Migrate from Desky to Zoho Desk

Desky Tickets migrate to Zoho Desk Tickets 1:1. The subject, description, status (Open, Pending, Resolved, Closed), priority, assignee agent email, created time, and modified time map directly. Custom ticket fields from Desky migrate to Zoho Desk custom fields, which require pre-creation in the destination portal under Setup > Customization > Layouts and Fields. We validate custom field data types before insert to avoid Zoho Desk validation rule rejections. Ticket thread history (agent replies, customer replies) migrates as Ticket Threads in Zoho Desk, with authorship preserved by matching agent emails to Zoho Desk agent records.

Desky Agent accounts migrate to Zoho Desk Agents using email as the primary dedupe key. Zoho Desk's CSV schema for agents requires agentExtId, Last Name, First Name, and Email (email is required and if an agent with that email already exists, the system maps to the existing user). We flag any Desky agents with inactive status that will need to be reactivated in Zoho Desk post-migration. Agent roles (Admin, Agent) map from Desky's role system to Zoho Desk role assignments.

Desky Customer contacts migrate to Zoho Desk Contacts with name, email, phone, and company association preserved. The ContactExtId column in Zoho Desk's CSV schema serves as the dedupe key. If the corresponding Company (Account) has not yet been created, we insert Contacts after Accounts to satisfy the AccountExtId lookup relationship. Mobile number, street, city, state, country, and zip map to Zoho Desk Contact fields directly.

Desky Company records migrate to Zoho Desk Accounts. The AccountExtId column is the dedupe key. Fields mapping include Account Name (required), Phone, Email, Website, Industry, Street, City, Description, and Annual Revenue. We create all Accounts before importing Contacts so that the Account-to-Contact linkage is established at insert time. Any Desky Company records without an associated Customer are created as standalone Accounts.

Desky Knowledge Base Articles migrate to Zoho Desk Solutions (KB Articles). Article title, body content (HTML), publication status (Draft, Published), and category assignment map directly. However, article attachments stored as URL references in Desky's CSV export will not migrate through Zoho Desk's KB import; we download all referenced files separately and re-upload them as Zoho Desk article attachments in a post-import pass. Any HTML formatting that does not survive UTF-8 re-encoding is flagged for manual review.

Desky Tags migrate as string labels applied to the corresponding Ticket and Article records at the destination. Zoho Desk supports tags on tickets and articles, and we re-apply the original tag strings during the post-import pass. We handle tag normalization (lowercasing, trimming whitespace) to prevent duplicate tags from identical labels with different casing.

Ticket attachments in Desky are stored as file URLs in the CSV export. We download all referenced files, preserving original filenames and MIME types, then upload them to Zoho Desk Tickets via the Zoho Desk REST API. High-attachment tickets (more than 10 files) are flagged upfront for manual verification. We batch uploads in chunks of 50 to respect Zoho's credit-based API rate limits.

Desky user-defined ticket fields map to Zoho Desk custom fields. We detect all custom field definitions during the source scan, map their data types to Zoho Desk field types (Text, Number, Date, Dropdown, Checkbox, etc.), and create the corresponding custom field definitions in the destination portal under Setup > Customization > Layouts and Fields before any ticket data is imported. Note that Zoho Desk custom modules (creating entirely new object types beyond the standard set) require Enterprise tier; custom fields on Tickets, Contacts, and Accounts are available from Standard tier onward.

Desky does not have a formal Department construct, but agents can be grouped informally. Zoho Desk is department-centric: every agent, ticket, and article belongs to a Department. During scoping we identify whether the customer's Zoho Desk destination already has Departments configured; if not, we create a default Department and assign all migrated agents and tickets to it. Multi-department configurations (splitting support teams by product line or region) are documented as a post-migration configuration step for the customer's admin.

If Desky Products are in scope (typically used for ticket-to-product linking in warranty or hardware support scenarios), we migrate them to Zoho Desk Products. The Product Name and Product Code fields map directly. Products must be imported before any Ticket records that reference them, as the product lookup relationship must be satisfied at insert time.

Desky Tasks (agent action items attached to tickets) migrate to Zoho Desk Tasks with Subject, Description, Status, Priority, Due Date, and assigned Agent preserved. Tasks are imported after Agents so that the OwnerId lookup resolves correctly. Thread-level tasks in Desky that are associated with a specific ticket comment are linked to the corresponding Ticket Thread record in Zoho Desk.

Desky ticket conversation history migrates to Zoho Desk Ticket Threads. Each thread entry preserves the author (agent or customer), the direction (incoming/outgoing), the timestamp, and the message body. Direction classification from Desky maps to Zoho Desk's thread direction field; if Desky does not expose direction metadata, we infer it from whether the author is an Agent or a Customer contact.