Making the decision to transition your customer support infrastructure is a huge step, and moving from a platform like Intercom to Trengo opens up powerful possibilities for unified communication.
The key to a smooth migration is a clear, systematic approach. We are here to guide you through every critical step, ensuring your valuable data and history make the leap intact.
Define Your Migration Scope
Before writing a single line of migration script, you must categorize your data. Not everything moves the same way; some objects are ported directly, others require configuration, and some are best left archived.
What Will Be Migrated via API
The majority of your functional customer data and foundational configuration can be migrated programmatically. This includes your organizational backbone and customer records:
- Teams and Admins: Your internal organization structure and users need to be established first.
- Customer Profiles: All contacts (users and leads) and companies (which become Trengo Contact Groups) are migratable.
- Custom Data: The definitions for custom fields and their associated values on contacts/profiles can be imported.
- Notes: Internal notes attached to contacts.
- Labels (Tags): Intercom Tags translate directly to Trengo Labels and their associations with tickets.
- Help Center Content: The entire public knowledge base, including structure and articles.
- Tickets and History: Historical conversations and tickets, including the messages themselves.
What Has to Be Configured Manually
Certain operational and organizational elements need to be rebuilt by hand in the Trengo environment because their configuration depends heavily on how Trengo functions:
- Internal Articles: Intercom’s internal documentation features must be manually recreated within Trengo’s system.
- Away Status Reasons: The specific reasons administrators are marked as away must be set up manually in the new environment.
- Quick Replies: These must be manually configured in Trengo based on your existing shortcuts.
- Workflows and Integrations: Any complex routing, bots, or auto-reply rules must be manually reconstructed post-migration.
What Has to Be Archived
Data that cannot be practically imported or is intended only for historical reference should be extracted and archived separately:
- Historical Reporting Data: Trengo’s reporting tools are designed to pull metrics from current operational data. Historical performance metrics, such as past average resolution times, must be exported using Intercom’s specialized data export endpoints and kept in an external data warehouse for archival or compliance purposes.
- News Items/Newsfeeds: These features, which handle announcements and product updates, rely heavily on proprietary presentation formats and specific audience targeting; recreating this feature set is usually best handled manually, with the old data simply archived.
Prepare Trengo for Data Import
Before migrating the customer data itself, you need to build the scaffolding in Trengo. Establishing this structure in the correct order is vital for maintaining data integrity and relationships.
- Establish Staff Hierarchy (Teams and Admins): Begin by recreating your team structure. Once the teams exist, provision your administrators or users within Trengo.
- Define Custom Data Schemas: Next, define every custom field that existed on your Intercom contacts or tickets using Trengo's Custom Field feature. This ensures that when you import the actual customer data, the fields are ready to receive the values.
- Map Operational Definitions (Labels and Ticket Results): Create all required Labels (which correspond to Intercom Tags). Simultaneously, create Trengo Ticket Results (which serve as the resolution definitions for your former Ticket Types).
- Rebuild Help Center Structure: Trengo structures knowledge into Help Centers, Categories, and Sections. You should build this architecture now, mapping your older Intercom Collections into this new multi-tiered framework. You must create the Help Centers first, then the Categories, and then the relevant Sections and Blocks.
Migrate Objects
The actual data migration proceeds in a careful, phased sequence, ensuring all hierarchical relationships are properly addressed.
Phase 1: Customer Data Foundation
We start with the bedrock of your data: the people and their attributes.
- Contacts and Profiles: Import all Intercom Contacts and Leads. In Trengo, you will typically use the tools to create both Contacts and their associated Profiles. The Contacts table holds communication data, while the Profile object holds additional attributes and relations.
- Companies (Contact Groups): Create the Contact Groups in Trengo to mirror your Intercom Companies structure.
- Populating Attributes and Notes: Once the contacts and profiles exist, inject the collected data, updating the custom field values on both the contact and the profile level. For internal context, ensure you recreate staff-side notes on the respective contact or profile records.
- Linking Associations: The critical relationship between contacts and companies must be re-established. Utilize the API function to Attach a Contact to their corresponding Profile, thereby defining the customer association.
Phase 2: Knowledge Content
The public-facing information can now be migrated since the structure is complete.
- Help Center Articles: Import the content of all your Intercom Articles into Trengo using the article creation endpoints. Ensure these articles are correctly placed within the previously created Help Centers, Categories, and Sections.
Phase 3: Historical Records
This is the most time-consuming and complex phase, as historical fidelity is essential.
- Creating the Tickets (Conversations): Begin by recreating each historical conversation or dedicated Intercom Ticket as a new Ticket in Trengo.
- Assign Status and Metadata: After creation, immediately update the ticket status. If the ticket was resolved in Intercom, Close the ticket in Trengo. Assign the ticket to the correct agent or team using the assignment capabilities. Also, attach any relevant custom data to the ticket using the "Set custom data" function.
- Applying Labels: Attach the necessary Labels (formerly Tags) to the newly created tickets, preserving the historical categorization.
- Importing Messages (The Conversation History): The final step is crucial for context. Instead of traditional message sending, use Trengo's dedicated import tools, such as Import text message or Import email message, to preserve the original dates and content structure of the historical conversation parts within the new ticket wrapper.
Post Migration Configuration
After the bulk data transfer is complete, your team will need to manually configure the platform to handle new incoming activity seamlessly.
- Rebuilding Automated Workflows: Any complex rule sets, assignment logic, or message handling workflows present in Intercom must be rebuilt using Trengo’s automation tools. This includes configuring rules for ticket creation, status changes, and notifications.
- Channel Setup Finalization: Ensure all communication channels (email inboxes, chat widgets, social channels) are linked correctly and configured with proper branding and routing settings.
- Quick Reply Integration: Manually recreate all of your saved quick responses to ensure agent efficiency day one.
Insider Secrets
Having successfully executed platform migrations before, there are a few nuanced points that can save you significant time and frustration:
- Profile vs. Contact Duality: Understand that Trengo maintains a clearer separation between a Contact (an addressable communication endpoint like an email or phone number) and a Profile (the holistic customer view). Intercom often blurs these roles into one "Contact" object. You must ensure that when importing, you create both objects and link them together using the profile attachment API, especially when migrating users who communicated across multiple channels.
- Respecting Rate Limits on History: When importing historical messages, Trengo explicitly limits the number of historical message imports per minute (e.g., 60 per minute for text or email imports). You cannot rush this process. Architect your script to manage concurrency and adhere strictly to these limits, or you risk facing significant delays or temporary service blocks.
- The Timestamp Trap: When pushing historical data like tickets or events, date fields must be meticulously formatted in ISO 8601 format to ensure accurate reporting later on. Incorrect date formats for created_at fields will corrupt your historical timeline visibility in the new platform.
- Tagging Complexity on Contacts: While tickets can easily receive labels via API, attaching tags/labels directly to contacts/profiles may require leveraging a custom field workaround if direct label association methods for contact profiles are not exposed in the API documentation.
Summary
Migrating from Intercom to Trengo is a multi-step project demanding attention to detail and adherence to a strict logical sequence.
By first preparing the organizational structure and custom data schemas, then importing the core customer data, and finally recreating the bulk of the historical conversation records using specialized import tools, you can ensure a successful transition.
Prioritize the API where possible, archive historical reporting data, and remember that manual post-migration configuration is necessary for workflows and administrative settings.
A methodical, phased approach guarantees that your customer operations continue smoothly in your new, unified 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.