Train your AI agent on helpdesk tickets and Intercom articles

Your support team has already answered many of the questions visitors ask. intoCHAT can learn from those answers in two ways:

• Helpdesk tickets: solved and closed tickets from Zendesk or Freshdesk become questions and answers.
• Intercom articles: the published articles of your Intercom Help Center become sources, one per article.

Both cards are on the agent's Knowledge tab, below Knowledge sources. Each import shows as one row with its count, its status and the time of the last sync, with Sync now and Remove.

Helpdesk tickets

Before you start

Ticket import uses the agent's helpdesk connection, the same one that opens helpdesk tickets for hand-offs. If the Helpdesk tickets card says so, connect Zendesk or Freshdesk first in the Setup tab under Helpdesk tickets. Connecting needs the account owner or an admin. Importing only reads tickets: it never changes anything in your helpdesk, and it works whether Open a ticket for each hand-off is on or off.

HubSpot, Gorgias and Help Scout tickets can't be imported: with one of them connected, the card says ticket import isn't available for that helpdesk.

Ticket import is included from the Starter plan. Each agent can hold up to 200 tickets on Starter, 1,000 on Pro and 5,000 on Enterprise. See Plans and limits.

Import tickets

1. Open the agent's Knowledge tab and find the Helpdesk tickets card. It shows which helpdesk is connected and how many tickets your plan allows.
2. Under Tickets solved in the last, choose 30 days, 90 days (the default) or 365 days.
3. Leave Condense long conversations into a clean question and answer with AI on, or switch it off to keep every ticket's own text. See Long conversations.
4. Choose whether to Sync automatically, and how often: Daily or Weekly.
5. Click Preview to see how many solved tickets were found and up to three of them as they will be saved. Nothing is saved yet.
6. Click Import tickets.

The import runs on intoCHAT's servers, so you can close the page. The card shows Importing… and updates by itself. New tickets are trained as they arrive, without pressing Train agent. A large import can take several minutes.

What is imported from a ticket

Only tickets with the status Solved or Closed (in Freshdesk: Resolved or Closed) are read. Each one becomes a source of type Ticket:

• Question: the ticket's subject and the customer's first message.
• Answer: the public replies your team sent after it.

What is left out:

• Internal notes are never imported. In Zendesk, comments that aren't public are skipped. In Freshdesk, private replies and all notes, private or public, are skipped.
• Tickets without a public reply from your team are skipped, and so are tickets your team opened without a message from a customer.
• Quoted emails: the earlier messages an email quotes ("On … wrote:", lines starting with >) are cut off.
• Freshdesk: only the first 10 replies of a ticket are read.

Imported tickets don't appear one by one in the Knowledge sources list. The card shows them as one row, for example Zendesk tickets with "acme.zendesk.com · 412 tickets". Their characters count toward the agent's character limit.

How personal data is removed

Before a ticket is saved, and before anything is sent to the AI, intoCHAT replaces:

These labels and phrases are recognised in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian, for example Bestellnummer, commande, pedido and ordine, or mein Name ist, je m'appelle, me llamo and mi chiamo.

Dates, times, prices and ordinary links to your site are kept. Names elsewhere in a message, street addresses and anything else written in free text aren't detected. Use Preview to see the result before you import.

Long conversations

When a conversation is long (more than about 3,000 characters, or more than three replies from your team) and the condensing option is on, the redacted conversation is sent to OpenAI, which rewrites it as one general question and the answer your team gave. The result is checked for personal data again before it is saved. If the AI finds no reusable answer, or doesn't answer in time, the ticket's own redacted text is saved instead.

Short tickets are never sent to the AI. With the option off, no ticket is.

Keep tickets up to date

With Sync automatically on, intoCHAT checks for tickets solved since the last sync, once a day or once a week. Sync now does the same right away.

• A ticket already imported is read again only if it changed in the helpdesk since then. When its text changed, it is retrained.
• A sync never deletes tickets. To start over, use Remove and import again.
• When the agent reaches your plan's ticket limit, new tickets are no longer added and the card says so. Tickets already imported are still updated. The same happens at the character limit.
• After a downgrade, tickets already imported stay. A plan without ticket import can't import or sync tickets.

If the helpdesk is disconnected, connected to another account or no longer accepts the saved credentials, the sync stops with a message on the card, and the imported tickets stay as they are. To import from another helpdesk account, remove the imported tickets first.

Intercom articles

Connect Intercom

1. In Intercom, open Settings, Integrations, Developer Hub, and create an app for your workspace. Copy its Access token from the app's Authentication page.
2. On the agent's Knowledge tab, find the Intercom articles card and paste the token under Access token.
3. Under Region, choose where your Intercom workspace is hosted: United States (api.intercom.io), Europe (api.eu.intercom.io) or Australia (api.au.intercom.io).
4. Click Connect Intercom.

intoCHAT checks the token with a read that changes nothing in Intercom, then saves it in encrypted form. The card shows the workspace's name, never the token. Connecting and disconnecting is for the account owner and admins, because it hands over a credential. Each agent connects its own Intercom workspace.

If Intercom refuses the token, check that you copied all of it and chose the region your workspace is in.

Import articles

1. Click Load collections and preview. The card lists your Help Center's collections and shows the published articles on the first page.
2. Under Collection, keep All published articles or choose one collection.
3. Choose whether to Sync automatically, and how often.
4. Click Import articles.

Each published article becomes a source of type Intercom, named after the article's title, with its Help Center address. Its text is read from the article's HTML: headings, paragraphs and lists are kept, images give only their alt text, and scripts and styles are dropped. Draft articles are never imported.

Intercom articles appear in the Knowledge sources list like other sources, and the card shows how many there are. Up to 2,500 articles are read per import or sync.

Keep articles up to date

Each sync reads the articles again:

• new published articles are added;
• articles changed since the last sync are updated and retrained;
• articles that were unpublished, deleted or moved out of the chosen collection are removed from the knowledge.

Syncs run daily or weekly with Sync automatically on, or when you click Sync now.

Remove or disconnect

• Remove deletes all imported articles from the agent's knowledge. Intercom stays connected, so you can import again, for example with another collection.
• Disconnect deletes the saved token. Articles already imported stay in the knowledge as they are now, but are no longer synced. Delete them in the Knowledge sources list, or use Remove before disconnecting.

How the agent uses these sources

Intercom articles are trusted like your own documents, the same as files and Notion pages. Tickets are past answers to one customer, so they rank below your website when sources disagree. See How answers work.

Ticket sources have no address, so they are never shown as source links under a reply. Intercom articles aren't shown as source links either; only website pages are.

Who can do what

Starting an import, connecting and disconnecting Intercom, and removing an import are recorded in the audit log.

Things to know

• Removing an import deletes its sources at once. It can't be undone; import again to get them back.
• Deleting a single Intercom article in the Knowledge sources list removes it until the next sync, which adds it back while it is still published. To leave articles out for good, import one collection only, or unpublish them in Intercom.
• A duplicated agent gets the imported tickets and articles as ordinary sources, without the import or the Intercom connection. Tickets then appear one by one in its source list.
• When an agent is transferred, the Intercom connection is removed and the articles stay. A ticket import stops syncing until the recipient connects the same helpdesk.
• Automatic syncs run once a day at most on our current hosting.

Next steps

• Open tickets for hand-offs too: Helpdesk tickets.
• Write the answers that must be worded exactly: Text and Q&A.
• Check what the agent learned: Managing sources.