Sell your support tickets to AI: Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk

A support desk holds years of real problems and the answers that solved them. AI companies use that to teach models how a good agent handles a customer, step by step. Three of the companies we list name support tools in what they take.

Export the conversation, not just the list

The value is in the back-and-forth: the customer’s words, each reply and the fix. Most quick exports leave that out, so check what your file contains before you call it done.

Zendesk: switch exports on, then use JSON

• Plans: full data export isn’t available on Team plans. It works on Suite Growth, Professional, Enterprise and Enterprise Plus, and on Support Professional and Enterprise.
• Ask first: the account owner has to contact Zendesk support to turn data exports on.
• Format: the CSV export doesn’t include ticket comments or descriptions, which is the part buyers want. Use JSON. Zendesk recommends it anyway for accounts with more than 200,000 tickets.
• Deadline: Zendesk starts deleting an account’s data 90 days after it’s canceled.

Intercom: export to an S3 bucket

Intercom exports conversations as JSON into an Amazon S3 bucket, with history going back up to two years. Its help page warns that the export doesn’t contain a transcript, so check the message bodies are there before you rely on it.

Intercom deletes a workspace without a subscription once it has been inactive for 180 days, and sends notice 90 days before deletion starts.

Freshdesk: export from account settings

An account administrator exports from Admin, Account, Account Details, Export data. The file is XML, with tickets, solutions, forums and customers.

Freshdesk says that when an account is deleted, all its data is destroyed within 14 days. That’s the shortest clock on this page.

Customers wrote half of it

Tickets are full of customers’ names, emails, phone numbers, order numbers and sometimes payment or health details. Before anyone sees a sample:

• Check your privacy policy. It says what you told customers you’d do with their messages.
• Strip attachments you don’t need. Screenshots and documents often hold more personal data than the text.
• Ask how the company de-identifies, and read a sample after it’s done.