--- title: How Decantalo Integrated 3M+ Records from an Acquired Brand's Zendesk into Freshdesk in Under Two Months slug: decantalo-zendesk-to-freshdesk-case-study date: 2026-06-26 author: Raaj categories: [Case Studies] excerpt: "After acquiring Bodeboca from Pernod Ricard, Decantalo consolidated 548,787 Zendesk tickets and 2.2M+ comments into their existing Freshdesk instance with ClonePartner. Shared contacts, automation safeguards, and a customer-supplied exclusion list made this an M&A integration, not a standard migration." canonical: https://clonepartner.com/blog/decantalo-zendesk-to-freshdesk-case-study/ --- # How Decantalo Integrated 3M+ Records from an Acquired Brand's Zendesk into Freshdesk in Under Two Months ## TL;DR **Customer:** Decantalo (Europe's largest online wine retail group, Barcelona, Spain. Part of Melchior Wine & More alongside Bodeboca and Le Petit Ballon.) **The Move:** Zendesk (Bodeboca) to Freshdesk (Decantalo's existing instance) **The Scope:** 3,028,683 total records: 548,787 tickets, 2,272,963 comments/replies, 206,735 contacts, 118 macros, and ~70 groups/custom fields/statuses. Spanning ~10 years of Bodeboca's support history (2015 to 2025). **The Roadblock:** Post-acquisition systems consolidation at massive scale. Shared contacts between two brands that could not be overwritten. Freshdesk automation rules that would reopen every imported closed ticket and send notifications to hundreds of thousands of customers. **The Outcome:** Full Bodeboca support history consolidated into Decantalo's Freshdesk. Go-live on open tickets completed on schedule. Both brands' data cleanly separated by tags, ticket types, and product fields within a single workspace. --- ## By the Numbers - **Total records migrated:** 3,028,683 - **Tickets:** 548,787 - **Ticket comments/replies:** 2,272,963 - **Contacts:** 206,735 - **Macros:** 118 (migrated with "BB-" prefix) - **Groups, custom fields, and statuses:** ~70 - **Data span:** ~10 years (2015 to 2025), with tickets from 2020 onward pushed - **Time from first call to go-live:** ~8 weeks --- ## The Challenge: An Acquisition That Needed One Support Inbox, Not Two In September 2025, Barcelona-based Decantalo acquired Bodeboca from Pernod Ricard, creating what the group describes as the largest online wine retail operation in Europe. Both brands are now part of Melchior Wine & More alongside French platform Le Petit Ballon, with a combined projected revenue of over EUR 50 million. Decantalo sells internationally across 38+ countries. Bodeboca is the leading wine e-commerce platform in Spain, with over two million registered users. With the acquisition came a systems problem. Bodeboca's support team had been running on Zendesk. Decantalo was already on Freshdesk. Maintaining two separate helpdesks would have split customer context across systems and doubled the management overhead for Laura Sax, Decantalo's Customer Care Manager, as she worked to unify operations. The decision was to consolidate Bodeboca's full Zendesk history into Decantalo's existing Freshdesk instance. But consolidation at this scale carried risks that a standard migration does not: - **Shared contacts.** Decantalo and Bodeboca had overlapping customer bases. Customers who bought from both brands shared the same email address. Importing Bodeboca's contacts could overwrite custom field data that Decantalo's team was already using. - **Automation triggers.** Decantalo's Freshdesk had active rules, including one that reopened tickets whenever an internal note was added. Importing 548,787 closed tickets with historical internal notes would trigger those rules, potentially reopening every single imported ticket and sending notifications to hundreds of thousands of customers. - **Scale.** With 2.2 million comments and replies across half a million tickets, the migration would push Freshdesk's API rate limits and required careful pacing to avoid dropped webhooks or failed imports. > *"We are already using Freshdesk and are now planning to integrate one of our partner companies into our account. We currently have about 1,000,000 contacts and around 550,000 tickets to be imported."* > > Laura Sax, Customer Care Manager, Decantalo --- ## The ClonePartner Solution: Staged Migration with Automation Safeguards ClonePartner structured the project in phases: a migration checklist to capture Decantalo's preferences, a sample migration for validation, iterative fixes, then a full production run with a timed delta migration for go-live. - **Migration checklist and sample run.** Within days of the kickoff call, ClonePartner generated a detailed checklist covering agent mapping, group-to-group assignments, status mapping, custom fields, and tag strategy. A sample batch of tickets was then migrated into Freshdesk so Laura's team could verify exactly how Bodeboca data would appear alongside their existing Decantalo tickets. - **Automation safeguard via tagging.** The sample run revealed the critical issue: Decantalo's existing Freshdesk rules reopened every imported closed ticket the moment internal notes arrived. ClonePartner's solution was to tag all imported tickets with "Zendesk," then guide Decantalo's team to add a simple condition to each automation rule: "Tag contains none of Zendesk." This kept every rule working as before on live tickets while ignoring all imported history. - **Shared contact handling.** For contacts that existed in both Bodeboca's Zendesk and Decantalo's Freshdesk (same email address), ClonePartner added logic to prevent overwriting existing custom fields. Bodeboca's custom fields were added alongside Decantalo's without disturbing existing data. A "Product" field was set to "Bodeboca" on imported tickets, and a "BB" ticket type was created to keep both brands' data filterable from day one. - **Notification lockdown.** Before each migration batch, Freshdesk's customer-facing email notifications were disabled to prevent imported tickets from triggering outbound messages. Notifications were re-enabled after each batch completed. - **Batched, rate-limit-aware execution.** The migration ran in parallel workers at approximately 240 tickets per cycle with paced pauses, designed to be cursor-resumable so it could stop and restart without losing progress. When Freshdesk flagged an API rate limit warning and dropped a webhook, ClonePartner confirmed the migration script was unaffected and continued without interruption. - **Customer-supplied exclusion list.** Laura's team provided a CSV of tickets that should not be imported. Those tickets were filtered out before any data was pulled, ensuring a clean destination workspace. - **Macros with prefix.** All 118 Bodeboca macros were migrated into Freshdesk under a dedicated "Bodeboca" folder with a "BB-" prefix, keeping them organized and separate from Decantalo's existing macro library. --- ## The Results: One Workspace, Two Brands, Zero Downtime The migration ran from late October through early November 2025. Ticket shells were migrated first (190K within the first few days, 287K by day four, all 548K by day six), followed by individual messages and comments over the next week. A timed delta migration at 9:45 AM CET on November 6 captured the final batch of open and recently updated tickets, and Laura's team began managing Bodeboca's open tickets directly in Freshdesk immediately after. The historical message migration, covering 2.2 million comments, completed on November 12. At no point did the migration interrupt Decantalo's live support operations. Laura's team continued handling their existing Freshdesk tickets throughout the entire process. Post-migration, ClonePartner ran an additional bulk update to assign historical tickets to the correct Freshdesk groups based on their original inbound email address, giving Decantalo's team clean group-level reporting across the combined dataset. > *"I understand this will not affect us and we can work while the migration is run? If so, please go ahead starting from the older tickets."* > > Laura Sax, Customer Care Manager, Decantalo --- ## What Made This Migration Different For teams planning a similar post-acquisition consolidation, three details from this project are worth noting: - **Automation rules are a hidden landmine.** The biggest risk was not data loss but automation chaos. Importing half a million closed tickets into a live Freshdesk with active rules would have reopened them all and sent notifications to hundreds of thousands of customers. The "Zendesk" tag solution was simple to implement but critical to identify before the full run. - **Shared contacts require merge logic, not overwrite logic.** In an acquisition, both brands may share customers. A naive import that overwrites existing contact fields would destroy data the acquiring team depends on daily. Additive field handling and product-level tagging preserved both brands' context in a single contact record. - **Exclusion lists prevent clutter.** Not every ticket from the acquired brand is worth importing. A customer-supplied exclusion CSV, applied before the first pull, kept the destination workspace clean and avoided importing data that would only create noise.