The Scenario
You run customer success at a SaaS company. It is Sunday evening. Tomorrow morning, onboarding sequences are supposed to start firing for the 400 trial sign-ups that came in over the weekend — but none of them are in Intercom yet. The sales team sent you an Excel file with emails, names, companies, and plan tiers. Someone on ops was supposed to handle the import. They did not.
The bad version:
- Open Intercom's contact import, discover it only accepts a specific CSV format with exact header names, spend 20 minutes reformatting the file.
- Upload the CSV, get a partial success report showing 47 rows failed because of blank company fields — no indication of which rows.
- Go back into the file, find the blank rows, fill in placeholders, re-upload, hope the duplicates are handled gracefully.
You do not have until Tuesday to figure this out. Onboarding starts at 9 AM and the contacts need to exist in Intercom first.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent that lives inside your Google Sheet. It reads the data and talks to Intercom for you. Open the sheet with the trial sign-ups, open the SheetXAI sidebar, and paste your prompt.
Create an Intercom contact for every row in this sheet — email in column A, name in column B, company in column C, plan in column D — skip rows where column A is blank and write the new contact ID back to column E.
What You Get
- One Intercom contact created per non-blank row, with email, name, company, and plan_tier attributes set.
- Contact IDs written to column E as each row completes — so you can see progress in real time.
- Rows with blank emails skipped silently; a note written to column E for those rows so you know which ones were passed.
- If a contact with that email already exists, the existing ID is returned rather than creating a duplicate.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
The plan column uses internal codes instead of display names
Your sheet has "ent", "smb", "start" in column D but Intercom expects "Enterprise", "Small Business", "Starter".
Before creating contacts, remap column D: replace "ent" with "Enterprise", "smb" with "Small Business", and "start" with "Starter" — then run the contact creation with the corrected values.
Some rows are missing the company field
About 30 rows have no value in column C — solo operators who signed up without a company name.
Create Intercom contacts for all rows in this sheet — if column C is blank, omit the company attribute entirely rather than sending an empty string — write the contact ID or error to column E.
Sign-ups are split across two tabs
The weekend batch is in the "Saturday" tab and the "Sunday" tab. You need both imported.
Create Intercom contacts from both the Saturday and Sunday tabs in this sheet — email in column A, name in column B, company in column C, plan in column D in each tab — deduplicate by email across both tabs before creating, and write results to a new tab called "Import Results".
Do the full cleanup and import in one shot
You need to normalize plans, skip blanks, deduplicate across tabs, and log outcomes before the 9 AM cutoff.
Merge the Saturday and Sunday tabs, deduplicate rows by email, remap plan codes (ent to Enterprise, smb to Small Business, start to Starter), skip rows with no email, create an Intercom contact for each remaining row with email/name/company/plan attributes, and write the contact ID or error status to a new "Results" tab.
The pattern is to ask for the cleanup and the action together — one prompt, one pass.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any Google Sheet with a list of trial sign-ups or new users — then ask it to create the contacts in Intercom before your onboarding sequences fire. For managing what happens to contacts after creation, see the spoke on bulk-tagging contacts and the Intercom hub overview.