Moving your support operations from Kustomer to Help Scout is a significant transition that requires a clear plan for your data.
This guide walks you through the process of migrating your historical information while ensuring your team is ready for action on day one.
By understanding how the data structures differ between these two platforms, you can ensure a smooth transition for both your agents and your customers.
Define your migration scope
When planning your move, the first step is determining how each piece of data will reach its new home. This involves deciding what can be moved automatically, what requires a human touch, and what is better left in the past.
API Migration Scope
The bulk of your core data will move through the programming interfaces provided by both platforms.
This includes foundational elements like your users and teams, which are essential for maintaining assignment history.
You will also migrate your structural data, specifically companies and customer profiles, to ensure every interaction is linked to the correct person.
The most critical data for your team, your conversation history and knowledge base articles, are also part of this scope. By using the API, you can preserve the relationships between messages, internal notes, and their associated file attachments.
Manual Configuration Scope
Not everything has a direct equivalent that a computer can map on its own. Your automation logic, such as Kustomer workflows that use conditional branching, must be recreated manually to align with Help Scout’s workflow engine.
Similarly, your routing structures, known as queues in Kustomer, are often better represented as distinct inboxes or folders within Help Scout.
You will also need to manually set up your organization settings, such as business schedules and custom snooze options, to match your team’s specific operational hours and habits.
Archive and Cleanup Scope
Migration is a perfect time to declutter your database by archiving data that is no longer useful. For example, tracking events that record every click a customer made on your website often carry high volume but low long term value for support history.
You might also choose to archive conversations that are several years old rather than moving them into your active Help Scout instance.
Additionally, custom objects that were used for specific integrations in Kustomer may not need to be migrated if those integrations are being retired or replaced.
Prepare Help Scout for data import
Before you start pushing data into Help Scout, you must build the environment that will house it. Completing these steps beforehand prevents errors during the import process.
- Create all your team members as users in Help Scout so that historical conversations can be assigned to the correct people.
- Build out your team structures to mirror your Kustomer departments, allowing for accurate reporting on historical data.
- Set up your Docs collections so that you have a destination ready when you begin moving your knowledge base categories and articles.
- Define your custom fields for customers and conversations if you plan to move data from Kustomer's custom attributes or objects.
- Establish your tags in Help Scout to ensure that any tags appended to conversations during migration are recognized correctly by the system.
Migrate objects
The migration follows a specific logical sequence to maintain the integrity of your data. You cannot attach a message to a conversation that does not exist yet, nor can you link a conversation to a customer who has not been created.
Kustomer views data as a timeline of events associated with a customer profile. Help Scout uses a more traditional inbox model where conversations contain threads.
When migrating, we first move the structural "containers" and then fill them with content. You will start with users and teams, then move to the organizational level with companies and customers.
Next, you will move the knowledge base to ensure your help center is live. Finally, you move the support history, creating the conversation containers first and then inserting messages, notes, and attachments as threads.
Data Mapping
Kustomer Object | Help Scout Object |
Users | Users |
Teams | Teams |
Tags | Tags |
Companies | Organizations |
Customers | Customers |
KB Categories | Docs Categories |
KB Articles | Docs Articles |
Conversations | Conversations |
Messages | Threads (Reply/Customer) |
Notes | Threads (Note) |
Attachments | Attachments |
Snoozes | Snooze Status |
KObjects | Customer Properties |
Satisfaction | Ratings |
Post Migration Configuration
Once your data is successfully residing in Help Scout, you need to rebuild the logic that makes your team productive. This phase focuses on automation and workflow management.
- Recreate your automated workflows to handle conversation routing and status updates based on your new inbox structure.
- Configure your folders to replicate the functionality of Kustomer’s saved searches for organized viewing.
- Set up your satisfaction survey settings to begin collecting new ratings on your Help Scout conversations.
- Verify that your incoming email and chat channels are correctly connected and routing to the right inboxes.
- Rebuild your saved replies (shortcuts) so agents can quickly respond to common customer inquiries.
Insider Secrets
- Respect the Rate Limits: Kustomer and Help Scout both enforce strict limits on how many requests you can make per minute. If you exceed these, you will receive error messages, so it is vital to build retry logic into your migration script.
- Use External IDs: When creating objects in Help Scout via the API, always store the original Kustomer ID as an external identifier. This allows you to verify data integrity and prevents you from creating duplicate records if you need to restart the migration.
- Handle Attachments Carefully: Attachments in Kustomer often provide temporary pre-signed URLs that can expire quickly. You must download the actual file data from Kustomer and then upload it to Help Scout immediately rather than just moving the link.
- Preserve Timestamps: To keep your historical reporting accurate, use the "imported at" or equivalent fields to set the original creation dates for conversations and messages. Without this, all your old tickets will look like they were created on the day of the migration.
- Audit Your Merges: Kustomer handles customer merges by giving precedence to specific fields like email and phone. Check for any merged profiles in Kustomer before migrating, as you may want to clean up these duplicates to ensure the Help Scout customer list is pristine.
Summary
Migrating from Kustomer to Help Scout is an organized transition that moves your support history into a new, inbox-focused environment.
By following a logical order, starting with users and teams and ending with individual messages, you can preserve the context of every customer interaction.
While your core data moves via the API, remember that your automation logic and routing rules require a thoughtful manual rebuild in Help Scout.
Managing rate limits and using external IDs will ensure that your migration is not only successful but also accurate and reliable.
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.