How to load data from Intercom to BigQuery

Learn how to use Airbyte to synchronize your Intercom data into BigQuery within minutes.

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Set up a Intercom connector in Airbyte

Connect to Intercom or one of 400+ pre-built or 10,000+ custom connectors through simple account authentication.

Set up BigQuery for your extracted Intercom data

Select BigQuery where you want to import data from your Intercom source to. You can also choose other cloud data warehouses, databases, data lakes, vector databases, or any other supported Airbyte destinations.

Configure the Intercom to BigQuery in Airbyte

This includes selecting the data you want to extract - streams and columns -, the sync frequency, where in the destination you want that data to be loaded.

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TL;DR

set up Intercom as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
set up BigQuery as a destination connector
define which data you want to transfer and how frequently

You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

This tutorial’s purpose is to show you how.

What is Intercom

Intercom is a customer messaging platform that helps businesses communicate with their customers in a personalized and efficient way. It offers a suite of tools that enable businesses to engage with their customers through targeted messaging, live chat, and email campaigns. Intercom also provides customer data and analytics to help businesses understand their customers better and make informed decisions. The platform is designed to help businesses build strong relationships with their customers, increase customer satisfaction, and ultimately drive growth. Intercom is used by thousands of businesses worldwide, including Shopify, Atlassian, and New Relic.

What is BigQuery

BigQuery is an enterprise data warehouse that draws on the processing power of Google Cloud Storage to enable fast processing of SQL queries through massive datasets. BigQuery helps businesses select the most appropriate software provider to assemble their data, based on the platforms the business uses. Once a business’ data is acculumated, it is moved into BigQuery. The company controls access to the data, but BigQuery stores and processes it for greater speed and convenience.

Integrate Intercom with BigQuery in minutes

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Prerequisites

A Intercom account to transfer your customer data automatically from.
A BigQuery account.
An active Airbyte Cloud account, or you can also choose to use Airbyte Open Source locally. You can follow the instructions to set up Airbyte on your system using docker-compose.

Airbyte is an open-source data integration platform that consolidates and streamlines the process of extracting and loading data from multiple data sources to data warehouses. It offers pre-built connectors, including Intercom and BigQuery, for seamless data migration.

When using Airbyte to move data from Intercom to BigQuery, it extracts data from Intercom using the source connector, converts it into a format BigQuery can ingest using the provided schema, and then loads it into BigQuery via the destination connector. This allows businesses to leverage their Intercom data for advanced analytics and insights within BigQuery, simplifying the ETL process and saving significant time and resources.

Step 1: Set up Intercom as a source connector

1. First, navigate to the Intercom source connector page on Airbyte.com.
2. Click on the "Create new connection" button.
3. Enter a name for your connection and click "Next".
4. Enter your Intercom credentials, including your Access Token and App ID.
5. Click "Test" to ensure that your credentials are correct and that Airbyte can connect to your Intercom account.
6. Once the test is successful, click "Next".
7. Select the data you want to replicate from Intercom, including conversations, users, and companies.
8. Choose the replication frequency and the destination where you want to send the data.
9. Click "Create connection" to finalize the setup.
10. Your Intercom source connector is now connected to Airbyte, and you can start replicating your data to your desired destination.

Step 2: Set up BigQuery as a destination connector

1. First, navigate to the Airbyte dashboard and select the "Destinations" tab on the left-hand side of the screen.

2. Scroll down until you find the "BigQuery" destination connector and click on it.

3. Click the "Create Destination" button to begin setting up your BigQuery destination.

4. Enter your Google Cloud Platform project ID and service account credentials in the appropriate fields.

5. Next, select the dataset you want to use for your destination and enter the table prefix you want to use.

6. Choose the schema mapping for your data, which will determine how your data is organized in BigQuery.

7. Finally, review your settings and click the "Create Destination" button to complete the setup process.

8. Once your destination is created, you can begin configuring your source connectors to start syncing data to BigQuery.

9. To do this, navigate to the "Sources" tab on the left-hand side of the screen and select the source connector you want to use.

10. Follow the prompts to enter your source credentials and configure your sync settings.

11. When you reach the "Destination" step, select your BigQuery destination from the dropdown menu and choose the dataset and table prefix you want to use.

12. Review your settings and click the "Create Connection" button to start syncing data from your source to your BigQuery destination.

Step 3: Set up a connection to sync your Intercom data to BigQuery

Once you've successfully connected Intercom as a data source and BigQuery as a destination in Airbyte, you can set up a data pipeline between them with the following steps:

Create a new connection: On the Airbyte dashboard, navigate to the 'Connections' tab and click the '+ New Connection' button.
Choose your source: Select Intercom from the dropdown list of your configured sources.
Select your destination: Choose BigQuery from the dropdown list of your configured destinations.
Configure your sync: Define the frequency of your data syncs based on your business needs. Airbyte allows both manual and automatic scheduling for your data refreshes.
Select the data to sync: Choose the specific Intercom objects you want to import data from towards BigQuery. You can sync all data or select specific tables and fields.
Select the sync mode for your streams: Choose between full refreshes or incremental syncs (with deduplication if you want), and this for all streams or at the stream level. Incremental is only available for streams that have a primary cursor.
Test your connection: Click the 'Test Connection' button to make sure that your setup works. If the connection test is successful, save your configuration.
Start the sync: If the test passes, click 'Set Up Connection'. Airbyte will start moving data from Intercom to BigQuery according to your settings.

Remember, Airbyte keeps your data in sync at the frequency you determine, ensuring your BigQuery data warehouse is always up-to-date with your Intercom data.

Use Cases to transfer your Intercom data to BigQuery

Integrating data from Intercom to BigQuery provides several benefits. Here are a few use cases:

Advanced Analytics: BigQuery’s powerful data processing capabilities enable you to perform complex queries and data analysis on your Intercom data, extracting insights that wouldn't be possible within Intercom alone.
Data Consolidation: If you're using multiple other sources along with Intercom, syncing to BigQuery allows you to centralize your data for a holistic view of your operations, and to set up a change data capture process so you never have any discrepancies in your data again.
Historical Data Analysis: Intercom has limits on historical data. Syncing data to BigQuery allows for long-term data retention and analysis of historical trends over time.
Data Security and Compliance: BigQuery provides robust data security features. Syncing Intercom data to BigQuery ensures your data is secured and allows for advanced data governance and compliance management.
Scalability: BigQuery can handle large volumes of data without affecting performance, providing an ideal solution for growing businesses with expanding Intercom data.
Data Science and Machine Learning: By having Intercom data in BigQuery, you can apply machine learning models to your data for predictive analytics, customer segmentation, and more.
Reporting and Visualization: While Intercom provides reporting tools, data visualization tools like Tableau, PowerBI, Looker (Google Data Studio) can connect to BigQuery, providing more advanced business intelligence options. If you have a Intercom table that needs to be converted to a BigQuery table, Airbyte can do that automatically.

Wrapping Up

To summarize, this tutorial has shown you how to:

Configure a Intercom account as an Airbyte data source connector.
Configure BigQuery as a data destination connector.
Create an Airbyte data pipeline that will automatically be moving data directly from Intercom to BigQuery after you set a schedule

With Airbyte, creating data pipelines take minutes, and the data integration possibilities are endless. Airbyte supports the largest catalog of API tools, databases, and files, among other sources. Airbyte's connectors are open-source, so you can add any custom objects to the connector, or even build a new connector from scratch without any local dev environment or any data engineer within 10 minutes with the no-code connector builder.

We look forward to seeing you make use of it! We invite you to join the conversation on our community Slack Channel, or sign up for our newsletter. You should also check out other Airbyte tutorials, and Airbyte’s content hub!

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How to Sync Intercom to BigQuery Manually

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FAQs

What is ETL?

ETL, an acronym for Extract, Transform, Load, is a vital data integration process. It involves extracting data from diverse sources, transforming it into a usable format, and loading it into a database, data warehouse or data lake. This process enables meaningful data analysis, enhancing business intelligence.

What is Intercom?

What data can you extract from Intercom?

Intercom's API provides access to a wide range of data related to customer communication and engagement. The following are the categories of data that can be accessed through Intercom's API:

1. Users: Information about individual users, including their name, email address, and user ID.
2. Conversations: Data related to customer conversations, including the conversation ID, message content, and conversation status.
3. Companies: Information about companies that use Intercom, including company name, ID, and size.
4. Tags: Data related to tags assigned to users and conversations, including tag name and ID.
5. Segments: Information about user segments, including segment name, ID, and criteria.
6. Events: Data related to user events, including event name, ID, and timestamp.
7. Custom attributes: Information about custom attributes assigned to users, including attribute name, value, and type.
8. Teammates: Data related to Intercom team members, including name, email address, and role.

Overall, Intercom's API provides a comprehensive set of data that can be used to analyze customer behavior, improve communication strategies, and enhance overall customer engagement.

How do I transfer data from Intercom?

This can be done by building a data pipeline manually, usually a Python script (you can leverage a tool as Apache Airflow for this). This process can take more than a full week of development. Or it can be done in minutes on Airbyte in three easy steps:
1. Set up Intercom to BigQuery as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
2. Choose a destination (more than 50 available destination databases, data warehouses or lakes) to sync data too and set it up as a destination connector
3. Define which data you want to transfer from Intercom to BigQuery and how frequently
You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

What is ELT?

ELT, standing for Extract, Load, Transform, is a modern take on the traditional ETL data integration process. In ELT, data is first extracted from various sources, loaded directly into a data warehouse, and then transformed. This approach enhances data processing speed, analytical flexibility and autonomy.

Difference between ETL and ELT?

ETL and ELT are critical data integration strategies with key differences. ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) transforms data before loading, ideal for structured data. In contrast, ELT (Extract, Load, Transform) loads data before transformation, perfect for processing large, diverse data sets in modern data warehouses. ELT is becoming the new standard as it offers a lot more flexibility and autonomy to data analysts.

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Warehouses and Lakes

Sales & Support Analytics

How to load data from Intercom to BigQuery

Learn how to use Airbyte to synchronize your Intercom data into BigQuery within minutes.

Try Airbyte Cloud free

Deploy Airbyte Open Source

Step 1: Setup Intercom

Step 2: Setup BigQuery

Step 3: Setup a connection Use Cases Wrapping Up

Example H2

Example H3

Sync data between Intercom and BigQuery

Get your data syncing in minutes

Try Airbyte free

TL;DR

set up Intercom as a source connector (using Auth, or usually an API key)
set up BigQuery as a destination connector
define which data you want to transfer and how frequently

You can choose to self-host the pipeline using Airbyte Open Source or have it managed for you with Airbyte Cloud.

This tutorial’s purpose is to show you how.

What is Intercom

What is BigQuery

Integrate Intercom with BigQuery in minutes

Try for free now

Prerequisites

A Intercom account to transfer your customer data automatically from.
A BigQuery account.
An active Airbyte Cloud account, or you can also choose to use Airbyte Open Source locally. You can follow the instructions to set up Airbyte on your system using docker-compose.