Lite seats are included with Advanced (20 seats) and Expert (50 seats) and are intended mainly for people who need occasional access to Intercom rather than actively working as support agents. Essential does not include Lite seats.
A Lite seat cannot reply to customers, own or be assigned conversations, work from a personal or team Inbox, or use Copilot. In normal day-to-day use, a Lite-seat teammate accesses a conversation when another teammate @mentions them or sends them a direct link. They can then review the conversation and add internal notes.
How we see Lite seats used in practice:
- Engineering: a support agent mentions an engineer on a technical issue; the engineer opens the conversation, investigates and leaves an internal note.
- Finance or Operations: someone is brought into a billing, payment or operational issue without needing a paid Full seat.
- Product or management: occasional access to particular customer conversations for context or feedback.
- Key Account Managers: there is a useful reporting workaround here. Lite seats can access Reports and, with the appropriate permissions, use chart drill-in. A report can therefore be filtered to conversations or tickets relevant to particular accounts, and the Lite-seat user can drill into the results and open individual conversations from that list.
There is another less obvious use case: Lite seats can perform some administrative work in Intercom. Depending on their permissions, Lite-seat users can manage areas such as general and security settings, teammates and seats, teams, billing, workspace data, integrations and reporting. However, they cannot administer many core support functions such as Workflows, SLAs, Views, assignment rules, Knowledge Hub content or Messenger settings.
Our rule of thumb: if someone actively handles customer conversations, they need a Full seat. If they mainly need visibility, collaboration, reporting or access to selected administrative areas, a Lite seat may be enough.