How to migrate from Intercom (now Fin) without losing your help center: a complete checklist

The hard part of leaving Intercom (now Fin) is not the new tool. It's the three things you can't re-create after you cancel: the help center articles your AI answers from, the contacts your team recognizes, and the conversation history somebody will eventually ask about. If you want to migrate from Intercom without losing any of them, the order of operations matters more than the speed.

This is the how-to. If you're still deciding whether to leave, read our guide to the Salesforce and Fin news first; it covers what's confirmed and what to ask your account rep, and we won't repeat it here. What follows is tool-neutral until the Talvo section: what to export, what Intercom's exports do and don't contain, how to map your setup onto a new one, how to run both side by side, and how to roll back if it goes badly. Talvo is the worked example, and we'll be plain about where it can't replace what you have.

Decide the date before you touch anything

Everything hangs on one date: the day your Intercom subscription ends. Find it, find the notice period in your contract, and work backward. Put a named owner on the project, because migrations without one tend to finish at 80%.

A realistic shape for a small team is two weeks of work inside a longer window: export in week one, build and test the new setup in week two, cut over, then keep the old account alive for a fortnight before you cancel. Vendors who sell migration tools quote "20 minutes to a few days" or "hours to days," but those figures are for their own tools moving records, not for your team reviewing articles and rebuilding automations. We found no credible benchmark for average migration time, so don't borrow one. Talvo's own help article says most teams are set up in under an hour, and that's the mechanical import. The review is the real work.

What actually comes out of Intercom

Intercom's exports are uneven. Some things have a button, some need a script, and one important thing has neither. Here's what we could confirm from Intercom's own pages and community as of October 21, 2026.

Two details change your plan. Internal notes are excluded from conversation transcripts, so if your team keeps important context in notes, capture them another way. And the S3 export and the CSV exports are not archives of what people said to each other. If you need the actual text of conversations for legal or reference reasons, the realistic routes are per-conversation downloads, the Export API in 90-day windows, or a paid migration service. One migration vendor advises moving only the last 12 to 24 months and downloading embedded images before the account closes. That's a vendor's opinion, but it's a sensible default.

Move the help center first

Articles come first for two reasons: they're the content your AI will answer from, and they take the longest to review. There are three routes, and you can mix them.

The third route is a paid migration service. Help Desk Migration is one that covers Intercom's Collection, Section and Article structure; a third-party write-up puts its price at about $100 per 1,000 records, which we didn't verify on its site. For a small help center, you probably won't need it.

Whichever route you use, keep an independent archive. Even if the import works, save the API output or a crawl of the public pages. It's your insurance if a translation, a table or an image goes wrong later.

Review before you publish

Imports are a starting point, not a finished knowledge base. Everything Talvo imports arrives as a draft, deliberately: a crawler can't tell today's refund policy from a 2023 post about it. Publish what's still true. Edit what's nearly right, usually by cutting marketing language down to the answer. Delete anything stale. A stale article is worse than a missing one, because an AI will cite it with confidence.

Be harsher than feels comfortable. Five accurate, detailed articles will do more for an AI agent than fifty thin ones. Our guide to writing help articles an AI can answer from has before-and-after examples, and the knowledge base chatbot guide explains why the AI is only as good as this review.

Protect your help center URLs

This is the step almost every checklist skips. If your help center sits on a custom domain such as help.yourcompany.com, it probably points at Intercom with a CNAME record (Intercom's docs name custom.intercom.help as the target). When your subscription ends, those URLs stop working. Articles that rank in search, links in old emails, links in your product and links on other sites all break at once.

Make a spreadsheet of old URL, new URL and traffic, and focus on the pages that get visits or have inbound links. Then plan 301 redirects from the old paths to wherever the content now lives. A redirect needs something to answer at the old address, so you'll have to keep control of that domain and point it at something that can issue redirects before you cancel. That could be your own site or a redirect rule at your DNS or CDN provider.

Talvo's hosted help center doesn't support custom domains, so your articles will live at Talvo's address rather than under your own domain. If your help center URLs matter for search, that's a real cost of switching to any tool without a custom help-center domain, and a good reason to redirect carefully or to host the public version of the articles on your own site.

Contacts and conversation history

Contacts are the easy part. Export them to CSV and keep the columns you'll use: name, email, company and phone. Talvo's importer reads those four columns, matches on email, updates people who already exist, and ignores any other columns rather than rejecting the file. Rows without an email can't be matched and will create new contacts every time you import, so if your export has gaps, fix them first.

Tags and custom attributes need a separate step. Talvo's CSV import doesn't read them. Custom attributes come in through the REST API as part of Talvo's customer data platform (Growth plan and up), and tags you'll recreate or apply as you go.

Conversation history is where Talvo is clearest and where it's weakest: Talvo does not import past conversations. New history starts on the day you switch, and Intercom keeps the old one while you're a customer. Decide now what you need from the archive. For most small teams the answer is a folder of exported records for the last year or two, plus the customers' contact records, so nobody asks "what did we tell them last March" and finds a void.

Map what you have to what you'll have

Before you rebuild anything, list what you actually use. Write down what your team uses every week, not what the plan includes.

The last two rows decide a lot. If you rely on any channel Talvo doesn't have, don't migrate that traffic. Hold the channel in your old tool or choose a destination that covers it.

Stop here if you depend on any of these

Say you need WhatsApp, SMS or phone, product tours or checklists, a SOC 2 report, SAML single sign-on, a choice of data region or HIPAA support. Talvo has none of them today. WhatsApp, SMS and Instagram/Messenger are on the public roadmap, not shipped. Its integrations are a REST API, webhooks and Slack. It launched this year and is still in beta, so there are no G2 or Capterra reviews to check.

Fin is also a mature product. Fin's homepage reports a 76% average resolution rate across its customers; that's a vendor-reported figure and a definition worth checking, but it reflects years of production use that Talvo doesn't have. For a feature-by-feature view, read Talvo vs Intercom, and for other destinations, see cheaper Intercom alternatives.

Run both side by side before you cut over

Switching is a decision you should be able to undo, so test on real questions before customers see anything. Two cheap tests work in any tool.

First, replay the last 50 real customer questions through the new tool's AI, and compare them with what your team actually said. You'll find the gaps in your articles in an afternoon. Second, put the new widget on a low-risk slice: one product page group, a secondary site or a staging copy. Don't stack two chat launchers on the same page, because customers will hit both.

On Talvo, the Setup page is built for this. Its steps tick themselves only when they really work (articles exist, a channel has delivered a message, a teammate has joined), and it has a step that lets you ask the AI a test question.

Cut over the channels

The cutover itself is short if you did the rest. In Talvo, importing the help center is the first step, and the rest follow in this order:

1. 1Import and publishPaste your public help center address on the Knowledge page, start the import, then publish the drafts that are still accurate (guide).
2. 2Add the widgetCopy the snippet from Settings, Chat widget and paste it before the closing </body> tag on every page you want chat on (guide).
3. 3Forward your support emailPoint your support address at the forwarding address in Settings, Inbox, Email forwarding. Gmail needs one approval click after you add it (guide).
4. 4Ask the AI a test questionUse Setup to confirm it answers from your articles and cites them.
5. 5Remove the old widgetOnce the widget and email are live on the new tool, take the old tool's snippet off your site.

Do this on a quiet day, not before a launch or a holiday. Tell your team which inbox is the real one on which date, and for the first week keep one person watching both.

Keep a way back

Your rollback plan is simple if you set it up first: don't cancel Intercom on cutover day. Keep it for at least two weeks, on a monthly plan if you can, so you can reverse the change by swapping the snippet back and redirecting email. Write down the old forwarding rule and the old script tag before you touch them. Decide what would trigger a rollback: AI answers wrong enough that you'd be embarrassed, customers writing in and getting no reply, or a channel you didn't realize you used. If none happens in two weeks, cancel, and remember your notice period.

What it costs on each side

For a small team the arithmetic comes down to seats versus workspaces. Intercom bills per seat plus $0.99 for each Fin outcome. Essential lists at $39 per seat on monthly billing ($29 billed annually), Advanced at $99 ($85), Expert at $139 ($132), as shown on Intercom's pricing page on October 21, 2026. Talvo is priced per workspace, with $0.49 for each AI resolution above the plan's allowance. The Talvo column below shows the cheapest plan that fits the team and the volume, on monthly billing.

Those are list prices, and each vendor defines its billed AI unit its own way, so our Intercom pricing breakdown and AI resolution pricing comparison show the definitions side by side.

The short version

Export first, import articles second, review third, redirect fourth. Cut over the channels in one sitting, and keep the old account alive until you're sure. If any step feels rushed, move the cancellation date, not the checklist.