Mike HeapMike is an experienced Product Manager who focuses on all the “non-development” areas of My AskAI, from finance and customer success to product design, copywriting, testing and more.
Table of Contents
- What do you need before you start?
- How to set up your Intercom help center, step by step
- Step 1: Turn on your help center and decide how many you need
- Step 2: Build collections around the questions customers actually ask
- Step 3: Put an article in every collection
- Step 4: Decide who can see each article
- Step 5: Add the languages your customers write in
- Step 6: Connect your Intercom knowledge base to the AI that will answer from it
- Step 7: Put the help center inside the Messenger
- Step 8: Give it an owner and check the article reports every month
- How to test it before you let it near customers
- What breaks, and how do you know?
- What should you do next?
- FAQs
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We estimate about a day of setup, plus writing time, for an Intercom help center customers can search and your AI agent can answer from; a custom domain can take up to 72 hours to start working.
Your help center probably grew one article at a time, whenever someone had a spare hour. Some articles are in collections and some float free, two of them disagree about your refund policy, and the same questions still reach the inbox every morning. Then you switch on an AI agent, and it answers from the wrong article or not at all.
Intercom says you can set up a help center "in minutes, with no code required". Several separate settings decide what your AI can see, and Intercom documents them on different pages. Some only work once an earlier one is in place (the Messenger's Help space needs a published article in a collection first). Our guide to AI help center optimization covers how to word each article so an AI finds it.
Before Step 1, check your permissions and your plan, since a few of the steps need a higher Intercom tier.
What do you need before you start?
TL;DR: You need a teammate permission that lets you publish help center articles, a plan that covers the features you want, and a ranked list of the questions customers ask most. The theme and the custom domain can wait, unless some articles must be private.
Steps 1 to 3 all need the publishing permission, so start at the top of this list:
- Permissions - Intercom sets knowledge access per teammate under "Settings > Workspace > Teammates". You need "Can manage and publish Help Center articles"; without it a teammate cannot publish, set the help center live or manage collections, according to Intercom's permissions guide. The draft-only permission lets someone write but not publish (fine for a writer; the person who owns the launch needs the full one).
- Plan tier - every plan on Intercom's pricing page includes a public help center. Private articles and extra languages need Advanced, where the plan lists "Private and multilingual Help Center", and more than one help center needs Expert. You need at least one Full seat to get started.
- Data prep - a ranked list of the ten questions customers ask most. Export last month's conversations, paste them into the AI tool you already use and ask it to group and count them. If you are moving from Zendesk, Intercom imports or syncs your public articles from "Knowledge > Sources", but imported articles are not placed in a collection, so you file them yourself.
- What you can skip - the custom theme, the custom domain and analytics tracking. Intercom's setup guide lists "Set up a custom domain (optional)", and "Import your brand" styles the help center from your website. The exception is private articles, which need the custom domain (Step 4).
The AI tool you use for data prep only knows the conversations you paste, so ask the teammates who answer customers to check its groups before you build anything from them. Paste your export into this prompt, which ranks the questions and also sketches the collection tree for Step 2:
I run customer support and I am setting up our Intercom help center. Below are last month's customer conversations.
1. Group the conversations by the question the customer was asking, in the customer's own words, and count the conversations in each group.
2. Give me the ten most-asked questions as a table with these columns: rank, question, number of conversations, one example conversation.
3. Suggest a collection tree for those ten questions, no more than three levels deep. Name each collection after the thing customers ask about (billing, logins, setup), because customers do not know which team owns what. Put each question in exactly one collection.
4. If a conversation fits no group, or you are unsure where it goes, list it under "Unsure" instead of guessing.
Conversations:
[paste last month's conversations, with customer names and email addresses removed]How to set up your Intercom help center, step by step
TL;DR: Turn the help center on, build collections around real questions, put an article in every collection, decide who sees what, add your languages, switch your content on for the AI, put it in the Messenger, then give it an owner.
Work through these steps in order, from turning on your help center to naming who owns it:
Step | Where you do it | Finished when |
1. Turn on your help center | "Settings > Help Center" | It loads at its address, with your name on it |
2. Build collections | "Settings > Help Center", then New | Your most-asked questions each have a clear collection |
3. Put an article in every collection | Knowledge, then New content and Public article | Every question on your list has a published article in a collection |
4. Decide who can see each article | The article's Details panel | Every article has an audience you set on purpose |
5. Add languages | "Settings > Help Center > Configure & Style" | Your most-asked articles show in each language you turned on |
6. Connect the AI | "Fin AI Agent > Train > Content", or your AI tool's console | The AI reports the article count you expect |
7. Put it in the Messenger | "Settings > Channels > Messenger > Widget > Spaces" | A Messenger search, run as a customer, finds the right article |
8. Give it an owner | "Reports > All reports > Intercom reports" | One named person has the monthly review booked |
Step 1: Turn on your help center and decide how many you need
Start in Intercom: go to "Settings > Help Center" and set it live from the dropdown at the top. Your help center gets a default address on intercom.help with your app name at the end (you can edit that part).
To use a custom address, open "Settings > Help Center > Configure & style", find the Domains section, then ask whoever looks after your website's domain settings to add a CNAME record. Intercom supports both a subdomain of your website and a subpath on it. It warns the record "may take up to 72 hours" to propagate, according to its custom domain guide, so start this one early (old intercom.help links redirect to the new address once it goes through).
Then decide how many help centers you run. I'd default to one, because a second only helps when a second brand has separate customers, and multiple help centers need the Expert plan. Your first help center stays the default, and you can't delete it.
You're done when the help center loads at its address with your name on it; if it returns Not found, no article is published yet, which Step 3 fixes.
Step 2: Build collections around the questions customers actually ask
Still in Intercom, go to "Settings > Help Center" and click New to create a collection. Collections nest up to three levels deep: a collection, a sub-collection inside it and a sub-collection inside that.
Build the tree from the questions on your ranked list. An org chart gives you a tree only your team can find its way around (customers don't know which department owns billing). Intercom's advice on structuring collections agrees: "If you have lots of FAQs, you should organize your articles into collections of questions customers ask."
Here is how we'd lay it out for a software company whose most-asked questions are about logins, billing and setup:
- Account and login
- Reset your password
- Add or remove a teammate
- Billing and plans
- Change your plan
- Download an invoice
- Cancel your subscription
- Getting started
- Install the app
- Connect your first integration
- Troubleshooting
- Sync errors
- Notifications not arriving
An article goes in one collection per help center, and you set audiences article by article. You're done when each of your ten most-asked questions has an obvious collection.
Step 3: Put an article in every collection
In Intercom's Knowledge area, click New content, choose Public article, then pick its collection in the article's Help center section. Empty collections, and collections holding only drafts, stay hidden on the live help center. Customers cannot find an article with no collection either, because help center search only covers articles inside a collection.
Write one article per question on your list, and let AI get the first drafts down. Paste the conversations about one question into your AI tool and ask for an article that answers them. Then edit it against what your team tells customers today (some of last month's replies may be out of date). Our guide to optimizing a knowledge base for AI agents has the writing patterns to apply as you edit each draft.
Before Step 4, open the live help center and find a published article, inside a collection, for every question on your list.
Step 4: Decide who can see each article
Open the article's Details panel, where an article in a collection is public by default. Choose Users in the Help Center Audience section and it disappears for anyone not signed in to your product, or add a rule (plan is Pro, say) to narrow it further. Intercom's audience guide lists the prerequisites, which are a custom domain, cookie forwarding and a login link in your Privacy settings. If you set up the custom domain in Step 1, whoever added its CNAME record is the person to ask about cookie forwarding.
Intercom keeps a Help Center audience (who can read the article) apart from a Fin audience (which customers Fin may use it for), and its Knowledge FAQs say Fin only uses an article when the customer matches both. You build Fin audiences as reusable segments on the Audiences page of the AI & Automation settings, and untargeted content defaults to Everyone.
Audience changes only apply to conversations that start after the change, so test every change in a fresh conversation (reopening an old test chat shows you the old rule).
To update many articles at once, select them in Knowledge and use "Change Help Center audience". You're done when every article has an audience you chose on purpose, and you can name the articles a signed-out visitor never sees.
Step 5: Add the languages your customers write in
Back in help center settings, go to "Settings > Help Center > Configure & Style", open the General tab and select Supported languages, then add each language with a page title. Adding languages needs the Advanced plan or higher and workspace admin access (the same tier as private articles).
Intercom does not translate public articles for you. Visitors in a second language "only see the articles that you have translated", and a collection with an untranslated name drops off the home page. Translate the articles behind your most-asked questions first. If nobody on the team speaks the language well, ask your AI tool for the first pass (a fluent reader should still check it before it goes live).
Fin starts the same way: it will "first search for the answer using content that is available in the language a question was written in", according to Intercom's Fin multilingual guide. Switch on real-time translation at "Fin AI Agent > Fin settings > General > Fin's multilingual support" and, when Fin finds nothing in the customer's language, it translates an answer from your default-language content only.
Test it from the language switcher on the live help center, where the articles for your most-asked questions should appear in every language you turned on.
Step 6: Connect your Intercom knowledge base to the AI that will answer from it
Whichever agent answers, Fin or a third-party tool, decide which content it reads and for which audience, then check what it picked up.
If the agent is Fin, you stay in Intercom. Go to "Fin AI Agent > Train > Content", where each source has a toggle and each article has a Fin toggle in its Details panel (the panel where you set its audience in Step 4). To switch many articles at once, select them in the content list and use "Change AI Agent state". Intercom's Fin content guide warns: "A published article with the toggle off is invisible to Fin."
For public articles, Intercom's content guide sets the rule: "Public articles - must be published, and your Help Center must be set live for them to be enabled for Fin and Copilot. They do not need to be in a collection." If you run more than one help center, Fin searches only the one linked to the conversation's brand. Stop there for now (Guidance, escalation rules and Procedures are tuning for after launch).
If the agent is a third-party tool, the work happens in that tool's console. Connect your Intercom help center as a knowledge source there, then compare the article count it reports with yours. Our guide to adding AI to Intercom without Fin walks through the install.
You're done when the AI's content list shows the number of articles you expect. In Fin, a count indicator shows how much of your content Fin is using.
Step 7: Put the help center inside the Messenger
Back in Intercom, go to "Settings > Channels > Messenger > Widget > Spaces" and turn on the Help space, so customers search your articles before they start a conversation. Intercom's Messenger guide sets one condition: "Before enabling the Help Space, ensure that the Help Center is turned on with at least one published article assigned to a collection."
Spaces are set separately for users and visitors (signed-in customers and anonymous ones), so check both. Customers only see articles their audience allows, so the audiences you set in Step 4 apply here too. To have customers search before they can write in, use "Settings > Channels > Messenger > General > Control Inbound volume".
You're done when a Messenger search, run as a customer, returns the right article.
Step 8: Give it an owner and check the article reports every month
Name one person who owns the help center and put a monthly review in their calendar (without one, the help center drifts back to how it looked before Step 1). Their main tool is the Articles report, under "Reports > All reports > Intercom reports", which shows views, reactions, conversations started from an article, searches with results and searches with no results. It is a legacy report, updated once a day, and Intercom's reports guide confirms you can't export it.
Read the no-results list first, because it "shows you which terms customers searched for most, but didn’t find any results", which makes it next month's writing list.
If you run Fin with the Pro add-on, Recommendations at "Fin AI Agent > Analyze > Recommendations" flags missing, duplicate and contradictory content. Intercom's Recommendations guide has you accept, edit or reject each suggestion before anything goes live. Our roundup of AI tools that spot missing help center content covers the options outside Intercom.
This step is done once the review has an owner and a date.
How to test it before you let it near customers
TL;DR: Ask a question you know is answered, try a hidden article, ask something you never wrote, test a second language and search from the Messenger. Go live once every check passes.
Run these checks before any customer sees an AI answer. Fin users can do most of it in "Fin AI Agent > Test", where Intercom's batch test takes "up to 50 questions per test group" and lets you test as a specific user, lead or audience. Each answer lists the "Content sources Fin pulled from", and the test page is free.
For a single conversation, a preview works too (it stays out of your reporting). If you run a different agent, use the test console that comes with it, and work through these checks as a customer would:
- Known-good question - ask something one of your published articles answers; it passes if the answer comes from that article and the source list shows it.
- Hidden-article check - test as a signed-out visitor and ask something only a Users-only article answers; it passes if nothing from that article appears.
- Gap check - ask something you never wrote an article for; it passes if the agent hands the customer to your team and invents nothing. I don't launch an agent until this one passes, because a confident wrong answer does more harm than a handoff.
- Language check - ask in your second language, which Intercom lets you pick in the preview. You want the answer to come from the translated article.
- Messenger search check - search the Help space as a customer and look for the article itself at the top of the results.
You're ready to go live when each of your ten most-asked questions returns the right article, and nothing internal can be reached from outside.
What breaks, and how do you know?
TL;DR: The most common failure is an article that exists but cannot be reached. Customers need it in a collection, and Fin needs its toggle on and both audiences to match.
When something looks broken, work back from what you or a customer can see, like a missing article or a certificate warning:
Symptom | What is actually happening | Fix |
An article is published but missing from the help center | It is not in a collection | Add it to a collection in the article's Help center section (Intercom) |
A collection is missing from the home page | It is empty or holds only drafts, or its name is untranslated in that language | Put a published article in it, or translate the name |
Customers see the article but Fin never uses it | The Fin toggle is off, the customer fails one of the two audiences, or the article only sits in another brand's help center | Turn the toggle on, align both audiences, add it to the right help center (Intercom) |
An audience change "did nothing" | Changes apply to new conversations only | Test in a new conversation |
Second-language customers see few articles | Only translated articles show in that language | Translate your most-asked articles, or turn on Fin's real-time translation |
The custom domain shows a certificate error | Cloudflare SSL is set to Full (Strict), or the security protocol does not match the CNAME | Use Flexible or Full, and pick the matching HTTPS setup option (Intercom, community thread) |
Edits to a synced article will not save | Synced content is view-only in Intercom | Edit it at the source, and the next sync brings the change across |
What should you do next?
TL;DR: The help center is built. The next job is making sure your AI can read everything your team knows, including what is behind a login and outside the help center.
The help center can't hold the knowledge your team keeps elsewhere, in internal docs and in the answers buried in past conversations. Intercom's AI agent can sync some of it from other tools. A post on r/intercom asks how teams handle that knowledge:
"I’m curious about how teams using Intercom Fin manage company-specific knowledge that goes beyond public help-center content." - u/ponziedd, r/intercom
At My AskAI, our Knowledge feature connects to your Intercom help center, including the articles behind a login, and to Google Drive, Notion, Confluence and SharePoint. Train on Historic Tickets drafts knowledge from your last 5,000 historic tickets by default, for your team to review. We install as an approved app in Intercom. You can run us in Internal Notes mode first, so your team compares our drafts with what you have today before a customer sees one.
If you are staying on Fin, our guide to improving Fin's resolution rate covers what to tune once it is live.
FAQs
How much does an Intercom help center cost?
It depends on your plan and your seats, because Intercom charges per seat and every plan includes a public help center. Private and multilingual help centers start on Advanced, at $85 per seat a month billed annually, and multiple help centers need Expert, at $132 per seat a month billed annually, according to Intercom's pricing page. An AI agent answering from it is priced separately, and our Intercom Fin pricing guide has the full breakdown.
Does Intercom Fin use my help center articles?
Yes, once all of these are true:
- The article is published
- The help center is live
- The article's Fin toggle is on
- The customer matches both its Help Center audience and its Fin audience
Intercom's Knowledge FAQs set out both audiences. Fin can use an article outside every collection (customers browsing the help center need it inside one).
Can I make my Intercom help center private?
You can restrict articles, but the help center as a whole stays public. Set an article's audience to Users and only signed-in customers see it; Intercom's audience guide says that needs a custom domain, cookie forwarding and a login link in your Privacy settings. Private articles need the Advanced plan, and you can also stop search engines indexing your help center from its settings.
Can I undo this if the structure does not work?
Mostly, yes. Check twice before you delete anything, because deletion is the one change you can't reverse:
What you changed | Can you undo it? |
Moved an article to a new collection | |
Removed an article from a collection | Yes, because that unlists it without deleting it |
Switched a Fin toggle or changed an audience | Yes, at any time |
Deleted a collection or an extra help center | No, it is permanent (a deleted collection's articles survive, and your only help center can be set to Not live instead) |
Is Intercom now Fin?
The company is. Eoghan McCabe announced it on the Intercom blog: "We're changing the name of our company to Fin. Intercom will live on as our customer service software platform, but Fin is our future." So the helpdesk, and the help center inside it, still use the Intercom name, and Fin is the AI agent that answers from it.
