Connecting Intercom and Zendesk chat

Intercom and Zendesk connect through OAuth rather than a pasted widget ID. You authorise HelpShelf once, and it handles the connection from there.

Connecting Intercom

1. Go to Integrations in your dashboard.
2. Find Intercom and click Connect.
3. You'll be sent to Intercom to authorise HelpShelf.
4. Choose the workspace you want to connect and approve.
5. You'll land back in HelpShelf with the connection active.

Then go to Contact → Chat, select Intercom as your provider, and save.

Connecting Zendesk

1. Go to Integrations and click Connect on Zendesk.
2. Enter your subdomain — the part before .zendesk.com in your login URL.
3. Authorise HelpShelf in Zendesk.
4. You'll return with the connection active.

Then select Zendesk under Contact → Chat.

Zendesk access tokens expire. HelpShelf refreshes them automatically in the background, so you shouldn't need to reconnect — if you ever see an authorisation error, reconnecting from Integrations resolves it.

What the visitor experiences

Clicking through to chat opens a launcher page that loads the provider's messenger with the visitor's context attached — the page they were on and the question they'd been asking. Your support team sees the conversation in Intercom or Zendesk exactly as they normally would.

Remove the provider's own script

Once connected, remove the Intercom or Zendesk snippet from your site's HTML. HelpShelf loads it on demand, and having both installed shows two launchers.

If your existing snippet passed user attributes, use identify instead.

Disconnecting

Integrations → Disconnect removes the stored credentials. Remember to change your contact method too, or visitors will click chat and reach nothing.

Chat and content import are separate

Connecting Intercom or Zendesk for chat doesn't import their articles, and importing articles doesn't set up chat. They're independent — see Importing from Intercom and Importing from Zendesk.