Migrate from CRM and Deals for Zendesk to Salesforce Sales Cloud

Zendesk Contacts with no Organization linkage or with lifecycle_type indicating a prospect map to Salesforce Lead. Zendesk Contacts with a confirmed Organization and a customer lifecycle_type map to Salesforce Contact tied to an Account. We extract the contact's associated org_id and resolve it to an AccountId at migration time, creating the Account first if it does not exist. The original Zendesk contact ID is preserved in a custom field zd_contact_id__c for audit and cross-reference.

Zendesk Organizations map directly to Salesforce Account. The domain field becomes the Account Website. Organization custom fields map to custom Account fields. Zendesk's flat org structure has no parent-account hierarchy, so we create a flat Account tree in Salesforce unless the customer specifies a parent mapping derived from their org structure or a custom field.

Zendesk Deals map to Salesforce Opportunity. The critical difference is that Zendesk Deals do not require an Account or Contact linkage, while Salesforce Opportunities require both. We run a pre-migration reconciliation to flag Deals without an associated Organization and offer the customer three options: create a placeholder Account, attach to a default Account, or exclude from migration. StageName maps from the Deal's pipeline stage; we reconstruct the stage value from Activities if the current stage is not directly available on the Deal.

Each Zendesk pipeline becomes a Salesforce Record Type on Opportunity with a corresponding Sales Process. Stage values from Zendesk become StageName picklist values in the Salesforce Sales Process. Stage probability percentages map to StageProbability on the OpportunityStage metadata.

Zendesk's Deals API does not expose stage-change history. Stage transitions are logged as Activities with event type stage_change. We de-normalize these Activity records into a synthetic stage-history array during the transform phase, then write each stage transition as an OpportunityHistory record in Salesforce with the original Zendesk timestamp preserved in SystemModstamp.

Zendesk Activities (calls, emails, meetings) linked to Contacts or Deals migrate to Salesforce Task, Event, and EmailMessage records. Call activities map to Task with TaskSubtype=Call and disposition preserved. Email activities map to EmailMessage (body) plus a linked Task (timeline entry). Meeting activities map to Event with attendees preserved via EventRelation records.

Zendesk Tickets migrate to Salesforce Case if the destination org includes Service Cloud. Ticket status maps to Case Status, priority maps to Case Priority, and requester maps to Contact. Conversation comments migrate as EmailMessage records linked to the Case. Tags migrate as Case Tags or a custom multi-select picklist depending on the customer's preference.

Zendesk Custom Objects v2 map to Salesforce custom objects with __c API naming. We pre-create the destination schema including all custom fields, lookup relationships, and validation rules before any record import. Plan-tier limits are checked during scoping: Suite Team allows 3 object types, Suite Growth 5, Suite Professional 30, and Suite Enterprise Plus 50. If the customer's custom object count exceeds the destination's Salesforce edition, we flag this during scoping and offer to exclude objects or upgrade the destination edition.

We do not migrate Legacy Custom Object records directly. The mandatory pre-migration step is a five-step v2 schema migration: object type definition export, schema creation in v2 API, relationship type creation, record import to v2, then relationship record linkage. This step alone adds 3-5 days to the timeline. After v2 migration is complete, the resulting v2 records follow the standard custom object migration path. Legacy custom objects without a v2 equivalent in the destination schema are excluded and documented in the handoff inventory.

Zendesk Users (agents) map to Salesforce User records by email match. Agent role, group assignments, and profile data migrate as Salesforce Role, Profile, and Permission Set assignments. Zendesk group memberships that have no Salesforce equivalent (internal queue structures) are documented but not replicated. Inactive Zendesk users map to inactive Salesforce Users to preserve historical assignment.

Zendesk Help Center has no native export. We run a dedicated export job against the Help Center API, downloading all HTML article bodies, inline images, content blocks, and translations via separate API calls. Articles are written to Salesforce Knowledge with category and section mapping remapped to the destination's data category group structure. This step is scoped separately because Help Center API runs in its own rate limit bucket separate from the Support API.

Zendesk tags on tickets and contacts are flat string arrays. We offer two strategies: migrate as Salesforce Topics with TopicAssignment records for org-wide tag usage, or migrate to a custom multi-select picklist field on the target object for object-scoped tagging. The customer chooses during scoping.