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Migrate your articles from Zendesk
Migrate your articles from Zendesk

How to migrate your content from a Zendesk knowledge base in minutes.

Beth-Ann Sher avatar
Written by Beth-Ann Sher
Updated over a week ago

If you want to make Intercom your single source of truth for creating and updating content, migrating your Zendesk help content into the Intercom Articles product is easy and and requires no code.

Once in Intercom, you'll be able to use this content to power Intercom Support tools in the Messenger, Bots, Inbox, and Help Center for improved self-serve performance and team efficiency.

Important: This will attempt to migrate all of your published help articles from Zendesk. To add specific articles, we recommend copying them individually.


Get started

Go to Intercom Articles and click Get started with articles > Migrate from Zendesk.

Now enter your Zendesk subdomain and click Migrate to Intercom.

Note:

  • You'll need to choose the target Help Center in Intercom if using Multi Help Center.

  • Your Zendesk articles will be converted into Intercom articles.

  • There will be no sync between Zendesk and Intercom, so changes in Zendesk won’t be reflected in Intercom.

  • To import multilingual articles from Zendesk, you will need to add the additional languages in your Help Center settings, in order for the imported translations to be visible.

Now, wait for the migration to complete. During this time we’ll crawl your docs site, import all of your published articles, and place them in collections that match the structure of your existing knowledge base. 

This could take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour or more. We'll send you an email when it's done, so there's no need to wait around 😄 

After the migration has completed, refresh the Articles list to see your new articles and collections.

If you haven't already, you’ll need to start a trial of Articles and turn your Help Center on or your articles won’t go live.

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.


Uncategorized content

If you have any uncategorized content on your site, Articles will automatically create a ‘General' collection for you. Collections help your users browse and easily find what they need, so consider reorganizing these articles by topic before you publish them.


Zendesk articles redirect

Article redirects are automatically generated during the import process. While Zendesk and Intercom article and collection URLs are in different formats, this ensures that any existing links do not break after migration, preserving their SEO score.

The redirects are implemented in the form of permanent redirects (HTTP 301 responses).

Multilingual support

When importing collections and articles in multiple languages, each language variant will have its own redirect associated with the original Zendesk article URL.

Reviewing existing redirects

After the import is complete, you can review the generated redirects through the Domains section in your Help Center Settings.

The panel displays the original URL and the article/collection it redirects to.

Important:

  • The redirects will only be displayed for the chosen custom domain. For instance, if you're importing articles from a Zendesk Help Center at https://support.examply.com, the redirects will appear in the domain section only if you have selected support.examply.com as your custom domain and you're using the HTTPS security protocol.

  • With Multi Help Center, redirects are not connected to a specific Help Center. Instead, they are linked to a domain. This means that redirects will show up on any Help Center that is using the same domain as the one where the Zendesk articles were located.

  • Redirects will be available for all articles that have been imported from Zendesk after September 22, 2022.


Content we don’t support yet

We’ll convert your content into formatting we support (e.g. copying images). However we don’t support the following formatting just yet:

Importing from category/collection URL's also isn't supported. You'll need to import your knowledge base from the main URL.


Articles with unsupported formatting

If there are any issues with importing your content, we'll add a Review label to the article so you can correct it before setting it live. Just open the article you need to review and read the recommendation that we’ve added. The recommendation acts as a placeholder so you’ll need to delete this and insert the content we recommend before you set the article live.


FAQs

My Help Center has articles in 2 languages but I’m only seeing one after the import?

Intercom will import all supported languages, but we will not enable that language for the Help Center. You will have to add the language in their Help Center settings, and after that the translation will be visible.

I have an article localized in EN-US and EN-GB and it imported into two different articles?

Intercom only supports a short list of localized versions of languages: Portuguese / Brazilian Portuguese, German / German (Formal), Chinese Traditional / Simplified.

For all other localised versions, we map it to the closest language supported in Intercom (ex: EN-GB, EN-US, EN-AU all map to EN). In case of a clash, we create a different article for each localized version to avoid data loss.

I have articles in Irish but they were not imported, what happened?

We only import articles in one of the supported languages by the Intercom Messenger.

The email says it imported “X” articles, but I only see “Y” in my Help Center?

The total listed in the email includes all the different languages that the article exists in. An article with translations in English, French and Portuguese will count as 3 articles in the email.


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