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Zendesk Data Migration Tips and Tricks

What You Will Learn from This Presentation

• Ways to migrate users, organizations, tickets and knowledge base articles into Zendesk.

• Tips on how to make migration smooth.

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What Are Your Options?• Bulk User/Organization Import Tool. It’s a CSV based

tool, allowing you to import users and organizations only. You can find it under Admin/People section in your Zendesk account. Requires no technical expertise.

• Zendesk API. It allows you to migrate all help desk objects including tickets, users, organizations and knowledge base articles. Be ready for hands-on coding.

• Import2.com. Fully automated commercial service to migrate tickets, users and organizations.

1. Before You Start• Setup all agents, so when importing tickets those

could be assigned correctly.

• Make sure to create all the custom fields that you want to transfer in Zendesk.

• Backup your data.

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2. Don’t Spam Users With Welcome Emails

• When you create new users in Zendesk, each user will receive welcome email message. Make sure you disable this auto notification before mass importing.

• Uncheck the Send Notification Email box in your settings (instructions).

• Or if using API, make sure to set {“verified”: true} as mentioned in this guide.

3. Disable All Triggers • For example, what if you have a trigger that

sends SMS to a customer every time the ticket is resolved? If you don’t switch it off, customers will receive SMS for each migrated ticket.

• Make sure you have disabled triggers or that you use Ticket Import API to bypass the triggers during the import.

4. Use Full Featured Agents

• If you are on the Enterprise plan, make sure you don’t create light agents for migration. You cannot assign tickets to light agents in Zendesk.

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5. Bypass API Limits

• Zendesk has a limitation of 200 API requests per minute. For example, import of 300,000 records will take 24 hours in the case of perfect migration (which happens pretty much.. never).

•Ask Zendesk to increase the API limits.

•Read best practices for avoiding rate limiting on Zendesk help center.

6. Understand How To Deal With Data Errors

• Zendesk is strict on data validation requirements. So when migrating you might get data errors that would require you to ensure that importing data is correct.

• Use www.import2.com/questions/t/zendesk-import to find explanations of the most common errors and ways to fix them.

7. If Things Go Wrong

• Make sure to keep track of each record you import into Zendesk, so if you make any mistakes during data migration it is easy to locate problematic records and delete erroneous data.

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Keep Calm and Import2Good luck with your data migration! And if you feel like you don’t want to do migration yourself, let us help you. !!