# Intercom to Slack Escalation Router

> Triage Intercom conversations by severity and automatically escalate critical issues to the right Slack channel.

Source: https://cotera.co/solutions/support/intercom-slack-escalation-router

---

- **Team:** Support
- **Tools:** Intercom, Slack
- **Difficulty:** medium
- **Setup time:** 10 min
- **Time saved:** 1 hr/day

## How it works
1. **Classify Severity** — Auto-assign P0-P3 based on customer impact and issue type
2. **Add Intercom Notes** — Document triage details and next steps as internal notes
3. **Route to Slack** — Send structured alerts to the right channel for P0/P1 issues
4. **Preserve Context** — Include customer details, duration, and workarounds tried

## Example requests
- Conversation 7890123 — customer says payments are failing. Escalate to #billing-urgent.
- Triage this Intercom thread: user can't log in after password reset. Admin 12345.
- Customer on Enterprise plan reports data export broken for 3 hours. Route to #eng-escalations.

## Prompt

```markdown
## Task

Analyze a customer conversation from Intercom, determine its severity and category, add an internal note summarizing the situation using @Intercom/Add Note, and escalate critical issues to the appropriate Slack channel using @Slack/Send Message.

**Example:** A customer reports they can't process payments. The agent adds a triage note to Intercom and sends an urgent alert to #payments-escalations in Slack.

## Input

The user will provide:
1. The Intercom conversation ID and admin ID
2. A summary or transcript of the customer's issue
3. Slack channel mapping (which channels handle which issue types)

**Example:** "Conversation 7890123456 — customer says checkout has been broken for 2 hours. Admin ID 12345. Escalate billing issues to #billing-urgent, bugs to #eng-escalations."

## Context

### Severity Classification

**Critical (P0):** Revenue-impacting, data loss, security issues, or complete feature outages. Always escalate immediately.

**High (P1):** Major functionality broken for a segment of users, degraded performance, or enterprise customer blocked. Escalate within the hour.

**Medium (P2):** Feature partially broken, workaround exists, or non-blocking issue for important accounts. Note in Intercom, escalate if pattern detected.

**Low (P3):** Feature requests, minor UI issues, documentation questions. Note in Intercom only.

### Triage Strategy

1. Read the conversation context and identify the core problem
2. Classify severity based on customer impact and urgency
3. Identify the responsible team (billing, engineering, product, etc.)
4. Add a structured internal note to the Intercom conversation
5. If severity is P0 or P1, send an escalation message to the mapped Slack channel
6. Include enough context in the Slack message for the on-call team to act without reading the full conversation

### What Makes a Good Escalation

- Lead with severity level and a one-line summary
- Include the customer name, plan, and how long the issue has persisted
- Mention any workarounds already attempted
- Link back to the Intercom conversation
- Tag the issue category so Slack search works later

## Output

**Intercom Note Added:**

**Conversation:** [ID]
**Severity:** P0 / P1 / P2 / P3
**Category:** [Billing / Bug / Performance / Security / Feature Request]

**Summary:**
[2-3 sentence summary of the issue, customer impact, and current state]

**Recommended Next Steps:**
1. [Action item]
2. [Action item]

---

**Slack Escalation** (if P0 or P1):

**Channel:** [#channel-name]
**Message sent:**

:rotating_light: **[P0/P1] [One-line summary]**
- **Customer:** [Name] ([Plan])
- **Issue:** [Brief description]
- **Duration:** [How long it's been happening]
- **Conversation:** [Intercom link]
- **Workarounds tried:** [Any attempted fixes]

---

**No Slack Escalation** (if P2 or P3):

Issue noted in Intercom. Severity does not warrant immediate escalation.
```

## Related reading
- [Slack Bot Customer Support Guide](https://cotera.co/articles/slack-bot-customer-support-guide.md)
- [Slack Chatbot Customer Support](https://cotera.co/articles/slack-chatbot-customer-support.md)
- [AI Customer Support Shopify](https://cotera.co/articles/ai-customer-support-shopify.md)