Recording Scope
Recording scope lets you choose which customers your team can request a recording from.
It applies everywhere a request link is created: the Intercom app, every other helpdesk integration, and Birdie itself. Recordings your team sends are never affected.
You find it in Settings › Security › Recording scope. It is part of the Enterprise plan.
Allowlist or blocklist?
Pick one of two modes. They are opposites, not variations of each other:
Allowlist — only customers matching your rules can be recorded. Everyone else is refused.
Blocklist — everyone can be recorded, except customers matching your rules.
An allowlist is far more restrictive than it looks. It refuses every customer your rules do not explicitly match: a new lead, a colleague testing with a personal address, a customer whose email is not in Intercom yet. With a blocklist, only what you list is refused. With an allowlist, everything you did not list is refused. Choose an allowlist only when you genuinely want to record a known population and nobody else.
matches at least one rule
Allowed
Refused
matches no rule
Refused
Allowed
has no record in your Intercom workspace at all
Refused
Allowed
Writing rules
A customer only has to match one rule. Inside a rule, every condition must be true. Add conditions to make a rule narrower, add rules to catch more people.
A condition reads one of:
the email on the request. It accepts a pasted list, so forty domains are one condition rather than forty.
an Intercom contact or company attribute: the standard ones, your custom ones, and Tags.
Operators follow the attribute type. Text gets is / is not / contains / does not contain / starts with / ends with / is set / is not set. Numbers add is more than / is less than. Booleans get is true / is false. Tags get includes / does not include / has any / has none. Matching ignores case.
These rules read from names the Intercom workspace every customer is looked up in, whichever helpdesk or workspace the request comes from. If several workspaces are connected, a customer with no record in the chosen one matches no rule. The panel shows a warning when that applies to you.
Just created an attribute or a tag in Intercom? Refresh attributes re-reads the list.
Test an email
Type any customer address and press Check to see the verdict and, rule by rule, why: ✓ matched, ✕ did not match (with the value Birdie found), ? could not be answered because there is no such record. It reads live from Intercom, tests the rules as they are on screen, and saves nothing.
What a refused customer sees
In the Intercom sidebar and composer, Request a recording is greyed out with Not available for this customer. The agent is not told which rule applied.
If a link was created before the rule existed, opening it shows a page saying screen recording is turned off for their email address, with a ready-made message to send back to the agent. The customer is not told why either.
Good to know
Rule changes and the on/off switch apply immediately. A change made in Intercom, such as a new tag or an edited attribute, is picked up within a minute.
If Intercom cannot be reached, Birdie reuses its last answer for that customer for up to 24 hours. A customer it has never answered for is treated as matching no rule, and the table above says what happens next.
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