Import your Zendesk help center into FoxChat in 3 minutes

The 3-step process

1. Open the import tool in your FoxChat dashboard. After signup, your dashboard shows a Knowledge Base panel with an Import button. Click it and select Zendesk from the source list. You will be asked for your Zendesk subdomain — the part before .zendesk.com in your help-centre URL — and nothing else. The import uses Zendesk's public Help Centre API, so no admin token, OAuth dance, or service account is required.
2. Run the import and watch the article count climb. FoxChat pages through every published article in every section of every category in your Zendesk Guide. Most help centres of fewer than five hundred articles complete in under sixty seconds. Larger help centres take a few minutes. Titles, body text, and section structure all transfer with the article. The dashboard shows a live count of imported articles and surfaces any that failed for manual retry.
3. Spot-check the first dozen common answers. Once the import lands, the FoxChat dashboard suggests the dozen most common questions visitors are likely to ask based on your imported content. You scroll through them, watching Foxy answer in plain language with the source article attached. If any answer is wrong or thin, one click opens the underlying KB entry in the editor and you fix it.

The whole sequence is normally complete inside three minutes for a typical small-team help centre. Larger ones with thousands of articles take longer but never require manual intervention beyond the initial subdomain entry.

What gets imported

The importer brings across every published article in your Zendesk Guide: titles, body content, section assignments, category structure, and last-updated dates. The internal slug of each article is preserved so any deep links you have built into other content continue to resolve once you redirect them to the FoxChat help paths. Promoted articles in Zendesk become high-priority entries in the FoxChat retrieval index, surfacing earlier in answer generation.

Article media transfers in two passes. Embedded images and inline screenshots are referenced by their original Zendesk-hosted URLs at import time, which keeps the import fast. The optional follow-up sync mirrors media to FoxChat's own storage so your KB has no remaining dependency on your Zendesk instance. The follow-up sync runs from a button in the dashboard and takes a few minutes for typical libraries.

Article-author metadata, view counts, and vote scores transfer as informational metadata but do not influence retrieval. Foxy ranks by semantic relevance plus full-text overlap, not by historical view popularity, because historical views often reflect which articles were findable rather than which articles were correct. The metadata is visible in the FoxChat editor in case you want to audit by it.

What does not get imported

Things that do not transfer are mostly things that have no FoxChat equivalent. Ticket workflow rules, agent groups, Macros, SLA policies, and trigger-based automations all live in Zendesk Support, not Zendesk Guide, so they were never in scope for an import. Internal-only Help Centre articles (those gated behind login) can be brought in manually but the auto-importer reads the public surface only by default.

Visitor feedback like article votes and comments do not transfer as live interactions — they come across as metadata, not as a working comment thread. If you depended on Zendesk article comments for an inbound feedback channel, FoxChat's closed-loop unanswered queue plus the inbox notes are the FoxChat equivalent, but the data model is different and the old comment history stays on the Zendesk side.

What changes after import

The most noticeable change is that your help content is suddenly findable in the way visitors actually search for it. Zendesk Guide search is a keyword match against article titles and tags. FoxChat retrieval is semantic, which means a visitor who types "can I cancel and get my money back?" finds your refund-policy article even though the article is titled "Refunds and account closures". The same content, queried with the same words, surfaces correctly in FoxChat where it missed in Guide. Most teams notice this within the first day.

The second change is the closed loop. When Foxy could not answer a question, the question lands in an unanswered queue in your inbox. You answer it once, in plain prose, and the answer becomes a new KB entry on save. In Zendesk Guide the equivalent workflow runs through a knowledge-base manager role and a publishing step; in FoxChat the same loop closes inside the operator chair, in fifteen minutes a week.

The third change is operational. Your Zendesk Guide can stay live as a public help centre that humans browse, or it can be retired in favour of FoxChat answers inside the chat widget. Both modes are common. Many teams keep Guide for SEO surface and let FoxChat handle the in-product answering.

Common questions