Moving your support operations is a major step toward scaling your customer experience. If you are planning a move from Kustomer to Zendesk, you are looking at a transition that requires a deep understanding of how both platforms structure their data.
Kustomer is built around a customer-centric timeline, while Zendesk operates with a ticket-centric model. This guide will help you navigate the complexities of this migration, ensuring every message, customer profile, and knowledge base article finds its new home.
Define your migration scope
Before you begin moving data, you need to decide what goes where. A successful migration is rarely a simple transfer. It involves a mix of automated processes, manual setup, and strategic archiving.
What should be migrated via the API
High volume data is best handled through bulk API operations to maintain integrity and save time. This includes your Core Resources such as Companies (Organizations), Customers (Users), and Conversations (Tickets).
Within these conversations, you will also want to move all Messages, Notes, and Attachments to preserve the full context of your support history.
Your Knowledge Base content, specifically Articles and Categories, should also be moved via API to keep your self-service portal intact.
What has to be configured manually
System settings and structural configurations often do not translate directly through an API and require a human touch.
You will need to manually recreate your Brands, as these define your public presence. Business Schedules, which dictate your support hours and SLA targets, must also be set up within the Zendesk interface.
Other visual elements like Knowledge Base Themes and Templates, as well as complex routing logic like Routes and Forms, are better configured manually to ensure they look and function correctly in the new environment.
What has to be archived
Not all data needs to live in your active help desk. Kustomer standard search is often limited to data from the past 2 years, and anything older is typically archived.
You might choose to archive very old Conversations or Audit Logs that are no longer relevant for daily operations but necessary for compliance.
Satisfaction (CSAT) responses older than a specific period can also be archived rather than imported, keeping your new Zendesk instance lean and fast.
Prepare Zendesk for data import
Before the first piece of data moves, your new environment must be ready to receive it. Think of this as laying the foundation for your new data model.
- Rebuild Custom Fields: Recreate all Kustomer Custom Attributes as Ticket, User, or Organization fields in Zendesk to ensure data points have a place to land.
- Define Custom Objects: Use Zendesk Custom Objects to map over Kustomer Klasses, allowing you to store complex data that doesn't fit into standard fields.
- Establish User Identities: Prepare your user profiles to include multiple identifiers like email, phone numbers, and social handles.
- Configure Custom Ticket Statuses: Map Kustomer Snoozes and sub statuses to Zendesk Custom Ticket Statuses so your agents can maintain their existing workflows.
- Set up Brands and Schedules: Define your support brands and business hours so that incoming tickets are categorized correctly from day one.
- Enable Tagging: Ensure user and organization tagging is enabled in your Zendesk settings so that Kustomer Tags can be applied during import.
Migrate objects
Kustomer Object | Zendesk Object |
Companies | Organizations |
Customers | Users |
Conversations | Tickets |
Messages | Public Comments |
Notes | Internal Notes |
Custom Attributes | Custom Fields |
Klasses (KObjects) | Custom Objects |
Tags | Tags |
Satisfaction | CSAT Responses |
Articles | Guide Articles |
Categories | Categories |
Audit Logs | Ticket Audits |
The order in which you migrate objects is critical because of the relationships between them.
You cannot attach a message to a conversation if the conversation does not exist, and you cannot attach a conversation to a customer if the customer has not been created yet.
The logical sequence starts with Organizations (Companies).
These are the top level containers. Once organizations are in place, you migrate Users (Customers) and link them to their respective organizations via Group Memberships or Organization Memberships.
Next, you move to the Tickets (Conversations). In Kustomer, a conversation is a container on a timeline, while in Zendesk, a ticket is the primary record. As you import tickets, you will also import Ticket Comments (Messages and Notes). It is important to distinguish between public messages and internal notes to maintain privacy.
Finally, you can migrate your Knowledge Base and CSAT data. Articles must be associated with their Categories and Sections, and any Attachments or Media must be linked to the correct article version.
Post migration configuration
Once the data is in, you need to turn the lights on by setting up the automation and tools your agents use every day.
- Workflows: Rebuild your Kustomer Workflows as Zendesk Triggers and Automations to handle ticket routing, assignment, and status changes.
- Shortcuts: Recreate your Kustomer Shortcuts as Zendesk Macros so agents can quickly respond with canned text.
- Snippets: Convert Kustomer Snippets into Zendesk Dynamic Content to support multi-language responses and standardized text.
- Search Filters: Rebuild your Saved Searches and Search Folders as Zendesk Views to help agents organize their daily tasks.
- Notification Settings: Manually configure notification logs and individual user notification preferences to ensure the right people are alerted at the right time.
- Chat and Channel Setting: Finalize your Chat Settings and any Email or Web Hooks required to keep your various communication channels connected.
Insider secrets
- Setting historic timestamps requires specific roles. To set attributes like createdAt or createdBy during a migration, you must have the org.admin role in Kustomer or equivalent administrative permissions in Zendesk, otherwise the system will automatically set the timestamp to the moment of import.
- Avoid rate limit traps with importedAt. When migrating messages, including an importedAt property in your payload can often bypass certain object rate limits, which usually restrict a single user to 120 creations per minute.
- Identity matching is automatic but picky. When you create a profile in Zendesk, the API automatically tries to match standard identifiers like email or phone number to existing users. If it doesn't find a match, it creates a new anonymous user, which can lead to duplicates if your data isn't clean.
- Knowledge Base media must be handled first. Zendesk recommends creating your Guide media objects before creating article attachments. You then use the media ID to link the attachment to the article, ensuring images appear correctly in your translated content.
- Organization field keys are permanent. When recreating custom fields, remember that while you can change the title, you cannot change the "key" after creation. Make sure your naming convention is solid before you start the import.
Summary
Migrating from Kustomer to Zendesk is a strategic shift from a timeline view to a powerful ticket based workflow.
By carefully defining your scope between API imports and manual configurations, you protect the integrity of your data while taking advantage of Zendesk's robust features.
Preparation is the most important stage, ensuring that your custom fields and organizations are ready before you begin the logical sequence of importing users and their conversation histories.
Once the transition is complete and your workflows are tuned, your team will be ready to provide even better support on a platform built for scale.
Analytically, think of this migration as a library reorganization where every book is carefully cataloged and placed on the correct shelf to ensure no knowledge is lost.
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.