Your support team hates your current helpdesk. The agents complain about the UI, the pricing is going up, and the reporting is broken.
So you decided to move. You picked a new platform (maybe Salesforce, maybe HubSpot), and now you just need to get the data across.
You see an ad for a tool that promises to “Migrate Zendesk to Jira in One Click.” It sounds perfect. It costs $500. You run the demo. It looks fine.
Stop.
You are about to make a mistake that will cripple your support team for the next six months.
I have overseen hundreds of helpdesk migrations. The “One-Click” tools work fine for the easy data. But helpdesk data isn’t easy. It is a messy, tangled web of relationships.
If you use a basic automated tool, here are the three things that will almost certainly break.
1. The “Conversation Thread” Disaster
A support ticket isn’t just a row in a database. It is a story. It has a customer question, an auto-reply, an agent note, a customer reply, and a final resolution.
Generic migration tools often flatten this structure.
- The Failure: They migrate the ticket body but lose the chronological “back-and-forth” thread.
- The Result: Your agents open an old ticket and see a wall of unreadable text. They can’t tell who said what or when. The context is gone.
2. The Broken Attachment Links
This is the silent killer. Your agents rely on screenshots, PDFs, and log files attached to old tickets to solve new problems.
Many migration tools don’t actually move the files. They just migrate the link to the file.
- The Failure: The link points to your old helpdesk instance.
- The Result: Two months later, you cancel your old Zendesk subscription. Suddenly, every attachment link in your new Salesforce history returns a “404 Not Found” error. Your knowledge base is now useless.
3. The “Internal Note” Leak
Support agents write private notes to each other on tickets. “This customer is angry, be careful.”
If your migration tool doesn’t map the “Private Note” field correctly to the new system, it might import it as a “Public Comment.”
- The Failure: Private internal chatter gets exposed.
- The Result: The customer receives an email notification containing the snarky comment your agent wrote about them. This is a PR nightmare waiting to happen.
Audit Before You Move
You cannot trust a generic tool to understand your specific setup. You need to evaluate the complexity of your data before you sign a contract.
We built a free Helpdesk Migration Evaluator to help you spot these risks early.
It forces you to check the critical details:
- Do you have inline images in your tickets?
- Do you rely heavily on “Private Notes”?
- Do you have multi-brand setups?
When to Call in the Engineers
If you are a small startup with 500 tickets, use a cheap tool. It will be fine.
But if you are a mature company with 5 years of history and strict SLAs, do not gamble on a “black box” script.
This is why ClonePartner exists. We don’t just “map fields.” We treat migration as an engineering project.
- We preserve the threads.
- We physically move the attachments to your new storage (S3 or the new platform), so links never break.
- We sanitize the data to ensure private notes stay private.
Don’t let a bad migration erase your team’s hard work. Audit your data first. If it looks scary, let engineers handle it.