Appearance
Past conversations and saved replies
How your team has already answered a question is the best guide to how the next answer should read. Connecting a help desk brings its closed conversations and its saved replies into the knowledge base, with nothing more to set up.
What each help desk brings
| Help desk | Past conversations | Saved replies |
|---|---|---|
| Help Scout | Closed conversations | Saved replies |
| Zendesk | Solved and closed tickets | Active macros |
| Intercom | Closed conversations | Macros |
| FreeScout | Closed conversations | Not available: FreeScout offers no way for Overdesk to read them |
Choose how much history to import
The first sync reaches back as far as Conversation history to sync in Settings → Knowledge base says: 90 days, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years or all history. You pick it during onboarding and can change it later, and a change applies to the next full re-sync. If onboarding was skipped and nobody has saved a choice, the first sync reaches back 90 days. After the first sync, each nightly sync picks up the conversations that changed since the last one.
A large inbox arrives in stages. Each sync imports up to 2,000 conversations and carries on where it stopped on the next run, so a long history can take a few days to arrive in full.
The import covers every inbox your help desk connection can see. Allowed inboxes decides where Overdesk may draft, not which conversations go into the knowledge base. See Allowed inboxes.
What Overdesk keeps
For each conversation, Overdesk stores the subject, the messages, the tags and your team's answer. Unsent draft replies sitting in the conversation are left out, so a draft nobody sent never becomes an example for the next one.
Contact details are replaced before anything is stored: email addresses, phone numbers and similar identifiers become placeholders, which you can see in the stored copy. Names written in the text are not replaced. Saved replies go through the same step. How customer data is handled covers the rest.
If you erase a customer's data under Settings → Privacy & Data, later syncs do not import their conversations again. See Erasure and deletion requests.
How drafts use them
A past conversation shows the draft how your team answered something similar, and it appears in a draft's sources as Past conversation. A saved reply is wording your team has already approved, so Overdesk hands one to a draft only when it closely matches the question. It appears as Saved reply.
Sync on demand
Admins can start a conversation sync at any time with Sync conversations on the Knowledge base page, or with Sync now on the help desk's page under Integrations.
Disconnecting a help desk
Disconnecting a help desk removes its stored credentials and everything it put in the knowledge base: its conversations, its saved replies and its help center articles. Connecting again imports them from scratch. See Help desks.