Moving customer service platforms is a significant undertaking, but transitioning from Help Scout to Tidio can streamline your support operations.
While Help Scout offers extensive features for managing inboxes and documentation, Tidio focuses on unified communication for live chat, customer contacts, and ticket management.
Successfully making this shift requires careful planning, specifically identifying which assets can be automatically transferred using Tidio’s robust API capabilities and which crucial organizational components must be manually rebuilt.
This guide walks you through the process, ensuring your historical data and operational structure land safely in your new environment.
Define Your Migration Scope
A smooth migration hinges on a clear understanding of what data moves automatically and what requires manual effort. We can divide the required transfers into three categories:
- Migrated via API (Automated Data Transfer):
These are the core data assets that Tidio’s API is designed to handle. Help Scout Customers translate directly into Tidio Contacts. Any associated Customer Properties you track will also be migrated.
Crucially, complex historical data, like Help Scout Conversations, can be reconstructed in Tidio as Tickets by utilizing a specific API workaround to preserve the message threads. - Configured Manually (Pre- or Post-Migration Setup):
Essential organizational elements and specialized content must be manually configured in the Tidio panel.
This includes fundamental entities like Help Scout Users (which become Tidio Operators) and Help Scout Teams (which become Tidio Departments).
Additionally, specialized content like Saved Replies and Tags requires manual entry, as do your comprehensive Knowledge Base (Articles, Categories, and Collections). - Archiving Considerations:
All data assets must be addressed either through API migration or manual setup. The information required for operational configurations, such as Inboxes and Workflows, must also be manually replicated in Tidio.
Prepare Tidio for Data Import
Before initiating the transfer of thousands of contacts and tickets, you must lay the organizational groundwork in your Tidio project. This foundational setup ensures that all imported tickets can be correctly assigned and categorized immediately.
Start with your staff structure. Help Scout Users must be manually created as Operators in Tidio.
Similarly, your Help Scout Teams should be manually defined as Departments in Tidio.
The API allows you to retrieve existing Operators and Departments, but not to create or update them, making manual creation mandatory before any historical ticket assignment can occur.
Finally, if you utilize custom data fields, take time now to define your Contact Properties within the Tidio panel. These property definitions must exist before you attempt to push any corresponding custom data fields into your new contacts.
Migrate Objects
This is where the heavy lifting occurs. By following this sequence, you ensure that primary entities exist before dependent entities are created.
- Customers to Contacts and Contact Properties
Tidio Contacts represent site visitors identified by information like their name, email, or phone number. Help Scout Customers map directly to this model.
You can utilize the Tidio API feature designed for creating a single contact or, for large migrations, leverage the batch creation feature for efficiency. When creating a contact, you must provide at least an email, first name, last name, or phone number.
Once the contacts exist, you must transfer their associated data. Tidio contacts can have default properties and various custom properties.
After ensuring the property definitions are set up in the Tidio panel, you can update individual contacts or multiple contacts in a single request, populating them with the customer property data extracted from Help Scout. - Conversations to Tickets
Help Scout Conversations are migrated as Tidio Tickets, which are designed to record complex interactions that often require multiple communications, including emails and internal messages.
The logical sequence to preserve thread history involves a workaround.
First, you create the main record, initiating the ticket in Tidio as Contact. This establishes the ticket identity.
Next, you populate the conversation history. Since a ticket often involves numerous messages from operators and customers, you must sequentially add each historical message as a reply to that newly created ticket using the feature designed for replying to an existing ticket.
This method allows you to reconstruct the entire thread structure within the Tidio system. You can also update ticket parameters like status or assignment using the update ticket functionality.
Post Migration Configuration
Once your core transactional data (Contacts and Tickets) has successfully landed, the final stage is rebuilding the specialized, human-centric assets that require manual attention.
- Knowledge Base Content:
Your Help Scout Docs contain valuable information structured as Articles, Categories, and Collections.
The Tidio API sources provided do not offer endpoints for managing this content, meaning all Help Scout documentation must be manually transferred and restructured within Tidio’s knowledge base feature. - Saved Replies and Tags:
These efficiency boosters must also be manually rebuilt. Help Scout manages Saved Replies and Tags via its API, but corresponding automated management features are not detailed in the Tidio API sources provided.
Re-entering your saved replies and manually organizing your tagging structure is a necessary post-migration step. - Inboxes and Workflows:
The channel configuration defined by Help Scout Inboxes must be manually replicated within your Tidio project settings.
Similarly, any automated business processes defined as Workflows in Help Scout must be manually recreated in Tidio to ensure your support logic continues to run seamlessly.
Insider Secrets
Having successfully navigated this specific migration, there are subtle operational nuances that can save you considerable effort and headache.
The batch processing capability for contacts is essential for moving large datasets quickly, but exercise extreme caution. Tidio uses an "all or nothing" strategy for batch creation and updates, meaning if even one contact record within a batch of up to 100 contacts is invalid due to formatting or missing requirements, the entire request fails. Thorough pre-migration data validation is your best friend here.
When you are creating new contacts in Tidio, remember that if you attempt to use the creation feature for existing records, it will simply add new contacts. The API does not overwrite data based on matching an email or distinct ID during the creation process, so be mindful of data duplication if you run a partial list twice.
Finally, while managing large amounts of historical data, always keep in mind the finality of deletion. Whether deleting contacts or tickets, these actions are generally irreversible. Ensure your staging environment is complete before touching production data.
Summary
Migrating from Help Scout to Tidio is a structured process that combines the power of automated data transfer with meticulous manual configuration.
By prioritizing the setup of foundational elements like Operators and Departments first, followed by the API transfer of Contacts and Tickets, you establish a robust and functional environment.
Dedicating sufficient time to manually rebuild your Knowledge Base, Saved Replies, and Workflows ensures that your team maintains efficiency and access to all necessary resources in your new Tidio system.
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.