Keep your Zendesk Guide articles in sync with your Intercom Help Center and use them to power Intercom Support tools in the Messenger, Bots and Inbox for improved self-serve performance and team efficiency.
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 live in your Intercom Help Center.
Only one Zendesk Help Center can be synced at a time. If you want to change the Help Center that you’re syncing, remove the current sync and then resync using the new Zendesk domain.
We prevent search engine indexing on the your Intercom Help Center if they have set up a regular sync with Zendesk. Our assumption is that the you will be using Zendesk as their primary search engine indexed Help Center.
Get started
You can start a sync from Articles Settings (Settings > General > Integration) by clicking “Sync with Zendesk”:
Now enter your Zendesk subdomain and click “Sync”.
Important:
If you already have articles published in Intercom, we’ll keep these existing articles and you may end up with duplicated content. You can choose to delete all Intercom articles before starting the first sync.
You’ll also need to update any bots containing Intercom articles with the new synced articles to ensure they’re linking to the right content and kept up-to-date with changes you make in Zendesk.
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 be redirected to the Articles list where you can find your Zendesk articles under “Other source”:
Note:
You’ll receive an email to your registered Intercom email address after the first sync is complete, which confirms how many articles were synchronized.
Following 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). Custom HTML, CSS, or JavaScript-based video embeds are not supported.
Using synced articles in Intercom Support tools
After syncing your Zendesk articles with Intercom, you can use them to power the following Intercom Support tools (if they’re included in your plan):
Browsing articles
Searching for articles
Article suggestions (Messenger Home)
AI answers
Article suggestions
AI answers
Search and send articles in conversations
Read-only capability
Using synced articles via the Public API
Synced articles and their content will be retrievable from the Public API similar to Intercom articles. However, you won’t be able to edit or manipulate synced articles via API calls.
Affected API endpoints:
Unaffected API endpoints:
Remove the sync
If you’d like to remove the sync with Zendesk (and related data), you can do this from Articles Settings.
Scroll down and open the Regular sync with Zendesk section, then click “Remove sync”:
You’ll see a green confirmation banner indicating the removal has been successful and synced articles will be deleted from your Articles list.
Reporting
Find reporting for all articles (including synced articles) in the Articles report.
Note: 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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