Sync Zendesk knowledge base articles to Airtable with markdown conversion

Who is it for

• Customer service or support teams who want to use their Zendesk articles in other tools.
• Content/Knowledge managers consolidating or migrating knowledge bases.
• Ops/automation specialists who want Markdown versions of articles (could be adapted to Notion, Google Sheets, or any Markdown-friendly system).

How to get started

• Download the template and install it on your instance
• Set Zendesk and Airtable credentials
• Modify the Zendesk base_url and Airtable's table and base
• Run the workflow once manually to get your existing articles
• Finally, modify the Schedule Trigger (by default it runs every 30 days) and activate the workflow

Prerequisites

• Airtable base set up using this template. It includes the fields Title, Content, URL and Article ID.
• Zendesk account with API access (read permissions for help center articles)
• Zendesk API credentials (see instructions below)
• Airtable API credentials (see instructions below)

Getting Your Credentials

Airtable:

1. Sign up or log in to Airtable.
2. Go to your account settings and generate a Personal Access Token (recommended scopes: data.records:read, data.records:write).
3. In n8n, create new Airtable credentials using this token.

Zendesk:

1. Log in to your Zendesk dashboard.
2. Go to Admin Center > Apps and Integrations > Zendesk API.
3. Enable “Token Access,” and create an API token.
4. In n8n, add Zendesk credentials with your Zendesk domain, email, and the API token.

How it works

1. Triggers

• Manual: For first setup, use the Manual Trigger to fetch all existing articles.
• Scheduled: Automatically runs every N days to fetch only new or updated articles since the last run.

2. Fetch Articles from Zendesk

• Calls the Zendesk Help Center API, using pagination to handle large volumes.

3. Extract and Prepare Data

• Splits out each article, then collects fields: id, url, title, and body.
• Converts the article body from HTML to Markdown (for portability and easier reuse).

4. Upsert Into Airtable

• Inserts new articles, or updates existing ones (using Article ID as the unique key).
• Fields stored: Title, Content (Markdown), URL, Article ID.

Airtable Template

• Use this Airtable template as your starting point.
• Make sure the table has columns: Title, Content, URL, Article ID. You can add more depending on your needs.

Example Use Cases

• Migrating Zendesk articles to another knowledge base.
• Building an internal knowledge hub in Airtable or Notion.
• Creating Markdown backups for compliance or versioning.

Service

If you need help implementing the template or modifying it, just reach out 💌