What are Contacts?

Contacts represent your leads and users in Intercom. You can manage contacts with a role of lead or user with the Contacts API.

What's the difference between a visitor, lead, or user?

Any unknown visitor to your site who’s not logged in and has no conversation history with you is considered a visitor.

As soon as a visitor starts a conversation with you, or replies to an outbound message, they become a lead. A lead becomes a user when they sign up to your product, or log into an existing account.

Managing visitors with the API

If you need to take actions such as updating, retrieving, deleting, or converting a visitor you can do so using the Visitors API.

With the Intercom Messenger installed, you can start collecting contact data immediately. You can merge a contact with a role of lead into user with the API as long as you have the id values for both.

How can I identify a contact?

Contacts are assigned two identifiers, an external_id that you define and an Intercom assigned id.

In order to get, update, or delete a Contact, you will need to have access to the Intercom assigned id value.

What are custom attributes?

Data Attributes are metadata used to describe your contact model. There is a list of standard attributes collected automatically by Intercom, but you can set your own with custom attributes to aggregate more data about your users.

You can create a custom attribute for your Contacts by using the Data Attributes API and specifying contact as the model.

What is a segment?

A segment is a group of contacts defined by rules (or filters) that you set. You can create segments for every key group of contacts you'd like to send a message to - for example:

Contacts who have yet to take action
Contacts based in a certain geographic area
Contacts who signed up less than 7 days ago

You will need to update a contact's segments in the Intercom UI. However, you can use the Segments API to list all segments. You can use the Segments API to list segments attached to a contact or alternatively can use the Contacts API.

What's next?

Import your existing contacts into Intercom by following this guide
Create a new contact using the API
Use the API to merge a lead and a user