Fra Intercom
til Zendesk
Fra samtalebaseret chat til et system, der også kan håndtere sager, SLA'er og volumen
Chat is not the same as customer service
Intercom is good at what it was built for: quick in-product conversations, proactive messages and a light onboarding experience. Plenty of SaaS companies start there for good reasons.
The trouble starts when support has to handle more than chat. Email at volume, voice, tickets that run for days, escalations, SLAs, shift plans and reporting across it all. That is where a conversation-based model starts to feel thin.
What surprises most teams isn't the technology – it is the mindset. In Intercom everything is a conversation. In Zendesk everything is a ticket with an owner, a status and a history. That difference has to be handled deliberately, or you end up rebuilding Intercom on top of Zendesk.
Why do people leave Intercom?
The reasons we hear most
Pricing follows volume
A model based on seats, contacts and resolutions makes budgeting hard as you grow. Zendesk's agent-based model is easier to plan for over time.
Email and phone are second-class
With significant email or phone support you quickly feel that the platform was built chat-first. Zendesk treats all channels the same.
Managing tickets over time
Tickets waiting on suppliers, third parties or engineering need status, ownership and follow-up – not a conversation left sitting open.
Reporting and management
When support becomes a department rather than a team, management needs response times, backlog, channel mix and CSAT across the board. Explore is built for that.
What can be migrated?
How Intercom objects translate into Zendesk
Conversations with parts
Tickets with comments
The whole thread moves as comments so the context follows the ticket.
Contacts (users and leads)
Users
Custom attributes become user fields. A good moment to bring only what you actually use.
Companies
Organizations
Company data moves across, including domain mapping.
Articles / Help Center
Guide / Help Center
Articles and collections become categories and sections. Redirects matter if your help centre has traffic.
Saved replies and macros
Macros
Moved with a clean-up – most teams use a fraction of them in practice.
Fin AI and workflows
Zendesk AI agents and triggers
The AI flow has to be rebuilt. The upside is that the articles and intents you already learned from carry over.
How a migration works
Five phases where you know exactly what happens when
Mapping
We review your current setup: channels, volume, workflows, integrations and the habits that aren't written down anywhere.
Designing the Zendesk setup
We design fields, forms, groups, SLAs and automations around your processes – not around a standard template.
Test migration
We move a subset of the data first so you can see and approve the result before we touch production.
Full migration and go-live
We run the full move, switch the channels over and are on hand the day you go live.
Training and adjustment
The team is trained before go-live, and we adjust views, macros and rules in the weeks after, once daily use shows what is missing.
What usually causes trouble
What usually surprises teams
Conversations become tickets
Agents have to get used to status, ownership and closing tickets. That is a way-of-working change, not a system change – and it needs training, not just configuration.
The Messenger has to be replaced
Intercom Messenger sits in your site and usually in your app too. The Web Widget and mobile SDK have to be implemented, tested and rolled out in a coordinated way.
Proactive messages and product tours
Outbound, Series and tours are a marketing and product function, not a support function. Decide whether to replace, move or drop them – before you cancel anything.
Custom attributes everywhere
Intercom makes it easy to push everything from the product in as attributes. Bring only what support genuinely uses – otherwise you inherit the mess.
Why migrate with Available?
We have moved customer service departments between systems long enough to know that data is rarely what derails a project. It is the decisions nobody made along the way: who owns the customer, what should we stop doing, what do we do with the 400 macros nobody uses.
So we spend as much time on your processes and your team as on the move itself. A migration is the best opportunity you will get to clean up – and the worst one to waste copying old mess into a new system.
Connecting cables and hearts.
Frequently asked questions
Explore more
Related pages that can take you further
Thinking about moving off Intercom?
We help with both the migration and the change in how the team works – so they are ready from day one.
Contact usSee all migrations to Zendesk