Intercom helps businesses build strong customer relationships through personalized messaging and support. As the company grew, managing incidents with Slack, PagerDuty, and GitHub became fragmented and inefficient. More minor incidents often went undocumented, impacting visibility and learning across teams. Intercom needed a structured, scalable solution to improve incident response and chose incident.io.
Challenges before incident.io
Intercom’s incident management approach was previously manual and inconsistent, causing several operational issues. Static incident Slack channels created confusion during simultaneous incidents, and minor incidents frequently went undocumented, limiting visibility and learning opportunities. Engineers and incident commanders had to figure out processes on the fly, slowing responses and introducing inefficiencies.
We had two Slack channels. You had to hope there weren’t multiple incidents happening simultaneously. Overall, not a great experience.
Customer support teams were particularly affected. They needed to manually chase engineers for updates, causing delays and frustration both internally and with their customers.
Incident commanders often struggled to track follow-ups, leaving documentation incomplete and issues unresolved. With incident data spread across multiple tools, analyzing trends or making proactive improvements required tedious manual consolidation.
Why Intercom chose incident.io
Intercom wanted an end-to-end platform capable of automating tasks, enhancing visibility, and scaling efficiently across their engineering organization. incident.io stood out because it consolidated incident management into one intuitive interface, significantly reducing friction.
Essential features for Intercom included a deep Slack integration, automatic creation of dedicated Slack channels for incidents, and automated workflows such as incident summaries and status updates.
Intercom also valued incident.io’s commitment to rapid product development, evident from the quick implementation of requested features like regional status pages—something we shipped for them whilst on a train to Marseille for a company offsite! This responsiveness showed alignment with Intercom's needs as a fast-moving SaaS company, further strengthening their decision.
We saw how quickly incident.io shipped features based on our feedback, especially around regional status pages. They clearly understood our needs as a fast-moving SaaS company.
Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer, Intercom
Implementation and adoption
Intercom’s migration to incident.io was fast and smooth. Automating the transfer of alerts and configurations made the switch effortless, and briefly running incident.io alongside PagerDuty proved its reliability, boosting team confidence.
The transition was incredibly smooth. Our engineers immediately preferred incident.io over PagerDuty, and adoption across the broader company quickly followed.
Mark Gorman, Technical Program Manager, Intercom
Adoption rapidly spread beyond engineering to customer support and go-to-market teams, creating a transparent, company-wide incident response culture. This reduced apprehension around incidents and encouraged proactive engagement throughout the organization.
Previously, Intercom relied on several disconnected tools. By adopting incident.io, they replaced their entire incident stack:
- PagerDuty → incident.io On-call
- Manual, in-house workflows → incident.io Response
- Atlassian Status Page → incident.io Regional Status Pages
Jumping between multiple tools during high-pressure incidents was challenging. Now everything is centralized in incident.io, simplifying incident response significantly.
Brian Scanlan, Senior Principal Engineer, Intercom
Now, teams have everything they need in one place—enabling quicker decisions, clearer communication, faster incident resolution, and simpler operational management.
Results
Adopting incident.io significantly improved incident management at Intercom:
incident.io’s automated summaries and real-time highlights have dramatically reduced cognitive overhead. Engineers and executives quickly understand incidents without manual intervention, vastly improving our overall experience.
Ryan Sherlock, Director of Engineering, Intercom
- Faster incident resolution, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR) and minimizing downtime.
- Improved visibility with comprehensive incident documentation, enabling proactive improvements.
- Lower cognitive load through AI-generated incident summaries and real-time highlights from Scribe.
- Enhanced customer trust with integrated regional status pages, providing timely and accurate customer updates.
- Easier team mobilization, reducing friction and confusion during high-pressure incidents.
- Broader organizational engagement in incident management, fostering collaborative problem-solving and continuous learning.
