When you decide to move your support operations from Intercom to Kustomer, you are choosing a platform built to provide a true 360 degree view of your customer.
This transition allows your team to see every interaction, from historical conversations to custom behavioral events, all within a single timeline.
The process requires a methodical approach to ensure that your data relationships remain intact and that your agents can hit the ground running on day one.
Define your migration scope
Before you begin the technical heavy lifting, you need to categorize your Intercom data into three distinct buckets to determine exactly how each piece will reach its new home.
What should be migrated via the API
The vast majority of your core data is perfect for API migration. This includes your Admins (which become Users in Kustomer), Teams, and Companies.
You should also plan to move Contacts (Users and Leads) into the Customer object. The structural content of your Help Center, such as Collections and Articles, along with their Versions, can be moved programmatically.
Most importantly, your entire interaction history: Conversations, Messages, Notes, Attachments, Tags, Snoozes, and Data Events should be migrated via the API to maintain a complete audit trail.
What has to be configured manually
Some elements are too tied to the specific logic or visual styling of a platform to move via a script. Your Knowledge Base Themes must be rebuilt manually because they involve custom CSS and HTML that is unique to Kustomer's rendering engine.
Similarly, Workflows and automated Series must be reconstructed by hand. While the data inside them is predictable, the conditional branching and logic of Kustomer’s workflow engine require a manual touch to ensure your automations trigger correctly in the new environment.
What has to be archived
Not every piece of data needs to occupy space in your new live environment. You should archive historical Segments that are no longer in use, as these are dynamic filters rather than static data.
You may also find Intercom specific app data or metadata that was only relevant to Intercom's internal features. Archiving this ensures your Kustomer instance remains lean and that your Custom Attributes are populated only with high value information.
Prepare Kustomer for data import
Setting up the infrastructure in Kustomer before the data arrives is the secret to a smooth migration. You cannot import data into fields that do not exist yet.
- Define Custom Attribute Metadata: You must establish the schema for all custom fields for Companies, Customers, and Conversations so the API has a destination for your unique Intercom data points.
- Establish Brands: If you support multiple product lines, create your Brands first to ensure data is partitioned correctly upon arrival.
- Create Business Schedules: Set up your support hours and holiday schedules to ensure that migrated conversation timestamps interact correctly with your reporting.
- Define Klasses for Custom Objects: If you are migrating Intercom Tickets, you must first define the Klass (data model) for these custom objects.
- Set up Teams and Users: Create your organizational structure so that historical conversation owners can be mapped to active Users and Teams.
Migrate objects
Data Mapping
Intercom Object | Kustomer Object |
Admins | Users |
Teams | Teams |
Companies | Companies |
Contacts (Users/Leads) | Customers |
Data Attributes | Custom Attributes |
Collections | KB Categories |
Articles | KB Articles |
Conversations | Conversations |
Messages | Messages |
Notes | Notes |
Attachments | Attachments |
Tags | Tags |
Data Events | Tracking Events |
Snoozes | Snoozes |
Segments | Saved Searches |
Tickets | Custom Objects (KObjects) |
KB Themes | KB Themes |
Workflows/Series | Workflows |
The order in which you move your data is critical. Because Kustomer relies on relational data models, moving objects out of order will result in failed requests or orphaned records. You cannot, for instance, attach a message to a conversation that doesn't exist yet.
The first phase involves creating your Users and Teams. Once your staff is represented in the system, you can upload your Custom Attribute Metadata, which prepares the platform to receive non standard data.
Next, migrate your Companies. Only after the companies exist should you import Customers, as this allows you to link individuals to their respective organizations during the creation process.
The second phase focuses on content. You will move your Knowledge Base Categories (Collections) followed by the Articles and their associated Versions.
The third phase is the most data intensive: the interaction history. You must create the top level Conversation container first. Once the conversation ID is generated, you can populate it with individual Messages and their Attachments.
You can then layer on Notes, Tags, and Snoozes to complete the picture of that interaction. Finally, you will import Tracking Events and establish your Saved Searches and Custom Objects.
Post Migration Configuration
After the bulk of the data is in the system, you need to focus on the operational settings that bring the platform to life.
- Rebuild Workflows: Manually recreate your Intercom logic using Kustomer’s visual builder to handle routing and tagging.
- Configure SLAs: Establish your Service Level Agreements based on your newly imported business schedules to start tracking performance.
- Design KB Themes: Use the theme editor to match your brand's aesthetic for the public facing knowledge base.
- Assign Search Positions: Organize your Saved Searches (formerly Segments) into folders and set their display order for your agents.
- Setup Shortcuts: Import or manually create Shortcuts and Shortcut Categories to help agents respond quickly.
Insider Secrets
- Bypass Rate Limits with importedAt: When you include the importedAt field in your API request body for customers, conversations, or messages, Kustomer often bypasses standard rate limits, allowing for much faster data ingestion.
- The 500 Part Limit: Be aware that Kustomer has a hard limit where it only retrieves the 500 most recent parts of a conversation via the API. If your Intercom conversations are extremely long, focus on the most recent context.
- Naming Suffixes for Metadata: Kustomer uses a specific naming convention for custom attributes. You must append suffixes like Str for strings, Num for numbers, or At for dates to your field names in the metadata definition.
- External IDs are Your Best Friend: Always map Intercom's internal ID to the externalId field in Kustomer. This allows you to perform easy lookups and prevents duplicate records if you need to re-run a migration batch.
- Search Indexing Latency: There is often a delay of a few minutes between creating a contact and that contact being available in search results. Don't panic if your search queries don't show your newest imports immediately.
Summary
Successfully migrating from Intercom to Kustomer is all about respecting the order of operations.
By preparing your metadata first and moving from broad objects like Companies down to granular ones like Messages, you ensure that every relationship is preserved.
While rebuilding workflows and themes requires manual effort, the result is a more powerful, automated environment that provides your team with the context they need to deliver exceptional support.
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.