Question 1

Which Intercom objects accept writes from ClickHouse?

Accepted Answer

Leads, users and companies. Plenty of other Intercom data can be read into the warehouse, including contacts, tags, conversations, admins, teams and tickets, but those are source only. The writable set is the useful one for this direction anyway, since it holds the attributes an agent actually sees when a conversation opens.

Question 2

What is the minimum ClickHouse permission needed?

Accepted Answer

SELECT on the tables or views the model reads, and genuinely nothing more. No write privileges, no ability to create tables, and no access to any storage bucket, because staging only applies when ClickHouse is the destination. That makes this a good candidate for a tightly scoped user, which is worth doing even though the default account would work, since it keeps the sync's access obvious to whoever audits it later.

Question 3

How does a user get linked to its company?

Accepted Answer

Through a column in the model. Include the company identifier next to the person and map it, and leads or users are associated with that company during the same sync rather than needing a second pass. Worth doing from the start, because the context that actually helps an agent is usually company level: plan, account value, renewal date.

Question 4

Should the model create people in Intercom?

Accepted Answer

Usually not, if your product already does. Update or create will make anyone missing, update only enriches those already there, and create only adds new ones without touching matches. Since Intercom is typically fed by signup, letting a warehouse model create people as well tends to produce duplicates from rows that never went through that path. Update only still gets the attributes onto the records that matter.

Question 5

Is this worth it if the product already sets attributes?

Accepted Answer

Often, because the two carry different things. Your application can send what it knows about a session or a plan, but not anything derived from aggregated behaviour, billing history or a model combining several systems. Reverse ETL fills that gap without asking engineering to build another integration, and keeps the definitions identical to the ones reporting uses rather than approximately right.

Sync ClickHouse to Intercom

Sync ClickHouse to Intercom with Polytomic

Users, leads, companies

SELECT is the whole ask

Attach people to companies

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