Moving your support operations to a new platform like Freshdesk promises advanced features and scalability.
If you are currently relying on Tidio for managing your customer interactions, planning a methodical migration is key to retaining valuable historical data and ensuring a smooth transition for your team.
This guide walks you through every step, focusing on leveraging the application programming interfaces for a data-rich migration from Tidio to Freshdesk.
Define Your Migration Scope
A successful migration hinges on understanding which data elements move smoothly (via direct mapping), which require translation (API workarounds), and which must be configured manually in the new environment.
Migrated via Direct API Mapping: These core entities have direct counterparts in Freshdesk and can be transferred efficiently once preparatory steps are complete.
- Contacts: Tidio's contacts, which represent identified visitors who interacted with the widget, map perfectly to Freshdesk Contacts.
- Operators (Agents): Your Tidio agents, or operators, who handle real-time customer interactions, transition seamlessly into Freshdesk Agents.
- Departments (Groups): Tidio organizes agents into Departments, which correlate directly with Freshdesk Groups, allowing you to maintain your team structure.
- Tickets: The primary support records in Tidio, representing complex conversations that require ongoing interaction, translate directly to Freshdesk Tickets.
Migrated via API Workaround/Transformation: These objects exist in both systems but require data manipulation or mapping to different concepts in Freshdesk to retain context.
- Contact Custom Properties (Schema): Tidio allows for custom properties to be defined on contacts. These must be first defined as custom fields in Freshdesk before the actual contact data can be imported.
- Conversations/Messages: The stream of messages within a Tidio contact's conversation, originating from contacts, operators, or chatbots, needs to be converted into specific conversation types in Freshdesk (like public Replies or private Notes).
- Viewed Pages History: The history of pages viewed by identified contacts in Tidio (available for the past 30 days), must be restructured as Omnichannel Activities for publication onto the Freshdesk contact timeline, providing valuable context for agents.
Manual Configuration: Settings, workflows, and rulesets cannot be automatically imported via API and must be rebuilt directly within the Freshdesk admin interface after the data migration is complete.
Prepare Freshdesk for Data Import
Before moving mass volumes of customer data, you need to lay the foundation in Freshdesk. This initial setup ensures that the incoming Tidio data lands in the correct format and locations.
The most critical preparatory phase involves replicating your custom data structure. Retrieve the complete list of properties and their associated types from Tidio. Since Freshdesk mandates that custom fields exist before data import, you must use the administrative API to create matching Contact Fields in your Freshdesk instance. This step guarantees that all the valuable contextual data gathered in Tidio moves with your customer profiles.
Migrate Objects
The actual data movement must be executed in a specific, logical sequence due to object dependencies. For instance, you cannot assign a ticket to an agent or put a contact in a group unless those entities already exist in Freshdesk.
- Establishing Support Structure (Groups and Agents)
We begin by establishing the team structure. First, retrieve your list of Departments from Tidio.
You can then create these as Groups within Freshdesk. Next, pull all Operators data from Tidio. These correspond directly to Agents in Freshdesk and can be created in bulk.
Ensure that these new Agents are associated with the corresponding Groups defined earlier. - Migrating Contacts (Customer Records)
Contacts are core to support operations. Tidio identifies contacts by email, name, or phone number.
Using Freshdesk's bulk creation or import mechanisms, ingest all contacts retrieved from Tidio. This is where you map Tidio's standard fields (name, email, phone) directly to Freshdesk's primary contact attributes.
Crucially, during this step, ensure that the values stored in the Tidio Contact Custom Properties are mapped precisely to the custom contact fields you prepared earlier in Freshdesk. - Importing Tickets (Support History)
With agents and contacts in place, we move the tickets. Retrieve the list of all Tidio Tickets. A ticket represents an ongoing, usually complex, conversation.
Use the Freshdesk API to Create a Ticket for each record. When creating the tickets, be sure to pass along standard ticket data, including the associated customer (Requester ID) and any agent (Responder ID) or group assignments, using the IDs established in the previous steps
Map statuses (e.g., Open, Resolved, Closed) and priorities to the corresponding numerical values supported by Freshdesk. - Rebuilding Conversations and Messages
This is perhaps the most detail-oriented step. We must take the unstructured chronological communication stream from Tidio and fit it into Freshdesk’s structured conversation format.
Pull the specific message history associated with each ticket or contact from Tidio. - For public-facing customer and agent messages, recreate these items sequentially in Freshdesk using the Create a Reply functionality against the corresponding ticket ID.
- For internal chat operator notes or chatbot actions, recreate these as Notes in Freshdesk, carefully marking them as private if they should not be visible to the customer.
- For public-facing customer and agent messages, recreate these items sequentially in Freshdesk using the Create a Reply functionality against the corresponding ticket ID.
- Contextual Data: Viewed Pages History
Finally, load auxiliary data that enriches the contact profile. The log of pages a contact viewed in Tidio provides vital context for support agents.
In Freshdesk, leverage the Omnichannel Activities API to publish this web activity history directly onto the contact's timeline.
This ensures that your agents have a rich, integrated view of the customer's journey leading up to their support request.
Post Migration Configuration
Once the data is securely migrated, several key functional configurations must be rebuilt manually to ensure your helpdesk operates efficiently. While the data moved via API, the system logic remains in Freshdesk.
You will need to manually recreate your:
- SLA Policies: Define the time-based targets for response and resolution for different priority levels and customer segments.
- Scenario Automations: Rebuild quick-action automations that help agents manage routine updates to tickets.
- Ticket Rules (Automations): Recreate business logic that runs on ticket creation, update, or hourly triggers (like assigning tickets or sending notifications).
Insider Secrets
Having successfully navigated this type of migration, here are a few critical points to keep in mind to ensure smooth execution and data fidelity:
- Mind the Rate Limits: Freshdesk imposes API limits per minute, varying based on your subscription plan. Even invalid requests count toward this limit. Designing your integration to process data efficiently in batches and include retry logic will be essential to avoid hitting temporary shutdowns (HTTP 429 errors).
- ID Mapping is Everything: As you migrate Groups, Agents, and Contacts, meticulously store the mapping of the original Tidio IDs to the new Freshdesk IDs. This cross-reference table is crucial later on, especially when updating the relational fields in the massive volume of ticket and conversation data. Without accurate ID mapping, associating history and replies to the correct records becomes impossible.
- Handle Timestamps Carefully: Both systems rely heavily on timestamps for sequencing events. Ensure that all creation (`created_at`) and update (`updated_at`) timestamps from Tidio are correctly formatted and migrated in UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) to maintain historical accuracy in Freshdesk.
- Data Validation: Plan for automated data validation post-migration. Use Freshdesk's ability to search and filter contacts and tickets by fields (like email or specific tag keywords) to spot-check for missing records or improperly mapped custom fields.
Summary
Migrating from Tidio to Freshdesk is a robust process involving foundational setup followed by phased data transfer.
By addressing the schema (Custom Properties) first, followed by hierarchical data (Groups and Agents), and finally moving transactional data (Tickets and Conversations), you ensure dependencies are met in the correct logical sequence.
Leveraging Freshdesk's specialized tools, like Omnichannel Activities, allows you to preserve the full context of your customer interactions, setting your team up for success in their new, powerful support platform.
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.