Intercom Dashboard on a TV: Support Numbers to Show

A good Intercom dashboard on a team TV shows five numbers: open conversations, unassigned conversations, conversations waiting on your team, first reply time and customer satisfaction. Put those as big totals in a grid anyone can read from across the room, keep every name and message preview off the screen, and leave the detailed reports in Intercom where they belong.

This guide covers which numbers earn a spot on the wall, how big they need to be at 5 metres, and how to make sure no customer data ever ends up on a screen that visitors or delivery drivers walk past. For TVpilot specifically, the Intercom TV dashboard integration page has the current details on what the board shows and how it connects to your workspace.

The reader I have in mind is a support lead or office manager with a team of five to twenty agents, a spare TV on the wall, and a nagging feeling that the queue only gets noticed when someone opens the inbox and gasps.

What a support dashboard TV is for

A wall screen answers one question for people who are not looking at Intercom right now: does the queue need me? Agents on a call, a team lead in a meeting, a developer on support rotation walking to the coffee machine. They glance up for two seconds and either carry on or sit down and start replying.

That purpose decides everything else. A number belongs on the TV if a change in it should make someone act within the next hour. A number that only matters in the Friday review (resolution time trends, tag breakdowns, per-agent performance) belongs in Intercom's own reports, opened on a laptop by the person who needs it.

The five Intercom numbers that belong on the wall

Open conversations

The total of conversations not yet closed. It is the headline size of the workload. On its own it is a slow-moving number, so it works best as context next to the two that follow.

Unassigned

Conversations nobody owns yet. This is the number most likely to trigger action, because an unassigned conversation is one that every agent assumes someone else will pick up. If your team triages by hand, make this the biggest tile on the screen. If you use Intercom's assignment rules or round-robin routing and this number is normally zero, it still earns a smaller tile: a non-zero value means routing broke or a new inbox has no rule.

Waiting on your team

Conversations where the customer replied last and is waiting for you. This differs from open: an open conversation snoozed until next week or waiting on the customer needs nothing from you today. Waiting is the number that tells agents how much actual reply work sits in the queue right now.

First reply time

How long customers wait for the first human answer, usually shown as a median for today. Use the median, because one conversation that sat over the weekend drags an average up and makes a good Monday look bad. Show it in minutes or hours with the unit spelled out ("14 min", "2 h 10 min"), never as a bare number.

Satisfaction

The share of positive conversation ratings, today or this week. Show the week if you get few ratings per day, because three ratings make a daily percentage swing wildly and the team learns to ignore it.

What to leave off

• Per-agent leaderboards. On a shared wall they turn into a public ranking, and people start closing conversations early to climb it.
• Resolution time. It is useful for reviews, but nobody can act on it in the next hour.
• Conversation lists with subjects or previews. They are unreadable at distance and carry customer data (more on that below).

Our longer post on the seven numbers for a support wallboard covers the general case across helpdesks. For Intercom, the five above cover what the team needs during the day.

How to lay out an Intercom dashboard for 5 metres

At 5 metres, small text disappears. The guideline I work with is roughly 2.5 cm of letter height for every 3 metres of viewing distance just to be legible. For a number you want read at a glance, aim for several times that.

Worked example: a 55-inch TV at 5 metres

Say you run a support team of eight agents in an open-plan office. The TV is a 55-inch set mounted at the end of the room, and the furthest desk is about 5 metres away.

1. A 55-inch 16:9 screen is about 68 cm tall. At 1080 pixels high, one pixel is roughly 0.63 mm.
2. For comfortable glance reading at 5 metres, give the main numbers a height of about 12 to 15 cm. That is around 190 to 240 pixels of digit height.
3. A 3 by 2 grid gives each tile about 640 by 540 pixels. That fits one big number plus a label comfortably. A 4 by 3 grid would shrink each number to around 100 pixels and the back row stops reading it.
4. Labels ("Unassigned", "Waiting") can be smaller, around 50 to 60 pixels (3 to 4 cm), because people learn the positions within a day and only need the label when the board is new.

That leaves room for five tiles plus one spare. Use the spare for open conversations as context, or leave it empty. Empty space makes the other numbers easier to find.

Layout rules that hold up

• Put the number people act on (unassigned or waiting) in the top-left tile. Eyes land there first.
• Keep tiles in the same position every day. People read a wallboard by position, and moving tiles around resets that habit.
• Show units next to times, and the period ("today", "this week") under every number. A satisfaction score without its period starts arguments.
• High contrast: light digits on a dark background are easier to read from distance on most office TVs and cause less glare.
• One board per screen. If you also want announcements or a lunch menu on the same TV, rotate them as separate slides and keep the dashboard slide on for most of the loop.

How to keep customer data off the wall

A support TV is often visible from a hallway, a meeting room with guests, or a window. Treat everything on it as public.

Totals only

The safest dashboard shows counts, times and percentages and nothing else. Whatever tool you use, check before it goes on the wall that the board shows how many conversations are unassigned, never who wrote them or what they said. That rules out the most common leak, a conversation list showing a customer's name and the first line of a complaint about a billing error. For TVpilot's Help Scout dashboard only totals reach the screen; for the Intercom board, check the integration page linked above for exactly which figures it displays.

Read-only access

Any wallboard tool that connects to Intercom should get the narrowest access possible. If its credentials ever leak, they should only be able to read numbers, not send replies, change assignments or export contacts. Intercom manages apps and their permissions in the Intercom Developer Hub. If you create access there for a dashboard, grant read permissions only, give the app a clear name such as "Office TV dashboard", and revoke it when you replace the board.

Watch the screen itself

A screen that runs a full Intercom browser session is the riskiest setup: someone logs in on the TV's browser, the session stays open, and anyone with a wireless keyboard can click into conversations. A signage player that only shows a dashboard page means nobody ever needs to log into Intercom on the TV itself.

How fresh the numbers need to be

For a team TV, an update every few minutes is the right speed: unassigned conversations piling up show within minutes, and the wall does not flicker with every single reply. Faster than that adds little for a room of people glancing up between tasks. Check the integration page for the refresh interval of the board you plan to use.

If your team works a phone-style queue where a 30-second spike matters, a wall TV is the wrong tool for that signal. Agents in that setup should watch the live Intercom inbox on their own screens, and the TV can carry the daily picture.

When TVpilot is, and is not, the right fit

TVpilot fits when you want the Intercom numbers on a TV without building anything yourself, on a Raspberry Pi, a Fire TV Stick or any smart TV with a modern browser. It also fits when the same screen shows other things between dashboard slides, like a calendar, office announcements or another team's KPIs. The Free plan covers one screen at €0 with no credit card, which is enough to test a single support TV. Starter is €5 per month for 3 screens if you add a second office or a screen in the dev area. The support dashboards overview lists the other helpdesks if part of your team works in a different tool.

It is not the right fit if you need conversation-level detail on the wall, per-second updates, or a self-hosted system: TVpilot is hosted software and cannot run on your own servers. If your team only ever looks at the dashboard on laptops, Intercom's built-in reports already do that job and you do not need a TV product at all.

Setting it up in practice

For the eight-agent example above, the hardware is a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 behind the TV, installed with the one-command installer and a 6-character claim code from the dashboard. Connect Intercom following the steps on the integration page, build the board from the figures it offers with the action number in the top-left position, and press Push to screen. Plugin edits stay as a draft until you push, so you can adjust the board during the day without the wall showing a half-finished version. Then stand at the back desk for a minute and check that every number reads without squinting. If one does not, remove a tile before you make anything smaller. You can create a free TVpilot account for one screen and try the setup on your own support TV.