How many support conversations each 100 orders generates — the single best gauge of whether your operation is getting easier or harder to run.
At a glance
Support Contacts per 100 Orders is a cross-platform revenue-at-risk metric that divides the Intercom conversations you created by the orders your commerce sibling processed, scaled to a per-100-orders rate. It is the contact-rate health check: a single number that strips out seasonality and growth so you can see whether each sale is costing you more or less support effort than before. A low, stable rate means the buying experience is self-explanatory; a rising rate means something — fulfilment, product pages, payments — is generating questions and complaints. The card only renders when an ecommerce-platform or marketplace sibling is connected, because the order count comes from there.
Calculation
The card counts Intercom conversations created in the trailing 30 days, divides by the commerce sibling’s order count for the same window, and multiplies by 100 to express the result as conversations per 100 orders. It then compares that rate to the prior comparable 30-day period (vsP) and flags a rise above 25%. Because both numerator and denominator are pulled per period, growth and seasonal swings cancel out, leaving a clean efficiency trend. The only_when gate keeps the card hidden unless an ecommerce-platform or marketplace sibling supplies the order count for the denominator.
Worked example
A representative reading of Support Contacts per 100 Orders for Blitz, the sports retailer. Last period Blitz processed 4,000 orders and opened 320 conversations — a rate of 8.0 contacts per 100 orders, a number the support lead considers healthy for a sports retailer with sizing questions. This period orders rose to 5,200 (a strong month) and conversations rose to 572. Raw volume is up 79%, which on its own looks alarming. But the rate is 11.0 per 100 orders — a 37.5% rise versus prior, well past the +25% trigger. So the extra tickets are not just more sales: each 100 orders is now generating meaningfully more contacts. The support lead cross-references the topic mix and the out-of-stock-complaints card and finds a sizing-guide change drove a spike in “wrong size” returns. The founder reads the same card as a margin warning: support cost per order is climbing. Without normalisation, the raw 79% volume jump would have been written off as “we grew”. To trace the cause, drill into the topic and stockout siblings; for natural-language exploration, ask Ask Viq “why did contacts per 100 orders rise this month”.Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Intercom’s own dashboard: Intercom can give you the numerator but never the full ratio. In Reports → Conversations you can read new conversations created over a period, which is the count this card divides. Intercom has no view of your order count, so it cannot produce a per-100-orders rate — that normalisation depends on the commerce sibling supplying the denominator. If you want to sanity-check the numerator, match the Vortex IQ window to the same date range in Intercom’s conversation report. Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ:
Cross-connector reconciliation: reconcile the denominator against the commerce sibling’s order-count / total-orders card and the numerator against the Intercom conversation-volume card. A rate that moves while both inputs look stable points at a window-boundary mismatch. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Q: How often does Support Contacts per 100 Orders update? The card refreshes on the standard data refresh (typically every 30-60 minutes for live integrations). Both the conversation count and the order count are re-pulled on that cycle. Q: Why is the card hidden? It is gated byonly_when: without an ecommerce-platform or marketplace sibling there is no order count for the denominator, so the rate cannot be computed and the card stays hidden.
Q: Is a lower rate always better?
Usually — fewer contacts per order means a smoother buying experience and lower support cost per sale. But an unusually low rate can also mean shoppers cannot find your support entry points, so read it alongside CSAT and resolution metrics rather than in isolation.
Q: Can I customise the alert threshold?
Yes. The default alert fires on a rise greater than 25% versus the prior period; the threshold and the comparison period are configurable per profile in the Alert Rules tab to match Blitz’s normal seasonal swing.