Successfully Migrating from Zendesk to Intercom: A Guide from VPS
Intercom is a comprehensive platform designed to empower businesses in cultivating and nurturing stronger relationships with their customers throughout every stage of their journey. Intercom offers various products and features and enables businesses to proactively engage with customers, understand their needs, and deliver personalized experiences
If you are currently using Zendesk as your customer support platform, you might be wondering how to switch to Intercom and transfer your existing historical customer data. Migrating from one platform to another can be a complicated and time-consuming process, especially if you have a lot of data and customizations in your Zendesk account.
That’s why we are here to help. We are Vision Point Systems, a Certified Service Partner of Intercom. We have the skills and experience to help you switch from Zendesk to Intercom smoothly and efficiently.
However, before you start the migration process, there are some things you need to think about and prepare for. Migrating from Zendesk to Intercom requires careful planning and analysis of your current and future needs. Here are some of the main things you need to think about before transferring over:
- What migration tools exist without a need for developers?
Migrating your Zendesk help content to Intercom Articles is a simple and fast process that does not require any custom development. You can use the Intercom Articles feature to automatically import all of your published articles from Zendesk and organize them into collections that match your existing knowledge base structure. Just browse to Articles within your Intercom dashboard, and click “Migrate from Zendesk”. Your Zendesk articles will be converted into Intercom articles. There will be no sync between Zendesk and Intercom, so changes in Zendesk won’t be reflected in Intercom.
- What data do you want to keep and how do you want to structure it?
If you want to keep a historical record of customer incidents, including associated data like accounts, contacts and communication records, you need to create a data mapping between your data in Zendesk and the Intercom data structure. Data consists of objects and fields. Objects are the entities that store your data, such as tickets, users, companies, etc. Fields are the attributes that describe each object, such as name, email, status, etc.
Intercom has different objects and fields than Zendesk, so you need to decide which Zendesk fields will map which Intercom fields, and which ones will be ignored or transformed.
Some objects are easier to transfer than others, depending on how similar they are between Zendesk and Intercom. For example, transferring companies is relatively easy, as both platforms have a similar concept of a company object with similar fields. However, transferring tickets is more difficult. Tickets have dependencies on other objects and chronological items like ticket comments that need to be preserved during the transfer.
- Do you have developers to write scripts to transfer your data?
Every Zendesk installation is set up differently to match each organization’s own process for managing companies, contacts, tickets and related data. So there is no simple “one click” solution for moving this data.
To transfer your data from Zendesk to Intercom, a script will need to be created by an API developer to use the Zendesk and Intercom APIs to fetch and transfer the data. The script will need to align with the data mapping document and account for system rate limits. The script will also need to be monitored and adjusted as needed during the transfer process.
- How much data do you have and how long will it take to transfer it?
The amount of data you have for each object in Zendesk will affect the duration of the transfer process. The more data you have, the longer it will take to transfer it from Zendesk to Intercom. This is because Zendesk has rate limits on how many records can be accessed or transferred per minute or hour. The rate limits also depend on what type of licensing plan you have with Zendesk. For example, an Enterprise plan will allow you to transfer your data at a faster rate than a Professional plan.
Depending on the complexity of the script and the amount of your data, the transfer process can take anywhere from a few hours to several weeks. You should be prepared for this process to take an extended period of time. We recommend running a small batch of records (say 5%), and using that to project time to completion. The time this ultimately takes is heavily dependent on the rate limits of the platforms, and cannot be overridden by developers.
These are just some of the factors that can affect the migration process from Zendesk to Intercom. There may be other aspects that are specific to your business or industry that need to be considered as well.
That’s why we recommend that you schedule an introduction with our Intercom specialists today to learn more about how we can help you switch from Zendesk to Intercom successfully.
Don’t let the migrating process overwhelm you or stop you from moving to Intercom. Let us handle the technical details and guide you through the transition with ease and confidence.
Contact us today and get ready for a smooth switch from Zendesk to Intercom.
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