Intercom is an American software company that produces a messaging platform which allows businesses to communicate with prospective and existing customers within their app, on their website, through social media, or via email.

Authenticating

Intercom uses OAuth, a developer-friendly delegated access protocol. Quolum has already connected the necessary wires with Intercom. Using a sequence of click-throughs, your organization's administrator allows Quolum to make API calls to Intercom without getting access to passwords.

Step 1: Initiate a connection to Intercom

Click the Connect button from the Connections card. If you are not an admin, you can invite your organization's Intercom admin to make a connection to your Intercom organization account. When you click on the Connect button, the web browser will navigate to the Intercom login page.

Step 2: Log in to Intercom

Log in to Intercom using your organization's credentials. The exact login mechanism may depend on your Intercom plan, and the sign-in mechanism used. You may have corporate SSO such as Azure AD, GSuite, or Okta along with multi-factor authentication. Once you have successfully logged-in, Intercom is going to ask you to grant access to Quolum.

Sometimes the screen looks like the one below

Step 3: Provide consent to Quolum

The next screen after login into Intercom is the consent screen. On this screen, Intercom confirms whether you authorize Quolum to access your organization's data.

Step 4: Back to Quolum

Once you have granted access to Quolum on Intercom's website, Intercom is going to send you back to Quolum's page in Step 1, where you started. The Connect button on the Connections card would now say Reconnect. Reconnect is used to reauthenticate under circumstances where the access has expired.

Under the hood

Using the OAuth protocol, Quolum now has delegated access to your Intercom Workspace. The Quolum server, running on Amazon AWS VPC, will be able to make API calls and retrieve feature-level utilization. Later, this data is crunched and available for visualization on the Quolum dashboard.