Intercom's real-time dashboard answers one question, and answers it well: what is happening in the inbox right now? How many conversations are waiting, who is available, who is buried. It does not answer the question a support lead asks on Monday morning: is our support working? Here is exactly what it shows, where it stops, and what to look at beside it.
What is Intercom's real-time dashboard?
It is a monitoring view, found under Inbox > Dashboard. It is available on the Expert plan only, and each teammate needs the "Can access real-time dashboard" permission, which an admin grants by role or individually. On other plans, it does not exist.
It has two tabs: Inboxes, which looks at conversation queues, and Teammates, which looks at people. Both can be filtered by inbox or view, team, teammate and timeframe (8 hours by default). A full screen mode lets you put it on a wall display.
What metrics does it show?
Inboxes tab
| Metric | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Unassigned | Conversations not yet assigned to anyone. |
| Waiting for first reply | Conversations with no teammate reply yet. |
| Total open | All open conversations, assigned or not. |
| Idle | Open conversations with no reply within the idle threshold (30 minutes by default). |
| Longest waiting | The longest current wait for a reply. |
| SLA miss rate | Share of conversations that missed their latest SLA target. |
| First response time, Closed, Satisfaction | Computed over the selected timeframe. |
Teammates tab
| Metric | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Status, Time on status | Active, Away or Away & Reassigning, and for how long. |
| Workload | Open conversations relative to the assignment limit. |
| Open, Idle, Snoozed | The teammate's current conversations. |
| Participated, Closed | Conversations they replied to, or closed, in the timeframe. |
| First response time, Response time, Satisfaction | Their response times and customer satisfaction. |
Almost every value is clickable and opens the list of conversations behind it. First response time is split into three buckets: under 5 minutes, 5 to 30 minutes, over 30 minutes.
How often does the data refresh?
- Every 60 seconds for most metrics, but only while the dashboard is the active browser tab.
- Every 15 minutes for SLA and CSAT.
For a wall display, that is enough. For reacting to a slipping SLA, it is tight: with a 15-minute first response target, a conversation can miss its SLA before the rate moves on screen.
What are its limits?
It is Expert plan only
A team on Essential or Advanced has no access, whatever its size. That is often why teams go looking for a real-time Intercom dashboard elsewhere.
It ignores temporal views
The "SLA due in" and "Waiting for teammate reply" views show up disabled in the filter. Those are exactly the two views a team lead checks to decide what to handle first.
It counts closures, not resolutions
"Closed" counts closed conversations. A conversation closed at 10am and reopened the next day by the same customer counts as a successful closure. The only way to see the difference is to track reopen rate, which the dashboard does not show. Same logic for satisfaction: it only covers customers who rated, and those who rate are not a neutral sample (see CSAT, CES or NPS).
It measures teammates, not Fin
The dashboard is built around inboxes and people. Bot time is excluded from response times by default, and nothing on it tells you whether Fin's answers were right. On a team where Fin handles a good share of the volume, the screen shows the human half of the work and leaves the other half in the dark.
Do you need a third-party tool for a real-time Intercom dashboard?
If you are on Expert and the need is a wall display, no: full screen mode is enough. If you are not on Expert, or you want to mix Intercom with other sources (sales, product), wallboard tools such as Geckoboard, Plecto or Klipfolio connect to the Intercom API and show the same counters.
No wall display, native or third-party, will tell you whether the answers were good. It will tell you how many there were, and how fast.
What should you track beside real time?
| Question | Where to look | Cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Who is available, what is waiting? | Real-time dashboard | Continuously |
| Are we meeting our SLAs? | Real-time dashboard, then Reports for the trend (see setting SLAs) | Daily |
| Are closed conversations actually resolved? | 7-day reopen rate | Weekly |
| Is Fin answering correctly? | Fin answer audit | Weekly |
| Is Fin's containment real? | Net containment | Monthly |
That is the layer ResponZ covers. Connected to Intercom, it updates on every new conversation or reply, scores the quality of every answer, Fin's included, and tracks reopens, backlog by age and whether each conversation went through Fin or a human. See what it adds to Intercom Reports.
Real time is for running the day. The rest is for running support.