Switching to Intercom from Zendesk is easy. With simple setup, and handy importers you’ll be up and running in no time, ready to unlock the Support Funnel and deliver fast and personal customer support.

First, here’s an overview of how concepts you’re familiar with in Zendesk map to Intercom. 👇

As a Zendesk user, you’re familiar with tickets. In Intercom you’ll support your customers with conversations instead. This gives your customers a delightful, messenger first experience, just like the way they chat to their friends and colleagues, but with all the power and automation behind the scenes for your team to work efficiently.

Let’s take a look at some of the most useful features of a conversation in Inbox:

You’re used to tagging your conversations with Zendesk. Tags are similar in Intercom - they add context to conversations and help you gather valuable data.

To tag and keep track of feature requests and bugs, for example, just hover over the right hand side of a conversation, select the drop-down menu and create a tag from there:

You can quickly search for, or report on all conversations with a specific tag whenever you like:

You can also automatically tag conversations with rules, based on the content of the messages, where the conversation was started and more:

In Zendesk, when a user submits a ticket, they can be prompted to provide additional data about the request, or your team may fill out these fields while handling the ticket. In Intercom, you have conversation data attributes:

You can collect conversation data from customers when they start a conversation, update them manually as you handle the conversation, or set them automatically with Inbox rules and Custom Bots.

Conversation data attributes can then be used to filter your reports, or build customized views of your inbox:

To learn more about custom Inbox views, read this article.

In Zendesk, you had triggers. With Intercom, you can automate your support workflows with inbox rules. These let you:

Inbox rules are triggered exactly when you want them to be. At the start of a conversation, after each reply, or after a customer has been waiting a while:

When you switch from Zendesk, you can also create dynamic macros to speed up your response time to common queries, like feature requests and bug reports. If you’ve already set up macros in Zendesk just copy and paste them over.

Read this article to learn how to use macros in the inbox.

If you used Zendesk’s ‘Answer Bot’ add-on to suggest articles to your customers, you’ll get the same functionality included by default when you switch your Help Center to Intercom Articles. 👌

For even more support automation, Intercom’s Resolution Bot can answer common questions when customers start a new conversation, then close the conversation when successful - so it never reaches your team.

Resolution Bot will resolve 33% of your customers’ common questions (on average), create a better customer experience, and save your team hours each week:

Find out more about Resolution Bot in this article.

Intercom’s customer support reports let you dive deep into:

This article explains Intercom’s reports in more detail.

Just export your users as a CSV list from Zendesk, then import the list to Intercom:

Once you do this you can see who your users are and what they do in your product 😄

You can import your help content from Zendesk in just one click. Just visit ‘Articles’ in Intercom, click ‘Import articles’ and enter the URL of your Zendesk Help Center:

When you import your articles from Zendesk, we’ll retain your organizational structure for you. We’ll even flag any content you need to review and give you advice on how to fix it.

Note: If you have multiple languages in your Zendesk Help Center, you'll need to add them in your Intercom Help Center settings, in order for the imported translations to be visible.

After switching to Intercom, you can start training Resolution Bot right away by importing your historic data from Zendesk. Resolution Bot will use your history to recognize and suggest common questions to create answers for.

Finally, to start supporting your customers in the right way, we recommend:

When you switch from Zendesk, you can still stay integrated with your favorite tools like Salesforce, Slack, Facebook and Twitter. These integrations help you support your customers from one platform and resolve their issues faster:

Check out our app store for over 100 other ways to connect Intercom to your existing tech stack.

Yes, you can localize the Messenger to work with multiple languages, resolve conversations automatically in multiple languages and support multiple languages in your Help Center.

Yes, you can install the Messenger on your iOS or Android app so customers can get in touch from your mobile app.

Yes, you can support multiple brands or businesses from a single Inbox, while ensuring the Messenger is a perfect match for each of your different domains. This article explains how to set up multiple brand styles in the Messenger.

If you're not ready to make the full switch to Intercom just yet, you can integrate Intercom with your Zendesk account. This will provide live data on who your users are and what they do in your app. And you can turn any Intercom conversation into a Zendesk ticket.