New conversations in the last 24 hours, flagged when they run more than two standard deviations above your 30-day baseline — your early warning that something just broke or went viral.
At a glance
Volume Spike watches the rate at which new conversations land in your Intercom inbox and raises a flag when today’s inbound runs far above what’s normal for your store. It is an anomaly detector, not a counter: the headline is the count of new conversations in the last 24 hours, but its job is to tell you when that count is statistically unusual. For Blitz, a sudden surge almost always has a single root cause — a broken checkout, a delivery-carrier outage, a stock-out on a hyped drop, or a marketing email that landed wrong. Catching the spike early lets you fix the cause before the inbox becomes unmanageable.
Calculation
Vortex IQ counts conversations created in the trailing 24 hours via theconversations search endpoint filtered on created_at. In parallel it computes the mean (μ) and standard deviation (σ) of daily new-conversation counts over the preceding 30 days. The card flags an anomaly when the 24-hour count exceeds μ + 2σ — roughly the top ~2.5% of expected daily volumes, so genuinely unusual rather than merely high. The baseline self-adjusts as your normal volume shifts, so a growing store doesn’t get false alarms and a quiet desk still catches its smaller spikes.
Worked example
A representative reading of Volume Spike for Blitz. Blitz’s 30-day baseline is a mean of 90 new conversations a day with a standard deviation of 18, so the spike line sits at 90 + (2 × 18) = 126. On most days the inbox takes 70–110 conversations and the card stays quiet. On Thursday it reports184 and flags red — well past 126. The support lead opens the underlying tags and sees a cluster of “payment declined at checkout” conversations created since 14:00. That points straight at the payments stack; she cross-references the Support Spike on Failed Payments card, confirms a card-acquirer issue, loops in the founder, and posts a banner on the site to deflect duplicate contacts. To understand why the spike concentrated in one hour, she uses Vortex Mind; to ask “what tags are driving today’s volume?” she uses Ask Viq.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in Intercom’s own dashboard: In Intercom, go to Reports → Conversations (or the Conversation volume report) and set the range to the last 24 hours, then compare against a 30-day daily view. Intercom shows you new-conversation counts over time but does not compute a statistical spike flag — so you’ll be eyeballing the bar height against recent days. To find what’s driving it, open Reports → Topics or filter the conversation list by tag andcreated_at = today.
Why the Vortex IQ value may legitimately differ:
Cross-connector reconciliation: a spike with no obvious support cause often traces to a commerce or payments event — cross-reference the failed-payments and out-of-stock cards. For divergence investigations, use Vortex Mind.
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
Q: How often does Volume Spike update? The 24-hour count refreshes on the standard data refresh (typically every 30–60 minutes); the 30-day baseline recomputes daily. During an incident, force a manual refresh to see the latest count. Q: Why does my Intercom report not show a “spike”? Intercom reports raw volume; it does not compute a per-store statistical baseline or a 2σ flag. The spike detection is the value Vortex IQ adds — the same raw count can be a non-event for a high-variance store and an alert for a steady one. Q: I had a spike but the inbox felt fine — was it a false alarm? Not necessarily. A spike that gets absorbed by good staffing is still worth knowing about because the cause (a payment wave, a shipping delay) may still be hurting revenue even if support coped. Use the tags and cross-platform siblings to find the root cause. Q: Can I change the alert threshold? Yes. The>2σ threshold is configurable per profile in the Alert Rules tab — tighten to 1.5σ to catch smaller surges or loosen to 2.5σ for a noisy, seasonal inbox.