[intercom] not sending the same anonymous_id as segment

[SegmentDestinationsBot]

Migrated from #30 by @RahavLussato

this issue is affecting inconsistent intercom anonymous id.

here is a call to segment:

and here is a call to intercom:

you can see that the anonymous_id is different

[miaskiewicz]

Hi Segment team,

This issue is a big pain point for us in our usage of Segment to load Intercom.

1. User visits webpage; this is tied to anonymous ID generated by Segment; in downstream, consumers of this data, this creates a user profile tied to the anonymous ID
2. User opens Intercom bot; this is tied to a new anonymous ID generated by Intercom; Intercom has no awareness of the previous user created
3. User identifies themselves inside of Intercom; this is tied to an email address inside of Intercom; the website has no awareness of this user identifying themselves inside of Intercom and this email address will not be tied to the session on the website (outside of Intercom).

We tried workarounds with Zapier to get the Intercom data into our analytics tools, but since Intercom is not a source inside of Segment... it seems like we cannot do much here to resolve the creation of two separate users that cannot be easily linked together.

As far as I see it, there's a couple ways to resolve this issue:

1. As indicate in this issue: fix the anonymous ID issue with two different anonymous IDs being used for Intercom and Segment analytics.js fires
2. Propagate the intercom user_id and/or contact_id to the web session context, such that it can be added to .identify() calls and used to join the two profiles (web session, intercom session) in downstream consumers of the Segment data

Right now, we don't really have any ability to join the two users in our system due to the problem noted in this issue.

Outside of the scope of this issue, it would be great to have Intercom as a source of events inside of Segment (that can connect to destinations; not just data warehouses). Right now, Intercom is a silo and interactions with the user that occur inside of Intercom are not propagated to other destinations in Segment easily, nor can the two profiles be linked together easily unless the same email address is added to both user profile contexts (in intercom and in segment analytics.js).

[LionelPaulus]

Hey Segment team, do you have a solution to this problem? It's very annoying for us too. I see that a PR had been created to fix that but it was never merged. @pooyaj maybe you can help?