Use Intercom from your MCP Client

Intercom  is a customer messaging platform that helps teams manage support conversations and customer relationships.

Using the Intercom MCP Server, you can analyze customer conversations through Claude Desktop, identifying churn risks and sentiment patterns by describing your needs in natural language.

At the end of this guide, you’ll know how to connect the Intercom MCP Server to Claude Desktop.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have:

• Claude Desktop  installed
• An Intercom workspace  with admin access or permission to create integrations
• A few sample conversations in Intercom (we’ll show you how to set this up)

Set up demo data in Intercom

For this guide, we need realistic customer data to analyze. We’ll use the Intercom Messenger chat widget to create sample conversations.

Install the Intercom Messenger component

We can’t create conversations directly in Intercom, so we need to use the Messenger widget component.

Navigate to Settings > Channels > Messenger in your Intercom workspace. Under Install you’ll see installation options for different platforms including React, Angular, Vue, WordPress, and others. Choose the option that matches your application and follow the instructions to install the widget.

Create sample customer conversations

Using the Messenger widget, create several conversations that represent different customer health scenarios, ranging from satisfied customers asking feature questions to frustrated users reporting technical issues and requesting cancellations.

Here’s an example of what one of these messages might look like:

James Wilson is a customer who is actively seeking to cancel his subscription due to poor ROI. This is a critical churn signal that needs immediate attention.

Create a few more messages with varying sentiment levels to build a realistic representation of what a messy inbox.

Once you’ve created these messages, your Intercom inbox should look like this:

Install and configure the Intercom MCP server

We’ll use the Intercom MCP server to connect your Intercom data to Claude Desktop.

Get your Intercom access token

First, create an Intercom app to access your data:

• In Intercom, go to Settings > Integrations > Developer Hub.

  

• Click the New app button and create an internal integration.

• Name it Customer Health Monitor and click Create App.

• Under Permissions, enable the following:

  • Read conversations: To view conversations
  • Read one user and one company: To list and view a single user and company
  • Read events: To list all events belonging to a single user
  • Write events: To submit events (user activity)

• If that’s not the case, click the Edit button to enable the permissions above.

• Copy your Access Token from the authentication section.

  

Configure Intercom MCP server in Claude Desktop

Update your Claude Desktop configuration to include the MCP server. In Settings, go to Developer > Edit Config.

In the claude_desktop_config.json file that opens, add the Intercom MCP Server configuration:

Replace YOUR_INTERCOM_ACCESS_TOKEN with the access token you copied from the Intercom authentication page in the previous step.

Restart Claude Desktop. When you first try to use the Intercom tools, Claude requests permission to access them. Click Allow always or Allow once to proceed.

Testing the connection

With the Intercom MCP server configured, you can now ask Claude to analyze your customer conversations. Test the integration with the following prompt:

Claude will use the Intercom MCP server to get the list of conversations, identify the conversations that are at risk of churning, and summarize the conversations.

Automate your workflow

Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can automate your workflow by:

• Creating a weekly reminder to run the health check.
• Setting up templates for common outreach scenarios.
• Building a simple dashboard to track health score trends over time.

Ask Claude:

Conclusion

Now that you can analyze customer conversations in Claude Desktop using the Intercom MCP Server, try combining this functionality with other MCP servers. For example, you could use the Slack integration to automatically notify your customer success team about urgent cases.