Switching from Intercom to Help Scout is a significant step for any support team.
You are moving from a platform focused on customer engagement and messenger-style interactions to a platform, which excels at shared inbox management and structured support.
While Intercom and Help Scout share many similarities, their underlying data structures differ in ways that require careful attention during a migration.
This guide walks you through the steps to ensure your customer history, knowledge base, and team data are safely migrated to your new helpdesk.
Define your migration scope
The first step is identifying exactly what fits into the migration pipeline. Based on the API capabilities of both platforms, your migration will fall into three distinct buckets.
- Migrated via API: The vast majority of your data can be moved programmatically.
This includes your Knowledge Base, which consists of Articles and Collections. It also covers your core customer data, specifically Companies, Contacts, and Visitors.
Finally, your communication history. Conversations, Messages, Notes, and Tickets, along with their associated Tags and Data Attributes, are all eligible for API migration. - Configured Manually: Not everything has a direct API equivalent for creation.
Your team members, referred to as Admins or Teammates in Intercom, must be set up manually in Help Scout.
Additionally, Intercom Segments cannot be migrated directly via API and will need to be rebuilt using Help Scout's workflow or search features. - Archived: While not explicitly detailed in the API mapping, it is generally best practice to assess if very old inactive data needs to be moved.
However, strictly speaking, the API allows for the transfer of the objects listed above regardless of age, provided the data integrity is maintained.
Prepare for data import
Before you move a single byte of customer data, you must configure the destination environment. The most critical task involves your team members.
Intercom associates actions with specific Admins. Help Scout has a similar concept called Users. However, the Help Scout API does not support a "Create User" endpoint. This means you must manually create a user account in Help Scout for every agent who has a history in Intercom.
If you skip this step, you will be unable to assign migrated conversations to the correct agent, losing the historical context of who said what. Create these accounts first so their unique IDs are available when you begin importing conversations.
Migrate objects
This is the core of the operation. To maintain data integrity, you must follow a specific logical sequence. You cannot import a conversation for a customer who does not exist, and you cannot add an article to a category that has not been created.
- The Knowledge Base: Start with your self-service content. Intercom organizes this into Collections and Sections.
You should map these to Help Scout’s Sites, Collections, and Categories using the Docs API.
Once the structure is built, you can migrate your Articles into their respective collections. - People and Companies: Next, you need to establish the entities you support.
Begin by migrating Intercom Companies to Help Scout Organizations. Once the organizations are established, migrate your Contacts and Visitors.
These will become Customers in Help Scout. It is vital to link these Customers to their corresponding Organization ID during creation to maintain the relationship.
During this step, you should also map your Intercom Data Attributes to Help Scout Custom Fields to ensure you don't lose key customer details. - Conversations and Tickets: With your users and customers in place, you can move the communication history. Intercom distinguishes between Conversations and Tickets, but Help Scout treats everything as a Conversation.
- Conversations: Migrate these directly using the Create Conversation functionality.
- Tickets: Since Help Scout does not have a separate Ticket object, you must migrate these as Conversations. The best approach is to apply a specific Tag (like "Ticket") or a Custom Field to these entries so you can easily identify them later.
- Conversations: Migrate these directly using the Create Conversation functionality.
- Message History and Notes: A conversation is empty without its content.
For every conversation created, you must populate the history. Intercom Messages (the actual back-and-forth) should be migrated as Threads within the Help Scout conversation. You can differentiate these as replies or chat threads.
Similarly, Intercom Notes (internal comments) map perfectly to Help Scout Notes, allowing you to preserve private team context. - Tags: Finally, ensure that Tags from Intercom are applied to the newly created conversations and customers in Help Scout.
This preserves your categorization and helps with organization post-migration.
Post Migration Configuration
Once the data transfer is complete, you need to rebuild the logic that powers your support operations. The primary focus here is Segments.
Intercom uses Segments to group people based on criteria. Help Scout does not have a direct "Create Segment" API endpoint.
To replicate this, you will need to manually set up Workflows or "Saved Searches" in Help Scout. You can configure these workflows to tag customers or conversations automatically based on the data you just imported, effectively recreating the logic you had in Intercom.
Insider Secrets
Having mapped these objects out, there are a few technical nuances that can make or break your migration experience.
Respect the Speed Limit: The Help Scout Docs API has strict rate limiting that varies by your account setup. If you write a migration script that blasts the API as fast as possible, you will hit a 429 error code very quickly. Build a pause or "sleep" function into your script to respect these windows.
The Correlation ID: If things go wrong, and in complex migrations, they sometimes do. The API provides a Correlation-Id in the header of every response. If you receive an error and need to contact Help Scout support, having this specific ID allows their developers to trace the exact interaction. Log these IDs in your migration database so you have a trail if a specific batch fails.
Order is Everything: You might be tempted to run imports in parallel to save time. Do not do this. If you try to create a conversation before the customer exists, or attach a thread to a conversation that hasn't finished creating, the API will reject it. Stick rigidly to the order.
Quick Recap
Migrating from Intercom to Help Scout is a structured process of moving data from one container to another.
By understanding that Intercom's Tickets become Help Scout Conversations and that Users must be created manually before you begin, you avoid the most common pitfalls.
Follow the sequence, respect the API limits, and you will find your data ready and waiting for you in your new help desk.
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 migration is assigned a dedicated engineer who understands the nuances of both APIs and ensures zero downtime.