Configure your workspace settings
The settings that need to be right before you build anything else in your workspace: timezone, office hours, reply expectations, and identity.
Your workspace settings are the foundation for your entire helpdesk setup. Reporting accuracy, the reply-time estimates customers see in the Messenger, and the SLAs you set up all depend on what you configure here.
Prerequisites
Before you start, make sure you have the following in place.
- An Intercom workspace with admin access: You’ll need to access workspace-level settings. Start a free trial at intercom.com if you don’t have one yet.
Video transcript
So before we set anything up, there's something worth understanding about these settings. In a traditional help desk, your office hours response times define when customers expect to hear back. Every conversation is measured against that clock. When Fin's at the frontline, that changes. Customers are not left waiting because Fin responds instantly around the clock and in any language your customers speak. So what you're setting up now, your office hours, expected response times, is about when your team is accountable for the conversation that Fin hands off, and it's what your reports will measure. Think about First Response Time (FRT), for example. It used to measure how long customers waited for anyone on your team to reply. Now it's about how quickly your team picks up after Fin hands off. Same metric, completely different meaning. Now we know that not everyone will deploy Fin the same way. Some teams will involve Fin in all conversations from day one, and some will start with one channel or keep certain customer segments like high value ones with your team first. And even if Fin is only handling part of your volume, your team is still on the front lines for everything else, so these settings matter for your whole operation. However you're rolling Fin out, the core idea is the same. Think about what Fin is handling versus what your team is handling and set up your workspace to reflect that. There are a few settings everything else depends on, and they go in a specific order. Start with your workspace time zone. Every metric is calculated relative to it. Then your office hours, when your team is actually working, and this will enable your SLAs, which we'll set up later when we get to Workflows. Then your expected reply times and what customers see in the Messenger when Fin hands off to your team. Set them up in order, and your reporting will be accurate from day one. Here's also where you set up multilingual support and enable AI translations in your inbox and add all the supported languages that Fin and your team will use to support customers. If you're a smaller team and have a straightforward setup, so one inbox, Fin handling all your inbound, that's all you need to know. Set those three things up for when your team is accountable and multilingual support, and you're clear to go. If your team is much bigger, multiple team inboxes, different regions, or you're phasing your Fin rollout, the short guide in our lesson below walks through some considerations you might wanna account for. Once these settings are in place, your customers know when to expect a response, and your team is measured on what actually matters, how they respond after Fin hands off, not against the twenty four seven clock they were never meant to meet. So let's get these settings right before we move on to the rest.
Set your workspace timezone first
Every reply-time estimate, every reporting metric, and every SLA you set up is calculated relative to your workspace timezone. Confirm it’s correct before touching anything else.
Go to Settings → Workspace → General.
If you’re operating across multiple time zones, set the workspace timezone to your primary operation’s location. Team-level adjustments come when you set up team inboxes.
Set your office hours
Intercom’s default is no office hours set, which means your team is treated as available 24/7. Every conversation that arrives overnight will be measured against a round-the-clock schedule. Set your actual hours on day one so your reports are accurate from the start.
Go to Settings → Workspace → Office Hours.
- Work in 30-minute increments. Office hours auto-adjust for daylight saving time.
- Set conservative hours. If you’re unsure of exact coverage, err tighter as you can always expand. Hours that don’t match reality make your reporting less useful.
- Team-level overrides (Advanced and Expert plans) let you set different hours per team. You can configure those when you set up team inboxes.
Holiday and closure overrides are at Settings → Workspace → Office Hours → Holidays & Closures. Dates added here are automatically factored into reply-time calculations and SLA timers.
Set what customers see when Fin hands off
In a Fin-first setup, the expected reply time in the Messenger is about how quickly your human team responds after Fin escalates, not how long customers wait for any reply.
Go to Settings → Channels → Messenger → Conversations → Reply Expectations.
Tip: Start by setting them conservatively, then adjust once you have a real read on your team’s patterns. A reply time you reliably beat builds more trust than an ambitious one you consistently miss.
You can also set Intercom to show the reply time only once a conversation is assigned to a team, useful if routing takes a moment to settle after a handoff.
Measuring First Response Time when Fin and your team work together
Standard first response time excludes bot handling time by default, so it always reflects how long your human team took to respond. If you also want to see the full customer wait including the time Fin spent on a conversation, “First response time: including time assigned to bot” gives you that view.
Understanding the difference helps you choose the right metric depending on where and how Fin is involved in your operation, and Responsiveness reporting covers both metrics in detail.
Set your workspace name, avatar, and language
Your workspace name and avatar appear in the Messenger. Set them at Settings → Workspace → General.
Language sets the default for auto-replies and the Intercom interface. Fin detects and responds in the customer’s language automatically, so the workspace language setting primarily affects your team’s interface and system-generated messages.
Notification preferences: set these up with your team
Notification preferences are set by each teammate individually. Add it to your onboarding checklist: when you invite teammates to your workspace, have them configure their own notifications.
A note on SLAs
SLAs are configured inside the Workflows builder, not here. But they depend on office hours being in place, so what you set up here is what makes them meaningful. More on how SLAs and office hours interact.
