Moving your customer support operation from one robust platform to another is a significant undertaking, yet it offers immense opportunities for optimization and scale.
When transitioning from Trengo to Freshdesk, the central goal is ensuring continuity, meaning every piece of valuable historical data, configuration, and customer context must travel safely.
This guide breaks down the complex process of transitioning your valuable data from Trengo to Freshdesk
Define Your Migration Scope
Successful migration starts with defining exactly what data moves and how it moves. We break the data into three lanes: data suitable for API migration, data requiring API workarounds due to structural differences, and data requiring manual reconfiguration or archiving.
API Migration
The backbone of your service desk, including core entities, can be moved via a direct 1:1 API integration model.
This includes foundational records such as Users (agents in Freshdesk), Teams (Groups in Freshdesk), Contacts (customers), and the actual Tickets. Your core Custom Fields (metadata attached to tickets or contacts) and Quick Replies (Canned Responses in Freshdesk) also generally fall into this category.
Similarly, migrating the primary organizational structure of your knowledge base, including Help Centers (Solution Categories) and Help Center Categories (Solution Categories/Folders), can be automated.
API Migration Requiring Workarounds
Some data types require transformation to fit Freshdesk’s structure, but this process can still be managed programmatically:
- Labels (Tags): Trengo Labels typically need to be translated into tags within Freshdesk and applied during the creation or update of corresponding records like tickets or contacts.
- Ticket Messages (Conversations): While the main ticket content moves easily, individual Ticket Messages must be extracted and then imported sequentially as Replies or Notes in Freshdesk. This preserves the full conversation timeline.
- Contact Groups: Trengo’s Contact Groups often map best to Freshdesk's internal logic for Company association or are converted into generalized user-defined tags applied to the Contacts.
- Profiles: Detailed data contained within Trengo Profiles, such as custom fields or avatar images, must be parsed and specifically mapped to update the corresponding Freshdesk Contact or Agent record attributes.
- Help Center Sections / Blocks: These smaller content structures are consolidated into the hierarchical nature of Freshdesk Solution Folders and Solution Articles.
- Ticket Results: Information captured in Ticket Results, often denoting resolution types or outcomes, should be mapped to specific custom dropdown fields or utilized to set the final status on the Freshdesk ticket.
Manual Configuration and Archiving
Features tied fundamentally to Trengo's underlying architecture must be manually rebuilt or archived:
- Boards/Cards: If your team relies on Trengo’s Boards/Cards feature for visualization or workflow tracking, this needs manual reorganization outside of the API process, as a direct object equivalent is not available in Freshdesk. This data should typically be archived in Trengo or recreated manually as tasks or projects in Freshdesk, if necessary.
- Webhooks: Webhooks are crucial for integrations and must be manually analyzed and reconfigured within Freshdesk's automation features, pointing to the new endpoint logic.
Prepare Freshdesk for Data Import
Before commencing the bulk data migration, the target Freshdesk environment must be structurally prepared to receive and correctly categorize the incoming information. Skipping this step often leads to messy data and broken relationships.
- Define and Create Custom Fields: This is the most crucial prerequisite. All of Trengo’s custom metadata must have corresponding target fields created first in Freshdesk. This ensures that when tickets, contacts, or companies are imported, there are designated fields to hold their historical custom attributes.
- Establish Organizational Structure: Create the necessary Groups in Freshdesk to mirror your Teams structure, allowing for proper assignment during ticket migration.
- Prepare Knowledge Base Skeleton: Construct the Solutions Categories and Folders that mirror the hierarchy established in your Trengo Help Centers and Categories.
Migrate Objects
The actual migration must follow a dependency chain. Base entities need to be established before relational entities can reference them.
- Users, Agents, and Teams (The Foundation)
Begin with the people and their organizational containers.
Agents and Users: Pull Users from Trengo and push them into Freshdesk as Agents. Correspondingly, migrate end-customer Contacts into Freshdesk as Contacts.
Teams: Migrate Teams by creating corresponding Groups in Freshdesk.
Profiles and Metadata: During user and contact creation, import associated Profile data and custom attribute values directly into the Freshdesk agent or contact records. - Knowledge Base Content
Migrate the supporting self-service documentation, ensuring the structure is accurate.
Structure Migration: Map Help Centers and Categories directly to Freshdesk Solution Categories.
Content Migration: Iterate through Trengo’s Help Center Sections / Blocks and Articles and migrate the content into Freshdesk Solution Articles, ensuring proper hierarchical linking to the newly created folders and categories. - Contacts, Groups, and Quick Replies
With the structure and staff set, focus on standard customer data and common responses.
Contacts and Grouping: After initial contact creation, reconcile Contact Groups. If these groups define corporate relationships, model them as Companies in Freshdesk and establish associations. Otherwise, apply corresponding tags during the contact update process.
Canned Responses: Migrate Quick Replies seamlessly by creating Canned Responses in Freshdesk. - Tickets and Conversations (Historical Data)
This is the most time-consuming phase, requiring meticulous handling of historical context.
Ticket Creation: Retrieve historical Tickets and initiate creation in Freshdesk. During creation, ensure that fields like the Requester ID, creation timestamps, status (Open, Pending, Resolved, Closed), priority, and any relevant Custom Fields are correctly mapped.
Labeling and Results: As you create each ticket, map Labels from Trengo and assign them as tags. Map Ticket Results data to predefined custom fields within the Freshdesk ticket structure, reflecting the outcome status.
Conversation Import: For each new Freshdesk ticket ID, fetch all related Ticket Messages from Trengo. Then, import these chronological exchanges as either public Replies or private Notes in the corresponding Freshdesk ticket, preserving the narrative history.
Post Migration Configuration
Once the data transfer is complete, the final step involves restoring platform behaviors in the new Freshdesk environment.
- Rebuild Automations and Workflows: The logic previously handled by Trengo's automation tools, such as routing, escalation triggers, and internal communications, must be rebuilt using Freshdesk's robust Automation Rules. This includes reconfiguring any complex processes that previously relied on Webhooks.
- Channel Configuration: Verify that all communication channels (email, chat, phone) are correctly pointed to Freshdesk’s support inboxes (Email Mailboxes), ensuring a smooth handover of new incoming queries.
- Business Hours and SLAs: Manually configure Business Hours and define SLA Policies tailored to your service levels.
Insider Secrets
Having successfully executed these complex data transitions provides insight into critical pitfalls and optimization points.
- Prioritize Rate Limit Management: Freshdesk enforces strict Rate Limits, restricting the number of API calls per minute (e.g., typically between 50 and 700 calls/minute, depending on your plan tier). When performing bulk operations like importing thousands of ticket conversations or contacts, you must queue your API calls and implement robust retry mechanisms with adequate delays based on the `Retry-After` header response to prevent being locked out, which can severely impact your migration timeline.
- Handling Timestamps is Non-Negotiable: For true data continuity, especially for historical reporting on SLAs or resolution times, all timestamp fields (created\_at, updated\_at, etc.) must be accurately imported. Ensure all dates are provided in the UTC format, YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SSZ (Timestamps, Date Fields) to maintain data integrity regardless of geographic location.
- The Double-Check on Custom Fields: Custom fields often harbor hidden data constraints. Before initiating bulk ticket or contact creation, meticulously test that every data type and constraint defined in Freshdesk exactly matches the data format being pulled from Trengo. A single mismatch (e.g., pushing text into a number field, as noted in potential API errors) can cause large batches of API calls to fail (Client or Validation Error).
- Managing Orphaned Data: Although you plan for everything, there might be old ticket IDs or user IDs that fail to map. Establish a quarantine strategy for these few orphaned records, linking them back to an internal spreadsheet so they can be manually investigated and resolved post-migration, ensuring no critical data is lost in the noise.
Summary
Migrating from Trengo to Freshdesk requires careful planning and execution. By adhering to a rigorous sequence, you ensure data integrity.
Successful migration hinges on respecting API dependencies and diligently managing technical constraints like rate limits and data formatting, paving the way for a powerful new support 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.