So, you’ve completed your help desk migration. The heavy lifting is over, the data is in its new home, and you're ready to flip the switch. But hold on. How can you be certain everything works as it should? According to Gartner, a staggering 83% of data migration projects either fail or exceed their budget. The reason is often a neglected final step: a thorough post-migration Quality Assurance (QA) process.
Skipping the QA phase is one of the most disastrous Common Help Desk Migration Mistakes you can make. It’s like building a new house and not checking if the plumbing or electricity works before moving in. The result? Leaks, outages, and a whole lot of frustrated residents. In the world of customer support, this translates to lost tickets, broken workflows, and unhappy customers.
At ClonePartner, we’ve seen it all. We know that a successful help desk migration hinges on meticulous testing. That’s why our engineer-led custom migrations are 50x faster than any other service on the market and come with the highest possible accuracy, zero downtime, and no data loss guarantee.
Ready to ensure your migration is a success? Let's dive into the comprehensive 20-point checklist our experts use to validate every help desk migration.
Need a flawless help desk migration without the QA headache? Book a free consultation with our experts today!
Why Is Post-Migration QA So Important?
The primary intent behind any help desk migration is to improve efficiency, enhance customer experience, and scale support operations. However, without a robust QA plan, you risk the exact opposite. A QA plan shouldn't be an afterthought; it should be developed during the initial planning stage to define what a successful migration looks like.
Here’s what’s at stake:
- Data Integrity: Are all your tickets, contacts, and knowledge base articles where they should be, with all fields and attachments intact?
- Business Continuity: Do your automations, triggers, and integrations still work? Any broken workflow can bring your support to a screeching halt.
- User Adoption: If agents can't find what they need or the new system is buggy, they'll be frustrated and less productive.
- Customer Satisfaction: A flawed migration can lead to lost customer queries, delayed responses, and a damaged reputation.
A thorough QA process is one of the most important Best Practices for a successful migration. It’s your final line of defense against the chaos that a botched migration can cause.
The Ultimate 20-Point Post-Migration QA Checklist
Download the Free Tracker: Before you start, grab our free Post-Migration QA Checklist Spreadsheet to assign tasks, track deadlines, and monitor your progress.
To make this manageable, we've broken down the 20 essential tests into four logical categories.
Category 1: Is Your Data Intact and Accurate?
This is the foundation of your QA process. These tests verify that all your data has made the journey from the old system to the new one, completely and accurately.
- Ticket Data Verification:
- What to check: Randomly select a sample of tickets (from different time periods) and compare them between the old and new systems. Verify ticket IDs, subjects, descriptions, creation dates, status, priority, and custom fields.
- Why it's important: This is your core customer history. Inaccurate or missing ticket data can lead to massive confusion and a loss of context in ongoing customer conversations.
- Contact and Organization Data Audit:
- What to check: Ensure all user and organization records have been migrated. Check for correct names, email addresses, phone numbers, and any associated custom data. Verify that contacts are correctly linked to their respective organizations.
- Why it's important: Your customer data is vital for personalization and relationship management. Incorrect contact information can lead to communication breakdowns.
- Attachment and File Integrity Check:
- What to check: Spot-check tickets to confirm that all attachments (screenshots, logs, documents) are present, accessible, and not corrupted.
- Why it's important: Attachments often contain critical information for resolving issues. Missing files can render a ticket's history useless.
- Knowledge Base Article Validation:
- What to check: Review your knowledge base to ensure all articles, categories, and sections are present. Test formatting, embedded images, and hyperlinks within the articles.
- Why it's important: Your knowledge base is a key self-service tool. Broken links or missing articles will frustrate customers and increase ticket volume.
- Data Relationship Mapping:
- What to check: Verify that the relationships between data entities are intact. For example, check that tickets are correctly associated with the right contacts and agents, and that ticket comments are in the correct chronological order.
- Why it's important: The context of your support data comes from these relationships. A ticket without its history of replies is just a question with no answer.
Category 2: Does Your New System Actually Work?
Once you've confirmed your data is intact, it's time to test if the new help desk works as expected.
- Ticket Creation and Channel Testing:
- What to check: Create test tickets through every channel (email, web portal, social media, API). Ensure they are created correctly in the new system and that all relevant fields are populated.
- Why it's important: This is the entry point for all customer queries. If ticket creation fails, your customers have no way to reach you.
- Agent Roles and Permissions Validation:
- What to check: Log in with different agent profiles (admin, team lead, agent) to ensure permissions and access levels are correctly configured. Can agents only see and do what they're supposed to?
- Why it's important: Incorrect permissions can lead to data security risks or prevent agents from doing their jobs effectively.
- Automation and Workflow Trigger Tests:
- What to check: Test all your business rules, triggers, and automations. Do tickets get routed to the correct group? Are SLAs applied correctly? Do automated email notifications get sent?
- Why it's important: These workflows are the engine of your support team's efficiency. For specific tests, refer to our guide on How to Migrate Automations.
- Integration Functionality Testing:
- What to check: Test all third-party integrations (CRM, bug trackers, communication tools like Slack). Does data flow correctly between the help desk and the integrated apps?
- Why it's important: A broken integration can create data silos and disrupt critical cross-departmental workflows.
- Search and Filtering Functionality:
- What to check: Test the search functionality for tickets, contacts, and knowledge base articles. Use a variety of keywords and filters to ensure the results are accurate and relevant.
- Why it's important: A powerful search is a critical tool for agents to find historical context and for customers to find self-service answers.
- User and Agent History Verification:
- What to check: Ensure that agent and user profiles show the correct historical activity. This includes ticket assignments, comments, and any other actions taken in the system.
- Why it's important: This is key for performance tracking and understanding the full history of a customer's interactions. For more details, see our blog on How to Migrate Users.
Category 3: Is the New System User-Friendly?
This category focuses on the human element. Is the new system easy and intuitive to use for both your agents and your customers?
- Agent Interface Usability Test:
- What to check: Have a few agents perform their daily tasks in the new system. Can they easily find information, respond to tickets, and use the key features?
- Why it's important: A clunky or confusing interface will slow down your agents and lead to frustration.
- Customer Portal Experience Review:
- What to check: Go through the customer portal from a customer's perspective. Is it easy to submit a ticket, track its status, and browse the knowledge base?
- Why it's important: A poor customer portal experience will lead to more customers picking up the phone or sending emails, increasing your support load.
- Email Notification and Template Check:
- What to check: Review all automated email notifications (e.g., "ticket received," "ticket updated"). Check for correct branding, formatting, and that all the dynamic fields (like ticket ID and customer name) are populating correctly.
- Why it's important: These emails are a direct line of communication with your customers. They need to be clear, professional, and accurate.
- Mobile Responsiveness Testing:
- What to check: Access the customer portal and the agent interface on various mobile devices (phones and tablets) to ensure the layout is responsive and usable.
- Why it's important: Many customers and agents will access the help desk on the go. A poor mobile experience is no longer acceptable.
Category 4: Is the System Fast, Secure, and Insightful?
Finally, you need to ensure the new system is fast, secure, and provides the data you need to make informed decisions.
- System Performance and Load Testing:
- What to check: How does the system perform under load? Test response times for opening tickets, running searches, and generating reports, especially during peak hours.
- Why it's important: A slow, laggy help desk is a productivity killer.
- Security and Compliance Validation:
- What to check: Ensure that all security settings (e.g., password policies, two-factor authentication) are correctly configured. If you're in a regulated industry, verify that the new system meets all compliance requirements (GDPR, HIPAA, etc.).
- Why it's important: A data breach in your help desk could expose sensitive customer information, leading to severe financial and reputational damage.
- Reporting and Analytics Accuracy:
- What to check: Generate a few key reports (e.g., first response time, resolution time, ticket volume) in the new system and compare the data to historical reports from your old system.
- Why it's important: You rely on this data to measure your team's performance and make strategic decisions. It has to be accurate.
- API Endpoint Testing:
- What to check: If you use the help desk's API for any custom integrations or workflows, test the key endpoints to ensure they are responding correctly.
- Why it's important: API failures can silently break your custom-built processes.
- Backup and Restore Test:
- What to check: Before going live, perform a backup of the newly migrated data and, if possible, test the restore process in a sandbox environment.
- Why it's important: This is your safety net. The guide on How to Backup Your Help Desk, explain that this backup is crucial if the QA process reveals critical errors that require a rollback.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the 20-steps I should keep in mind? Here's the list of 20. You can download the free QA spreadsheet here, which includes pre-built dropdowns, deadlines, and assignees for you to track internally.
The ClonePartner Advantage: QA Built-In
Going through this 20-point checklist can be a full-time job, and that's after you've already done the hard work of the migration itself. This is where ClonePartner changes the game.
Our engineer-led custom migration service isn't just about moving data. It's about ensuring a seamless, successful transition from start to finish. Our process includes a rigorous, automated QA phase that covers all these tests and more, providing you with a detailed validation before you go live. With our highest possible accuracy and no data loss guarantee, you can be confident that your new help desk will work perfectly from day one.
Why spend weeks on manual QA when you can have a flawless migration, 50x faster than any other solution, with zero downtime?
The QA process is the final step before going live, and it's the most critical. Don't leave it to chance.
Ready for a help desk migration that's fast, accurate, and completely stress-free? Book a free consultation with ClonePartner today!