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Sync from your Zendesk help center
Sync from your Zendesk help center

How to set up a regular sync of your Zendesk help center articles into Intercom.

Updated over a month ago

Keep your Zendesk Guide articles in sync with your Intercom Help Center and use them to power Fin.

Important:

  • You must have access to Zendesk Guide.

  • You’ll still keep your Help Center website on Zendesk.

  • Only published Zendesk articles are synced. They must either be public or visible to logged-in users. Any articles that have other audience targeting rules applied to them in Zendesk won’t be synced.

  • Once the sync is complete, articles will be accessible in the Content.

Get started

You can start a sync from Train > Content by clicking Import/sync knowledge base from Zendesk.

Now enter your Zendesk subdomain then go ahead and click Sync.

Note: Once the first sync is started, it's not possible to force stop it. You can remove the sync once the initial sync is completed.

Once the sync is complete, you’ll receive an email to your registered Intercom email address which confirms how many articles were synchronized.

After syncing public articles from Zendesk, the content will appear in a flat list inside a synced folder you can view from the left sidebar in Train > Content. (Existing Zendesk folder structure is currently not supported but will be coming soon).

Public Articles that are synced from Zendesk will be shown as view-only and can’t be edited. All changes must be made through Zendesk and will automatically propagate to Intercom with the next sync. However, you can configure the settings for synced articles such as enabling them for Fin or managing audience rules.

Note:

  • Re-syncs automatically run every hour and propagate any changes made to articles in Zendesk into Intercom. This includes new articles, article content changes, and removing articles.

  • Syncs that run automatically following the first sync won’t send an email on completion.

What is my Zendesk subdomain?

This is the domain for your Zendesk account (not your Help Center URL). Your Zendesk subdomain is its unique identifier and there are a few ways to find it which you can see here.

Important differences between your articles in Zendesk and Intercom

  • There are slight differences with how synced articles look in the Messenger compared to Intercom articles. Differences can include content formats such as, additional headings, text styling, table formatting, etc.

  • If a customer clicks the “Open in Help Center” link at the bottom of a synced article in the Messenger, this will open a new tab with the article in your Zendesk Help Center.

  • Synced articles and collections are read-only and can’t be edited or moved from and to collections from Intercom Articles or via the Public API. All changes must be made through Zendesk and will automatically propagate to Intercom with the next sync.

  • We don’t support articles that are in any language that is not currently supported by Intercom. If you only have one English language supported, this will be transferred to the Intercom “default English” instead of the regional English language mapped in Zendesk.

  • We only support 2 levels of article nesting; collections and sections. Any Zendesk articles in multi-nested sections will be collapsed into the second level.

  • We don’t support the styles on articles that are set at a theme level on Zendesk so there may be differences between how an article looks in Zendesk vs. Intercom.

  • Internal/private knowledge base is not supported by the sync as they’re not public articles.

  • We exclusively support videos added through Zendesk's 'Add video' button, typically embedded via iframe, and compatible with all providers available in Zendesk's article editor (e.g., YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, JWPlayer, Brightcove, Vidyard, Loom, Guidde). Custom HTML, CSS, or JavaScript-based video embeds are not supported.

Remove the sync

If you’d like to remove the sync with Zendesk (and related data), you can do this from Train > Content by clicking Manage > Remove this source under public articles.

You’ll see a green confirmation banner indicating the removal has been successful and synced articles will be deleted from the Knowledge Hub in Intercom.

Reporting

Find reporting for all articles (including synced articles) in the Articles report.

If you choose to remove your sync with Zendesk, the data related to synced articles will also be deleted so this may cause the numbers in article reporting to decrease.

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