We work with a lot of Startups SaaS companies, and they consistently run into a few challenges when it comes to managing their growing customer base:

Its hard to know who your users are

Its not always clear how they interact with your product

For them to get the most value and have the best experience, they need meaningful communication from your company.

There are no two tools better suited to manage the overall experience of your customers than Stormpath and Intercom. A mutual customer recently brought us a challenge – can we make it easy for Stormpath to integrate to Intercom?

Our new syncing tool, stormpath-intercom makes it incredibly easy to integrate both into any Node.js or Express app. The integration will automatically populate your Intercom setup with user data from Stormpath.

Intercom: Smart Customer Communication

Intercom is a lightweight, slick CRM system that allows you to:

Store up-to-date information on your users via their simple REST API.

Automatically pull down a user’s avatar and company information.

Schedule emails to users when certain events happen (e.g. 3 days after signup).

Easily add user messaging and chat to your website so users can connect with you where they are?

And lots more.

At a previous company, we massively increased user conversion — as well as proactively solve support issues, by heavily leveraging Intercom’s user segmenting and emailing features:

Intercom fired off an email to new users, welcoming them to the platform, and giving them relevant links to get started.

Intercom sent another email after a user made their first API call to our service, thanking them and giving them more useful information.

We’d also have Intercom fire off another email depending on what user-agent they made API requests with, sending them language-specific help documentation, etc.

Overall, this greatly increased the number of happy users, reduced support cases, and improved the quality of our customer communication.

Store User Data in Stormpath

Unfortunately, while Intercom is amazingly useful — it’s only useful if it’s got access to all of your user’s data!

Let’s say you want to email all users who have made requests to your API service using the Ruby programming language, for instance. This could be a really great way to target your users with context relevant information!

But — there’s no way to do this without first loading this data into Intercom.

This is where stormpath-intercom comes into play.

If you’re storing your user accounts and securing your web applications with Stormpath, our stormpath-intercom tool will automatically sync all of your Stormpath user data with Intercom.

You’ll always have an up-to-date Intercom database, complete with any custom data from Stormpath to assist in segmenting and interacting with your users.

How Stormpath-Intercom Works

Here’s how it works.

First, you need to have Node.js installed and working on your computer (or server).

Once that’s done, you’ll need to install the stormpath-intercom tool by running:

$ npm install -g stormpath-intercom 1 2 $ npm install - g stormpath - intercom

The above command will download and install our syncing tool.

Lastly, you need to run the tool (passing in your Stormpath and Intercom API keys) — this will initiate the synchronization for you. Here’s an example:

$ stormpath-intercom \ --stormpath-api-key-id=xxx \ --stormpath-api-key-secret=xxx \ --stormpath-app-name=myapp \ --intercom-app-id=xxx \ --intercom-api-key=xxx 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 $ stormpath - intercom \ -- stormpath - api - key - id = xxx \ -- stormpath - api - key - secret = xxx \ -- stormpath - app - name = myapp \ -- intercom - app - id = xxx \ -- intercom - api - key = xxx

We recommend you run this tool every hour using a system like cron. This way, your Intercom database will be at most 1 hour behind.

Learn More

If you’re looking to build an incredibly awesome web company, and aren’t yet using either Intercom or Stormpath, you should get started right now!

Got any other questions? Feel free to email us! =)