software. Crisp calls it Campaigns. The behavior is a bit different. It works thanks to users' interactions. You'll have to build a tracking plan to push user event. How to use automated campaigns?.

Finally, In Crisp Inbox, you can have multiple email address. If you'd like to forward multiple email addresses to a single mailbox, and even respond from multiple addresses, that's no problem. Check How to setup a Custom Email Domain? or How to receive Emails in Crisp for more information about that.

Crisp has an open platform policy


As you know, Intercom offers a small part of his own API. At Crisp, you can enjoy an exhaustive API that contains every route that we use to serve Crisp to our customers. Therefore, you'll be able to build powerful integrations and go even deeper thanks to our JS SDK for front-end interactions.

Intercom Messenger ▶️ Crisp Messenger



If you are using the Intercom API to send customer data and details to the sidebar, keep in mind that you can do very similar things with Crisp inbox.

To log custom fields (such as role, plan, average basket, etc.) to the Crisp sidebar, you should use the JavaScript SDK? or our REST API?.

If you want to merge data from unknown visitors to logged in visitors, feel free to check out this article: How to restore chat sessions with a token?.

We also have iOS and Android SDKs.

With the Javascript, iOS or Android SDK you can control and build pretty cool stuff using Crisp chatbox.

Intercom Engage ▶️ Crisp Campaigns



If you are using Intercom Engage to retarget customers and improve your onboarding and activation, you'll be happy to see that Crisp also offer this feature. Nevertheless, it's a bit different because Crisp Campaign offer two kinds of campaigns. One is call 'one shot', the other is call 'automated'.

The one shot is like a product announcement or a newsletter and can target segments, advanced filters, specific list of users or all your users. Note that it's a manual action that needs to be done by yourself.

The automated is used to onboard or activate users automatically. It's event focused. It means that you'll have to How can I push user events?in your product or software to be able to trigger those events.

Both of these campaigns offer the ability to format messages, based on your need. Crisp also manages drafts and message templates.

Importing your data 📬



Importing contacts


Crisp has made importing contact from Intercom really easy. With a simple database extraction from your contact tabs in Intercom, you obtain a CSV file. With this file, you simply import in Crisp CRM. Simply follow the steps that are listed below:

Reach out to Crisp CRM (also known as Contacts)
Click on "Actions" at the top right of the screen
Select "Import contact profiles"
Configure your import and map your CSV file
Let Crisp do the job 🎉

Another way to do it would be to use our API and build a script that would import your data from your existing backend to Crisp.

Check out more details here

Importing your knowledge base


Crisp has made importing knowledge base from Intercom really easy. What you need to give us is the URL we can access your knowledge base. That's it. Simply follow the required steps to automate knowledge base import:

Reach out to Crisp Knowledge
Click on "Actions" at the top right of the screen
Select "Import articles"
Set the url of your existing knowledge base
Let Crisp do the job 🎉

Check out more details here.

Importing conversations


At the moment, Intercom doesn't offer any possibility regarding the export of your conversations. What we suggest is to keep a paid account in Intercom during the transition for about 2 or 3 months while starting to get conversations inside Crisp.

From then, simply unsubscribe from Intercom once you think you'll not need it anymore.

Still wondering if Crisp can fit with your needs? We've built a dedicated page that explains why Crisp is a good alternative to Intercom, check it out! Looking to see how Intercom compares with other competitors, check this article.

Updated on: 13/06/2022

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