Intercom Inc., a customer engagement startup that achieved unicorn status with a big funding round in March, today launched a new tool to let brands automate their interactions with users.

Custom Bots is a chatbot builder that enables companies to build tailored virtual assistants. It extends Intercom’s flagship Messenger platform, a chat service for websites that can be used to send visitors targeted, automatic messages in response to certain events such as an online purchase.

Bringing virtual assistants into the fold should theoretically add more depth to the experience for users. That’s why Salesforce.com Inc. and other players in the customer engagement segment have been busy adding new chatbot capabilities too. 

According to Intercom, Custom Bots makes it possible to launch an assistant without writing any code. Marketers can equip a bot with a unique identity and craft a script for the specific customer engagement scenario they’re looking to address.

Like Messenger, Custom Bots provides the ability to trigger a virtual assistant in predetermined situations. If a bank builds an assistant to engage potential new customers visiting its website, it could configure the bot to launch when they navigate to certain pages. Intercom said that companies can create dialogue scripts with multiple branches to address different customer inquiries.

An assistant created in Custom Bots is also capable of completing various tasks. The tool draws on the more than 100 workflows in the Intercom App Store, a catalog of third-party apps that the startup launched last week. Bots can schedule a product demo, synchronize a customer’s contact information to Salesforce.com and perform a variety of other actions. 

Custom Bots builds on Operator, a general-purpose virtual assistant that Intercom has offered for quite some time now. Adding the ability to customize the chatbot experience should make Intercom’s value proposition more appealing to large organizations with needs too broad to be addressed by an off-the-shelf bot. Intercom claims that its tools are used by more than 30,000 companies in total. 

Image: Intercom