Creating an Intercom multilingual help center in 2025

Let's be honest, we all prefer getting help in our own language. It's just easier. In fact, over 70% of customers say they're more loyal to brands that offer support in their native tongue. So if you're expanding globally, multilingual support isn't just a nice perk, it's pretty much essential.

If you use Intercom, you've got a starting point for building a multilingual help center. The tools are there. But as many support teams find out the hard way, the built-in process can get complicated and messy, especially as you grow.

In this guide, we'll walk through how to set it all up using Intercom's features. We’ll also get real about the limitations you'll hit and show you how adding a layer of AI can make the whole thing a lot less painful and a lot more effective.

What is an Intercom multilingual help center?

So, what are we actually talking about here? An Intercom multilingual help center isn't just a folder of translated articles. It's a self-service hub where customers from anywhere can get answers in the language that makes sense to them. When it works well, people can solve their own problems, which makes them happy and takes a load off your support team.

The whole point is to make customers in new markets feel seen and understood. If they can find what they need in their own language, they're more likely to stick around.

Getting this done in Intercom involves a few main jobs: setting up the languages you want to support (they have over 45 of them), translating the names of your article collections, and then translating every single article. It’s a decent foundation, but all that manual work can pile up fast.

Setting up your Intercom multilingual help center: The native process

If you’re ready to dive in, Intercom gives you the basic tools to build your multilingual support. It’s a hands-on process, but here’s how you get it done.

Step 1: Add languages

First, you need to tell Intercom which languages you're going to support. Just go into your Help Center settings and pick a default language (this is what people see if their browser language isn't one you offer). Then, you can add others like French, Spanish, or German. This sets up the different language versions of your help center.

Step 2: Translate the help center structure

Next up is translating the architecture of your help center. This means you have to go in and manually type in the translated names for every collection and section. It might seem tedious, but it's important. If a collection is called "Getting Started" and you don't create a French translation for it, French-speaking visitors won't see it on their homepage at all.

Step 3: Add article translations one by one

Here’s where the real grind begins. Intercom doesn’t translate your articles for you. Your team is responsible for getting every single article translated, whether you do it in-house or use a service. Once you have the text, you open an article, click over to the language you want to add, and paste the translated content in. You have to repeat this for every article, for every language.

A screenshot showing the Intercom interface for managing and translating articles in a multilingual help center.

The challenges of the native setup

While Intercom’s tools get the job done for a handful of articles, things start to get messy when you try to scale. The manual approach creates some big headaches that only get worse as you add more content and languages.

Here are the main four problems you'll almost certainly run into.

1. Slow, manual work

The biggest issue is that there are no built-in translation features. As others in the localization space like Prismy have pointed out, you’re stuck in a loop of copy-pasting text, reformatting everything, and re-uploading images for each language. It’s not just slow, it's also really easy to make mistakes that lead to wrong or confusing information.

2. Keeping content updated is a nightmare

The work isn't over once you've translated everything. Every time you update an article in your main language, you have to go back and manually update it in every other language. Intercom won't remind you or sync the changes automatically, so it's incredibly easy for your translated articles to fall out of date. This can lead to customers in different regions getting different answers to the same question, which is never a good look.

3. Your help center is stuck on an island

Intercom's Help Center is pretty isolated. Its search and AI tools are built to pull answers only from the articles you've created right there in Intercom. But what about all the other places your team stores knowledge? Most companies have important info spread across tools like Confluence, Google Docs, or Notion. Unless you plan on duplicating all that content into Intercom (and keeping it all synced), it's completely invisible to your customers.

A diagram illustrating how an AI tool can connect multiple knowledge sources, unlike a siloed Intercom multilingual help center.

4. Inconsistent customer experiences

All these issues add up to a frustrating experience for customers. With a system of static articles, it's an all-or-nothing situation. Either you have a perfect article for their question in their language, or they find nothing and are left stuck. If a customer asks something in Spanish and there’s no specific article for it, they're out of luck. Intercom's own AI Agent can translate answers, but that's an extra feature with its own costs. Without it, you’re basically telling some customers, "Sorry, can't help you."

The better way: An AI-powered approach

Instead of spending all that time on manual translations, there’s a much smarter way to handle multilingual support. By adding an AI layer on top of your helpdesk, you can fix the biggest problems without all the tedious work. An AI agent like eesel AI plugs right into Intercom and can completely change how you handle support.

Here’s what makes it different.

Connect all your knowledge sources

First off, eesel AI breaks down the walls between your knowledge sources. It doesn't just look at your help center articles. You can connect it to Intercom, Confluence, Google Docs, and dozens of other places you store information. The AI learns from all of it, including your past support tickets, to get a full picture of your business. This means you don't need a perfectly translated article for every single question anymore. The AI can just use your English content to generate an accurate answer in any language.

Get real answers, not just article links

This is where things get really interesting. A static knowledge base can only point you to an article. But eesel AI can actually understand a customer's question in their language, find the right information from any of your connected sources, and then write a clear, conversational answer from scratch. This fills all the gaps where a translated article doesn't exist, so customers always get help. It’s the difference between suggesting a recipe and just cooking the meal for them.

Get started in minutes

One of the best parts about eesel AI is how easy it is to set up. You can connect your helpdesk and knowledge sources with a few clicks and be up and running the same day. There are no mandatory sales demos or long setup projects. It even has a simulation mode that lets you test the AI on thousands of your past tickets before you let it talk to real customers. You can see exactly how it will perform and roll it out confidently, starting small and scaling up when you're ready.

Intercom multilingual help center pricing: What does it really cost?

Understanding Intercom's pricing can feel like you're trying to solve a puzzle. To get a fully-featured, AI-powered multilingual help center, you often have to combine a few different products, and the costs can sneak up on you.

Here's a simple breakdown based on their current pricing:

• The Help Center itself: The basic ability to create articles is part of all of Intercom's support plans (Essential, Advanced, and Expert).

• Agent Seats: This is your main cost. You pay per agent, per month, with prices ranging from around $29/month to $132/month if you pay for the year upfront.

• Fin AI Agent: This is the tricky part. If you want Intercom's AI to answer questions, you pay $0.99 for every resolution. This usage-based model means your bill can swing dramatically from one month to the next. In a weird way, you end up paying more for being more efficient and helping more customers.

To make it clearer, here’s a quick summary:

Feature	Plan Requirement	Additional Cost
Multilingual Help Center	Any Support Plan	Included in seat price
Fin AI Agent (for AI answers)	Any Support Plan	$0.99 per resolution
Workflows (for automation)	Advanced Plan or higher	Included in seat price

The eesel AI advantage

By comparison, eesel AI keeps its pricing simple and predictable.

The main difference is this: there are no per-resolution fees. With eesel AI's pricing, you pay a flat fee based on the number of AI interactions you expect to have. That’s it. Your costs are stable and you never get a surprise bill at the end of the month. You aren't penalized for successfully resolving more customer issues.

It’s also a single package. For one price, you get the AI Agent to talk to customers, a Copilot to help your human agents, AI Triage to route tickets, and more. There are no hidden charges or confusing add-ons to worry about. You can even start with a monthly plan and cancel anytime, which gives you a lot more flexibility.

Build a smarter Intercom multilingual help center

Building an Intercom multilingual help center is a key move for any company with global ambitions. Intercom gives you a place to start, but the manual approach is slow, full of potential errors, and just doesn't scale well.

By adding an AI tool like eesel AI, you can skip the manual grind, pull all your company knowledge together, and give your customers a much better experience. And you can do it without ripping out your current setup or signing up for a pricing plan that feels like a roller coaster.

Ready to see how easy multilingual support can be? Connect your knowledge sources and get an AI agent running in minutes with eesel AI.