Setting up Intercom Fin for a store: what to configure before you switch it on

Intercom’s Fin is one of the most capable AI agents a store can put on its site. It also bills per outcome: Intercom lists it at $0.99 for each conversation Fin resolves, or each defined action it completes.¹ That pricing is fair when Fin’s answers are right. When they aren’t, you pay for the wrong answer as well as for the customer it cost you.

Most of what makes Fin right or wrong is decided in the first afternoon of setup. This is the checklist we’d go through, in order.

1. Decide what Fin reads

Fin answers from content you give it: Intercom help centre articles, synced websites, uploaded files and short internal texts Intercom calls snippets. Intercom’s guide to optimizing content for Fin is worth reading in full before connecting anything.²

For a store, the minimum set is:

• delivery: times and costs by region, cut-off times, carriers;
• returns and exchanges, with every exception in the rule’s own sentence;
• payment methods and instalments;
• product care, sizing and compatibility, if customers ask;
• store locations and hours, if you have shops.

Then decide what Fin should not read. Old news posts, seasonal banners from last year, PDF catalogues, terms and conditions without a plain-language version. Each of these is a source of confident wrong answers. We wrote a longer list in what to put in the knowledge base.

One check that saves trouble: if you sync your public website and also write help centre articles, they will disagree sooner or later. Pick one as the source of truth for each topic and remove the topic from the other.

2. Write guidance like a short staff briefing

Fin lets you give it instructions on tone, what to do in certain situations and when to hand over. Treat it like a briefing for a new person on the support team, not a brand manifesto.

Good guidance for a store is specific:

• “Never offer discounts, vouchers or free shipping that isn’t written in our content.”
• “If a customer asks about an order that’s late, ask for the order number and hand over.”
• “Don’t say when a product will be back in stock.”
• “If a customer asks to return an item outside the policy, explain the policy and offer to pass the request to the team.”

Bad guidance makes Fin more confident without making it more correct: “always give a complete answer”, “never say you don’t know”. The second one in particular pushes it to fill gaps with general knowledge, which is where invented return policies come from.

3. Decide where Fin hands over

A customer who asks for a person and gets one doesn’t cost an outcome. A customer who gets a wrong answer and leaves usually does. So the hand-over rules matter for both money and trust.

Questions Fin should almost always pass on for a store:

Situation	Why
Where is my order, with an order number	Needs a live system or a person, unless you’ve connected order data
Damaged or wrong item received	A judgement call and often a refund
Complaints	Tone matters more than speed
Requests outside policy	Only a person can make an exception
Business orders, bulk quotes	Usually a sales conversation

Make sure the hand-over goes somewhere that is read. Out of hours, that means a clear message about when someone will reply.

4. Test with Intercom’s tools

Intercom gives you three ways to test before customers see an answer: previews of single questions, batch tests that run many questions at once (typed, from a CSV or generated from past conversations), and simulations of complete procedures.³⁴ Use batch tests. Write 50 to 100 questions in customers’ own words, not in the wording of your articles, including follow-ups like “and to Ireland?” or “what if I opened it?”.

5. Check answers against your pages, not against Fin’s sources

Here is the gap. A batch test tells you how Fin answers from the content you gave it. If that content is out of date, or disagrees with your live returns page, Fin’s answer will look right in the test and be wrong for the customer. The check that matters is the answer against what your public website says today.

For each test answer, note the page and sentence that should answer it, and mark it right, wrong, missing or handed over. A wrong answer with a page next to it is easy to fix. A wrong answer without one is an argument.

6. Keep checking after launch

Stores change prices, delivery terms and policies all the time, and each change is a chance for Fin to be out of date. Set a routine:

• after every change to delivery, returns or pricing pages, re-run the questions for that topic;
• once a month, run the full set;
• before peak season, run the full set twice: we keep a 25-question pre-season list.

Intercom’s reports show resolution rate and topics. They don’t show which resolved conversations were wrong. Only asking does.

The short version

1. Connect only current content, one source per topic.
2. Write specific guidance: no discounts, no stock promises, clear hand-overs.
3. Batch test with customer wording and follow-ups.
4. Compare each answer with your live pages, not with Fin’s sources.
5. Repeat after every page change.

If Fin is already live on your store and you’d like an outside check, our Intercom Fin page shows what we look at and the mistakes we see most. Assistant Care does the weekly checking for you.

Footnotes

1. Fin by Intercom, pricing, fin.ai/pricing. ↩

2. Intercom Help, “Optimizing content for Fin”, intercom.com/help. ↩

3. Intercom Help, “Batch test Fin AI Agent”, intercom.com/help. ↩

4. Intercom Help, “Simulations vs. Batch tests vs. Previews”, intercom.com/help. ↩