Keep your Salesforce articles in sync with your Intercom Help Center and use them to power Fin.
Important:
You’ll still keep your Help Center website on Salesforce.
Only published Salesforce 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 Salesforce won’t be synced.
Once the sync is complete, articles will be accessible in the Content section.
Get started
Once you have your Salesforce API connected, you can start a sync from Train > Content by clicking Import/sync knowledge base from Salesforce.
In the modal window click "Connect and sync content" and your sync will start automatically.
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 Salesforce, the content will appear in a flat list inside a synced folder you can view from the left sidebar in Train > Content. (Existing Salesforce folder structure is currently not supported but will be coming soon).
Public Articles that are synced from Salesforce will be shown as view-only and can’t be edited. All changes must be made through Salesforce 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 through the Details panel on the right.
Note:
Re-syncs automatically run every hour and propagate any changes made to articles in Salesforce 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.
Important differences between your articles in Salesforce 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 Salesforce 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 Salesforce 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 Salesforce.
We only support 2 levels of article nesting; collections and sections. Any Salesforce 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 Salesforce so there may be differences between how an article looks in Salesforce vs. Intercom.
Internal/private knowledge base is not supported by the sync as they’re not public articles.
We exclusively support videos added through Salesforces 'Add video' button, typically embedded via
iframe
, and compatible with all providers available in Salesforce'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 Salesforce (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 Salesforce, the data related to synced articles will also be deleted so this may cause the numbers in article reporting to decrease.