Making the move from Enchant to Zendesk is a significant step toward scaling your support operations. While Enchant provides a streamlined shared inbox experience, Zendesk offers a robust ecosystem for complex workflows and deep analytics.
This guide will walk you through the process of moving your data while ensuring your historical records remain intact and your team hits the ground running.
Define Your Migration Scope
Before you write a single line of code or upload a file, you need to decide exactly what makes the cut. Most of your core data should be migrated via the API to preserve relationships between customers and their conversation history.
This includes your agents (Users), your customers (End-users), their various contact methods (User Identities), and the tickets themselves. You will also want to move over the message history, including attachments and CSAT responses, to maintain a full audit trail.
Some things simply cannot be automated. You will have to configure your business logic manually. This includes your triggers, automations, macros, and views. These are the "brains" of your help desk and often require a fresh look during a migration anyway.
Finally, consider what to archive. If you have ancient tickets from years ago that no longer serve a purpose, it might be better to keep a static export of that data for compliance rather than cluttering your new Zendesk environment.
Prepare Zendesk for Data Import
Preparation is everything. You cannot just start dumping data into Zendesk. You must first rebuild the configurations that act as destinations for your Enchant data.
Start by creating Groups. In Enchant, you organized work through Inboxes, but in Zendesk, Groups serve as the core element of the ticket workflow.
Every Enchant Inbox should have a corresponding Group in Zendesk to ensure tickets are assigned correctly upon arrival.
Next, set up your Custom Fields. Whether it is a specific ticket category or a unique customer attribute in Enchant, you must create these as Ticket Fields or User Fields in Zendesk before the migration begins.
If your data models do not align perfectly, these custom fields will act as the catch-all for any metadata you do not want to lose.
You should also define your Organization structure if you plan to group customers by their email domains.
Migrate Objects
The actual migration follows a strict logical sequence to ensure that relational data remains connected. If you try to migrate a ticket before the user who requested it exists, the process will fail.
- Groups (Mapped from Inboxes): As mentioned, these must exist first. They are the primary containers for your tickets.
- Users (Agents and Admins): Migrate your staff next. A key detail here is that Enchant splits names into first_name and last_name, while Zendesk uses a single name field. You will need to concatenate these two strings during the import process.
- Customers (End-users): Once your agents are settled, bring over your customers. Ensure they are assigned to the correct Organizations if you are using that feature, as this helps in routing historical tickets later.
- User Identities: Customers often have more than one way to reach you. Use this step to add secondary emails, phone numbers, or social media handles to the user profiles you just created.
This ensures that when a customer reaches out from a secondary address, Zendesk recognizes them immediately. - Attachments: Before you migrate messages, you must handle the files. Upload your Enchant attachments to Zendesk first to generate an upload token.
You will need these tokens in the next step to reattach files to the correct comments. - Tickets and Messages (Replies and Notes): This is the heavy lifting.
Create the ticket shell and then import the message history. Remember that Enchant Replies map to Zendesk Public Comments, while Enchant Notes map to Zendesk Internal Notes.
During this process, you will use those attachment tokens to ensure your images and PDFs show up exactly where they belong in the conversation thread. - CSAT Responses: If you have historical satisfaction data, migrate it last. These objects represent the responses submitted to ticket surveys and are linked directly to the completed tickets.
You will need to map Enchant's rating values to Zendesk's answer objects, which can be rating scales, open-ended text, or even skipped answers.
Post Migration Configuration
Once the data is in, it is time to turn the lights on. You must now manually rebuild your workflows.
This means creating Triggers to handle incoming mail and Automations to manage ticket life cycles, such as closing solved tickets after a certain number of days. Recreate your Macros so your agents have their canned responses ready.
You should also set up your Views so agents can see their assigned work clearly. If you are using a Help Center, ensure your Article Labels and Content Tags are organized to help customers find what they need.
Finally, verify your email forwarding so that new inquiries start flowing into Zendesk instead of Enchant.
Insider Secrets
Experienced migrators know that the devil is in the details. One major secret is Token Expiration
When you upload attachments to get a token, that token is only valid for 60 minutes. If your ticket migration script is slow, those tokens might expire before they are associated with a comment, leaving your tickets file-less.
Another tip involves Rate Limiting. Enchant’s API is limited to 100 credits per minute for the entire account.
If you are embedding resources like labels or messages to save time, remember that each embedded resource costs an extra credit. Zendesk also has its own limits, especially for the Tickets and Users endpoints, so you must build robust error handling to catch "Too Many Requests" errors and retry after a delay.
Concatenation is also a potential pitfall. When merging Enchant names into the Zendesk name field, watch out for extra spaces.
Zendesk automatically trims leading and trailing whitespace for Organizations, but being precise with your string formatting for Users will prevent "User Smith" (with two spaces) from appearing in your new database.
Summary
Migrating from Enchant to Zendesk requires careful planning and a clear understanding of how both platforms handle data. By setting up your Groups and Custom Fields first, you create a stable foundation for your Users and Customers.
Following the logical order of migration ensuring identities and attachments are handled before tickets prevents broken links and orphaned records.
Once your workflows are rebuilt and you have navigated the nuances of API tokens and rate limits, your team will have a seamless transition into their new, more powerful support environment.
If you’d rather focus on your revenue instead of wrestling with mapping sheets and pagination loops, ClonePartner can handle the full migration for you. Every project gets a dedicated engineer who understands the nuances of both APIs and ensures zero downtime.