Making the switch from Zendesk to Enchant is a significant move toward a more streamlined team experience.
Enchant provides a fully hosted omnichannel shared inbox solution that simplifies how you interact with your customers.
While the underlying concepts of support tickets and customer profiles remain similar, the way the data lives in each system has its own unique rhythm.
This guide will walk you through the entire process, ensuring every piece of your historical data finds its proper place.
Define Your Migration Scope
Before you begin moving data, you need to decide what goes through the automated pipeline and what requires a human touch. Your primary migration scope for the API includes essential records such as users, customer profiles, ticket histories, and attachments.
These are high-volume objects that benefit from the precision of a programmatic transfer.
However, some elements must be configured manually. Your Help Center content, including categories, sections, and articles, belongs in this category.
While Zendesk provides extensive APIs for its knowledge base, the structure and formatting in Enchant are often distinct enough that a manual review of your articles ensures they look perfect for your customers.
Finally, consider what data should be archived rather than migrated. Non-essential system events, such as a record of every time a user name was changed or a notification was sent, are often better left in a CSV export from Zendesk for compliance purposes rather than cluttering your new active workspace.
Prepare Enchant for Data Import
Setting up your new environment is the first physical step of the process. You must rebuild certain configurations in Enchant before the data migration starts so that the incoming records have a destination. Start by creating your inboxes.
In Enchant, every ticket must belong to an inbox. Since Zendesk uses groups to segment work, you will want to create an inbox in Enchant for every corresponding group in Zendesk.
Next, you need to define your labels. Zendesk tags are highly flexible strings, but Enchant uses label IDs to organize tickets.
By predefining these labels in Enchant, you can ensure that as tickets are imported, they are automatically categorized with the correct context.
Finally, you must install the API app in your Enchant help desk settings to generate the necessary access tokens for the migration. These tokens are unrestricted, so keep them secure.
Migrate Objects
The migration process follows a strict logical sequence to maintain the relationships between different data models.
- Staff and Destinations:
Start by migrating your users. Zendesk admins and agents map directly to Enchant users.
You must create these staff accounts first because every message and ticket you import later will need to be associated with an author ID.
Without the users in place, the system will not know who sent a specific reply or wrote a private note. - The Customer Database:
Once your staff is ready, move your customer records. Zendesk end users become Enchant customers.
This is also the time to migrate user identities, such as email addresses and phone numbers, which Enchant stores as contacts within a customer profile.
Establishing these customer IDs is crucial because every ticket requires an associated customer ID during creation. - Files and Attachments:
Before you can populate ticket conversations, you must handle the files. Enchant requires attachments to be uploaded to the system first to receive a unique ID.
Once you have this ID, you can include it in the payload of the message it belongs to. This two-step process ensures that images and documents are correctly linked to the specific replies or notes that mention them. - Ticket Shells and Messages:
Now you can create the tickets themselves. When migrating Zendesk tickets to Enchant, remember that Enchant's public API primarily supports the creation of tickets with an email type.
After the ticket shell is created, you populate it with messages in chronological order. Public comments from Zendesk are migrated as replies, while internal notes are migrated as notes.
If you have custom fields in Zendesk, such as specific user metadata or organization details, you can store these in Enchant using the customer summary field or custom metadata arrays. - Handling Specialized Data:
For objects that do not have a 1:1 match, a workaround is necessary. Zendesk custom ticket statuses do not have a direct equivalent in Enchant's state model, which uses fixed states like open, hold, or closed.
To preserve this detail, migrate the ticket into the closest matching state and apply a label that indicates the specific Zendesk status. Similarly, CSAT survey responses can be migrated as private notes on the corresponding ticket so that your agents still have access to that feedback.
Post Migration Configuration
After the bulk of your data is in Enchant, you need to focus on the active logic of your help desk. This involves rebuilding your workflows manually.
Business rules, such as triggers and automations that route tickets based on specific criteria, must be recreated using Enchant's native tools.
Macros, which are used to provide quick, pre written responses to common questions, also need to be imported or rewritten to fit Enchant's formatting.
This is also the perfect time to verify that your email forwarding and brand settings are correctly pointed to Enchant so that new incoming requests are captured without interruption.
Insider Secrets
Experienced migrators know that the devil is in the details of the file handling. When migrating attachments, Enchant will automatically delete any file that is not associated with a message shortly after upload.
This means you should upload the file and create the associated message in the same step of your script to avoid losing data.
Another secret involves the way you handle historical dates. When creating messages via the API, you can specify the creation time to match the original timestamp from Zendesk.
However, if you are not careful, Enchant might trigger new ticket notifications to your customers for these old messages.
Always ensure that any automated notification rules are disabled during the import phase to keep the migration silent and seamless.
Lastly, if a user in Zendesk has multiple email identities, make sure to designate one as primary in Enchant to ensure that outbound replies are sent to the correct address.
Summary
Migrating from Zendesk to Enchant is a manageable process when you follow the correct sequence: starting with your team and customers before moving into the complex layers of ticket histories and attachments.
By preparing your inboxes and labels in advance, you create a sturdy foundation for your data. While manual work is required for your Help Center and active workflows, the result is a clean, organized system that allows your team to focus on what matters most: providing excellent support.
Keep an eye on your file association logic and notification settings during the move to ensure a quiet and successful transition.
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.