The Complete Guide to Migrating from Kustomer to Intercom

Moving your support operations is a major step toward scaling your customer experience. 

This guide will walk you through the transition from Kustomer to Intercom, ensuring every piece of data finds its proper place.

We will focus on maintaining the integrity of your customer history and internal workflows during this change.

Define your migration scope

What to migrate via the API

The heavy lifting of your migration involves high volume data that requires programmatic transfer.

This includes your core entities like Customers and Companies, as well as the detailed history of your interactions. Conversations, the Messages within them, and the private Notes shared between your team members are all handled through automated imports. 

Additionally, your Knowledge Base Articles and Categories, along with any non standard data structures known as KObjects, will be moved this way to preserve the depth of your existing resources.

What to configure manually

Certain elements are better handled through the user interface to ensure they align with the Intercom structure.

You will need to manually invite your Users, who become Admins in your new workspace, and organize them into Teams.

Functional tools like Shortcuts, which act as Macros, and the specific logic for your Workflows must be rebuilt to take advantage of Intercom's specific automation capabilities. 

Finally, because snooze definitions and past Satisfaction survey responses do not always have a direct data path, these should be set up as new configurations.

What to archive

It is often wise to leave some data behind to keep your new workspace clean. Audit logs, temporary tracking events, and conversation data older than two years are prime candidates for archiving rather than active migration.

You can export this data into a secure storage format for compliance or historical reference without cluttering your daily support environment.

Prepare Intercom for data import

Before you start pushing data into the system, you need to set the stage by recreating your organizational framework.

• Create Data Attributes for both contacts and companies to mirror the Custom Attributes you used previously.
• Manually set up your Teams so that conversations can be assigned to the correct groups immediately upon import.
• Invite your teammates as Admins and assign them to their respective teams to maintain accountability.
• Establish your Help Center Collections to serve as the structural containers for your incoming knowledge base articles.
• Define your Tag list so that categories can be applied to customers and conversations as they arrive.

Migrate objects

The migration follows a specific logical sequence. You must build the foundation before you can populate the history. We begin with structural metadata and end with the complex web of messages.

Data Mapping

1. Structural Metadata and Definitions: First, you move your Custom Attributes and Tags. In Intercom, these are known as Data Attributes and provide the context for every other object. You also define the schemas for your KObjects, which will exist as Custom Object Instances.
2. People and Organizations: With the attributes ready, you can import Companies and then Customers, who are referred to as Contacts in Intercom. It is important to move companies first so that you can properly associate individual customers with their organizations during their import.
3. Interaction History: Once your contacts exist, you can begin importing Conversations. Because Intercom views communication as a series of parts, you will move Messages into these conversations as conversation parts. Private Notes from the team are also attached to the relevant contacts or conversations at this stage.
4. Knowledge and Content: Finally, you move your support content. You populate the previously created Collections with your migrated KB Articles, ensuring that internal links and formatting remain intact.

Post Migration Configuration

After the primary data is in the system, you must reconnect the "wiring" that makes your support operation run.

• Rebuild your Shortcuts as Macros, ensuring any dynamic text placeholders are updated to the new syntax.
• Configure your Workflows and Series to replace your old automated logic, using Intercom's branching paths.
• Set up your Conversation Rating settings to begin collecting new satisfaction data from customers.
• Re establish your Business Schedules to ensure that your "away" and "office hours" logic works correctly.
• Enable your Snooze options so that agents can put conversations on hold with the correct intervals.

Insider Secrets

1. Respect the Rate Limits: While migrating, you will encounter limits on how many updates you can make to a single object in a short window. A single contact can usually be updated 600 times in 10 minutes, but other objects like companies or messages are limited to 100 updates in that same timeframe.
2. External ID is your Best Friend: When creating contacts or companies, always include an external ID from your original database. This allows you to perform reliable lookups later if you need to update a record or link it to a new interaction without creating duplicates.
3. Timestamp Preservation: You can often set the historical creation dates for your data if you have administrative privileges. This ensures that a conversation from three years ago still looks like it happened three years ago in your history.
4. The Message Threading Workaround: Since you cannot just "upload" a message, you have to use the reply functionality to build a conversation history. You essentially "reply" to an existing conversation on behalf of either the admin or the customer to reconstruct the thread.
5. Data Attribute Suffixes: Be mindful of how you name your attributes in Kustomer. They often use specific suffixes like Num or Bool to define data types, and you should ensure these match the types you select in Intercom's Data Attribute settings.

Summary

Transitioning to Intercom is a powerful move that centralizes your support and engagement.

By following this logical order and distinguishing between what can be automated and what requires a human touch, you ensure that no customer detail is lost.

Take your time with the preparation phase, as a well defined schema makes the actual data transfer much smoother. Once your workflows are rebuilt and your team is settled, you will be ready to provide a higher level of service than ever before.

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.

Further Reading:

• Kustomer
• Intercom