Migrate from Channel Talk to Freshdesk

Channel Talk Contacts (Managed Users) map to Freshdesk Contacts. The MU count is scoped during discovery because it affects both the Channel Talk export batch sizing and Freshdesk's contact-tier billing on certain plans. For contacts with a company domain or explicit company property, we also create a Freshdesk Company record and link it via the Contact's company_id lookup. Custom contact properties migrate as Freshdesk custom fields (string, number, date, boolean) which must be pre-created in Freshdesk admin before migration; we run a pre-flight check to confirm every source property has a destination field before data moves.

Channel Talk Conversations map to Freshdesk Tickets with each message preserved as a ticket comment. Channel Talk's conversation status (active, closed) maps to Freshdesk ticket status (Open, Resolved). Conversation priority and assigned operator migrate as ticket priority and agent assignment. Conversation tags become Freshdesk ticket tags. Long conversation threads are chunked to stay within Freshdesk API payload limits during import. We reconstruct the thread ordering from Channel Talk's message timestamps to preserve the chronological conversation view.

Channel Talk Team Chats are internal collaboration threads with no direct Freshdesk equivalent. We attach team chat messages as internal notes on the most recently related Freshdesk ticket (resolved by matching the customer contact on the Channel Talk conversation thread). Author attribution and timestamps are preserved. This is a reference-level migration; the customer should establish a separate internal communication process in Freshdesk's internal notes or a connected tool post-migration.

Channel Talk Documents map to Freshdesk Knowledge Base articles. We preserve article content, section categorisation, and portal visibility settings. Base64 inline images embedded in articles are extracted and re-attached as Freshdesk article attachments. The Freshdesk knowledge base folder structure (Categories and Folders) is pre-created in the destination before article import to avoid import-order failures. We validate the article count post-import against the source to catch the duplicate-article issue documented in Freshdesk community migrations.

Channel Talk custom contact properties are mapped field-by-field to Freshdesk custom fields. We handle type differences (Channel Talk text, number, date, and multi-select) and convert them to equivalent Freshdesk custom field types. All destination custom fields must exist in Freshdesk before migration begins; we create them via the Freshdesk API during schema preparation. If a destination custom field is missing at migration time, its data is silently skipped by the Freshdesk API — we prevent this with a pre-flight schema verification step.

Channel Talk Workflows trigger on conversation start, message sent, contact updated, and bot interaction events. These event-condition-action rules have no direct Freshdesk equivalent and cannot be migrated as code. We document each workflow as a step-by-step sequence with trigger type, conditions, and actions, then hand this to the customer's Freshdesk admin to rebuild in Freshdesk's Scenario Automations. Complex multi-branch workflows with more than three conditions may require simplification; we flag these during documentation for admin review.

Channel Talk chatbots are tied to specific workflow triggers and knowledge base document sources. We map the bot intent rules, triggering conversation events, and linked document IDs. The intent structure and response flows are documented in a step-by-step format for rebuild in Freshdesk's chatbot builder (available on Freshdesk Omni). The Freshdesk admin rebuilds the bot logic post-migration using the documented intents and the migrated knowledge base articles as the new content source.

Tags applied to Channel Talk Contacts and Conversations migrate as flat label arrays to Freshdesk tags. We preserve the tag vocabulary exactly. Tags used for conversation categorisation in Channel Talk map to Freshdesk ticket tags; contact-level tags map to Freshdesk contact tags. The tag set is verified post-migration against the source vocabulary to confirm no labels were dropped during import.