Moving from Zendesk, Freshdesk or Zoho Desk

What comes across

You export a file from your old help desk, we read it. There are ready column presets for the four exports we see most, so you are not matching 40 columns by hand.

• Tickets, with their historyFrom a CSV or JSON file, with column presets for Zendesk, Freshdesk, Help Scout and Zammad. Any other export: match the columns yourself, once.
• Customers and companiesUpload a CSV, match the columns, see the first rows, then choose whether to skip, update or re-add anyone already here
• Help articlesFrom a Zendesk export zip, a Freshdesk CSV, a Help Scout zip, an HTML zip or a CSV. This is your knowledge base, brought over as files.
• Years of old emailFrom IMAP, Gmail, Microsoft 365 or an mbox file, brought in as already-closed tickets, with a limit on how far back and how many messages
• Your saved repliesFrom a CSV. Your automatic rules can also be moved as a library file between workspaces.
• Your bounce listThe addresses that keep failing, from pasted text or a CSV, so you do not start by mailing dead addresses
• Anything else you keep in a spreadsheetDefine your own record type with your own fields, then load the rows from a CSV

Run it as a practice first. Nothing is saved.

Every import here has a practice run. It reads your file, works out what would happen, and writes nothing at all. You look at the result, fix your file, and run it again.

• A practice run on the ticket importIt saves nothing. You see what it found before a single ticket is created.
• A practice report on the help articlesProduced before anything is written
• A preview on the customer importThe first rows, shown against your column matching, before you commit
• A list of the problems, as a fileDownload the rows that would fail, with the reason for each. Fix them in a spreadsheet and run it again.
• As many practice runs as you wantA practice run changes nothing either way, so there is no cost to being careful

Your customers hear nothing while it runs

This is the part that goes wrong elsewhere. Load three years of tickets into a live help desk and everything fires at once: reply clocks start, chasers go out, and customers get email about problems you solved in 2023.

• A quiet mode on the importWhile it runs, no email is sent and no automatic rules run. You switch it on when you start the import.
• Old email arrives already closedNo automatic replies go out, and no reply-time clocks are started on it
• Nothing is deleted at the far endYour old help desk is untouched. You are reading a file you exported, so you can keep the old system running until you are happy.

What does not come across

A migration page that only lists what works is not much use on the day. Here is what we would tell you on the phone.

• Only what is in your export fileWe read the file your old help desk gives you. If it leaves something out, we cannot go and get it.
• We do not promise your attachmentsThe importer matches columns in your export. Nothing in it reaches back into the old system to fetch files.
• Your old rules and reply-time promises do not convertYou set those up here instead. There is a four-step wizard and a ten-step checklist for exactly this, covering your support email, your team, groups, working hours, channels, skills, routing and reply times.
• The reply box is plain text todayNo bold, no inline pictures, no formatting. If your team's replies depend on formatting, this will annoy them. We would rather you heard it from us.
• No "would you recommend us" scoreYou get the happy-or-unhappy rating after a request is closed. A recommendation score is not calculated anywhere.
• Reports do not open the tickets behind a numberClicking a value narrows the report. It does not give you the list of tickets that made it up.
• No app in the phone storesThe team screens work in a phone browser and can be added to the home screen. There is no app in the Apple or Google store.

Why it is worth the move

The practice run is not a one-off kindness for migration day. It is how the whole product is built: before you change something that affects live tickets, you can see what the change would do.

• See who would get a ticket, and whyBefore you change a routing rule, simulate it: the screen names each team member and the reason for each one
• Count who would miss a promiseBefore you save a set of reply and fix times, see how many of your real open tickets would be late, nearly late, or already late, split by how urgent they are
• Test a rule against a real ticket without running itWith a line-by-line trace of what matched and what did not
• Saved replies show what they will do firstA preview of every change the reply would make to the ticket
• Undo a bulk changeClosed or assigned a hundred tickets by mistake? One button.
• See what one person can seePick someone, and the screen shows exactly what the current rules let them reach
• Try a settings change on a copyCopy your set-up, change it, compare the two, then push over only the parts you ticked — and roll a deploy back if you got it wrong
• Preview a deletion ruleBefore a rule that removes old data runs for real, see what it would remove

The rest is ordinary help desk work done properly: all your messages in one list, help articles, reply and fix times with working hours, reports, 470 permissions grouped into roles you name, and 826 settings you can change per account. If you look after support for more than one business, each client gets a separate account.