If you’ve decided the Intercom pricing math doesn’t add up anymore, the next question is what migration actually looks like in practice. The marketing on every alternative promises a switch in minutes. The reality, for most teams, is a short core switch plus a few hours of housekeeping.
Here’s the unsensationalized walkthrough — what to do, what to skip, and the gotchas nobody warns you about. The flow is for Intercom → Replyze but the structure is similar for any shared-inbox migration.
Phase 1 — The core switch
Step 1: Sign up and create your Replyze workspace
Sign up at client.replyze.chat. Create your workspace. Invite the people who’ll be in the inbox: Pro includes 5 seats, Business 15.
Step 2: Install the widget alongside Intercom
This is the move that lets you actually switch without panicking: install Replyze in addition to Intercom for the first day or two, not as a replacement. Both widgets can coexist — Replyze docks to one corner, Intercom to the other, you’re testing in parallel.
Drop the Replyze snippet right before </body> in your site template. For platform-specific guides see Integrations.
You haven’t broken anything. Intercom is still your primary; Replyze is for testing.
Step 3: Bring over your help articles
Where Intercom uses Fin, Replyze uses its own AI agent. It answers only from your knowledge base, so this is the step that matters. Replyze doesn’t crawl or sync a help-centre URL; you bring the articles over yourself:
- Export your articles from Intercom (Phase 2 covers the export).
- Paste the ones that answer real customer questions into Replyze’s knowledge base, or upload the export as a PDF or Word file and let Write with AI draft articles for you to review.
- Publish the drafts you keep. Nothing the AI drafts goes live until you publish it.
You now have an AI agent answering from the same material Fin was. Run it through your top 10 questions in test mode (AI Agent → Test) to validate the answers are reasonable.
Step 4: Configure brand and handoff
Settings → Widget → set the brand colour, position and bot name. Visitors can always ask for a person or tap “Talk to an agent”; if you applied an industry setup, the topics it sends to your team (refunds, complaints and so on) hand over too. The AI doesn’t hand over just because it’s unsure — it says it doesn’t know.
You’re done with the core switch. The new widget is live, the AI is functional, the team is in the inbox.
Step 5: Test the whole flow
Open your site as a visitor. Test:
- Type a stock question → AI should answer with a knowledge base citation.
- Type “Talk to a human” → handoff fires, your inbox lights up.
- Send a reply from the inbox → visitor sees it instantly.
- Close the conversation → it disappears from the active list.
If all four work, you’re functionally migrated. Now the housekeeping.
Phase 2 — Housekeeping (on your schedule)
This is the stuff that doesn’t block “switch and use” but matters within the first week.
Export your Intercom data
For audit + future-proofing, get a clean export from Intercom:
- Intercom → Data → Export (or via Articles → Export depending on subscription).
- Pick: Conversations (CSV + per-conversation HTML), Contacts (CSV), Articles (HTML).
- Stash the exports somewhere durable (your cloud drive).
You may never look at them again. But they’re peace of mind.
Importing them into Replyze is not required and probably not worth your time. Old conversation history rarely gets reopened. Leave Intercom in read-only mode (downgrade to the cheapest tier and stop adding new conversations); use it as an archive if you need to reference an old thread.
Move your canned responses (saved replies)
Intercom Macros → Replyze canned responses. There’s no import for macros, so copy over the handful you actually use; the long tail of macros you wrote a year ago and forgot about can stay in Intercom.
Connect your inbound email
Settings → Channels → Email (Pro and Business). Replyze gives you a forwarding address; forward your support@ address to it (about 5 minutes). From then on, email lands in the Replyze inbox alongside chat, the AI answers it from the same knowledge base, and your replies go back by email in the same thread.
Threads already open in Intercom can stay there. If the customer writes again after the switch, the email arrives in Replyze as a new conversation.
Tags + custom fields
Intercom Conversation Tags → Replyze Tags. Recreate the 5-10 you actually use. Skip the long tail. Same logic applies as Macros.
If you used Custom Attributes on Intercom, recreate the ones you still need as custom fields in Replyze (Settings → Custom Fields).
Phase 3 — Turn off Intercom
Once you’ve been running on Replyze in parallel for 2–3 days and nothing’s broken:
- Remove the Intercom snippet from your site. Edit theme/template, remove the script, deploy. Replyze becomes the only widget.
- Downgrade Intercom to the cheapest plan (or cancel — Intercom does allow self-serve cancellation now). Keep an archive plan if you need conversation history access for compliance.
- Update internal docs referencing Intercom links. “Where’s the inbox” pointing at intercom.com → client.replyze.chat.
The gotchas nobody warns you about
Gotcha 1 — The DNS-level email change
If you were using Intercom’s incoming email feature (your customers email [email protected] and Intercom received it), point that forwarding rule at your Replyze forwarding address before you cancel Intercom. Otherwise email vanishes into Intercom’s now-disconnected inbox.
Check: send a test email to your support address. If it doesn’t appear in the Replyze inbox within a couple of minutes, your forwarder still points at Intercom.
Gotcha 2 — Webhook integrations
If you had Intercom firing webhooks to Slack / Zapier / your own CRM, those will stop firing when you remove the Intercom snippet. The Slack alert your team relies on for “new conversation” goes silent.
List every integration that listens to Intercom before you remove the snippet, and decide how each one gets its signal from now on. Replyze’s own new-chat alerts (in-app, push and email) cover the “someone is waiting” case; anything that fed a CRM or a Zap needs its own replacement. Overlap the two tools for a day so nothing goes quiet unnoticed.
Gotcha 3 — Existing visitor identification
If your site uses Intercom’s Intercom('boot', { user_id, email, name }) to identify logged-in users, you need to swap to Replyze’s equivalent (Replyze('identify', { ... })). Most install guides cover this; skip it and you lose the ability to see “Sarah from Acme Corp” — every visitor will look anonymous until they self-identify.
Gotcha 4 — Out-of-hours auto-responders
If you’d configured Intercom’s out-of-hours auto-reply, replicate it in Replyze before you remove Intercom — otherwise your first weekend post-migration is silent inbox + confused customers.
Gotcha 5 — Your team’s keyboard shortcuts
Intercom’s keyboard shortcuts are different from Replyze’s. Your senior agents may type Cmd+1 for “Assign to me” out of muscle memory and the wrong thing happens. Send a one-pager “here’s the shortcut mapping” to the team in week one. Saves hours of frustration.
When migration takes longer
Three situations push the timeline:
Heavy reliance on Intercom Series / Tours / Surveys. If you’ve built marketing automation on Intercom’s adjacent products, you’re not just migrating support — you’re choosing replacements for each of those (Customer.io / Userflow / Survicate or equivalent). Plan for 1–2 weeks.
Custom Bot logic. If you spent months building elaborate Intercom Custom Bots with branching, conditional flows, and identity verification — that work needs porting. Replyze has no import for them, and the very complex bots may not have an equivalent. Send screenshots to [email protected] before migrating; we’ll tell you whether each bot has an equivalent.
Enterprise compliance requirements. SAML SSO, custom data-residency contracts, signed BAAs — these involve legal review on top of the technical migration. Plan for 2–4 weeks of contract back-and-forth.
For the typical case (you use Intercom for chat + inbox + AI + email), the core switch plus the housekeeping above is the whole job.
What to do the day after migration
One thing only: monitor the inbox for 24 hours like it’s a launch. Watch the first 20 conversations through. Make sure the AI is answering well, the team is replying fast, the handoffs are clean.
Most migration regrets come from teams that installed the new tool and moved on. The first 24 hours are when small bugs surface — a misconfigured forwarder, an AI answering a question with a stale doc, an integration nobody replaced. Spot those in the first day and they’re a quick fix; spot them a month later and they’re a “why has CSAT been dropping” mystery.
After 24 hours, you’re migrated. The Intercom invoice stops. The customer experience is roughly the same to better. The whole thing was less work than you expected — and now you know.
