When a customer sends you their first message on a channel — a new WhatsApp chat, a first SMS, a fresh Telegram message — Octopods does three things:

The conversation appears in your Intercom inbox alongside any other incoming conversation. Your team can open it, reply, assign it, tag it, and close it with the tools they already use.

Once a conversation exists, additional messages from the same customer on the same channel are appended as replies to the open conversation rather than starting a new one. Your team sees one continuous thread per customer per channel — not a new conversation every time the customer sends another message.

Note: If you turn on the “Open New Conversation After Inactivity” setting, Octopods creates a fresh conversation when the customer replies after a configurable buffer period of silence. See Opening New Conversations (Conversation Buffer) for details.

Replies your team sends through Intercom carry the teammate’s identity back to the customer’s channel. If the conversation is assigned, replies are credited to the assigned teammate. If the conversation is unassigned, Octopods falls back to the default operator so the reply still goes out with a valid Intercom admin attached.

Customers can send images and files on the channels that support them. Octopods downloads the attachment from the channel provider, re-uploads it to Intercom, and surfaces it inline in the conversation so your team can open or download it the same way they would any other Intercom attachment. No extra step is required on your side.

If something unusual happens — for example, the conversation was deleted in Intercom, or the contact lookup failed — Octopods retries before giving up. For persistent issues, check the contact’s profile in Intercom to confirm the contact exists and carries the expected CDAs or phone number.