Migrate from Gladly to Zendesk

Gladly Customer Profiles map to Zendesk End Users. Each Profile has a unique Customer ID, unique email, and unique mobile number. We export both current and pre-merge historical Customer IDs because Gladly 301-redirects absorbed Profile IDs to the surviving ID while the Work Sessions Report retains the old value. In Zendesk, we store the original Gladly Customer ID in a custom field gladly_customer_id__c on the User record for cross-referencing and reporting continuity.

Gladly enforces a single open Conversation per Customer Profile at any time. We split each Gladly Conversation into individual Zendesk Tickets by Topic assignment and channel metadata (voice, email, SMS, chat). The split increases apparent ticket count in Zendesk compared to Gladly's conversation count, which the customer's CX lead must acknowledge before cutover. Closed Conversations map to Zendesk Ticket status (Solved/Closed); open Conversations map to Open status.

Gladly Conversation Items represent individual messages across all channels within a Conversation. We export all Items with timestamps, channel metadata (type, direction, agent attribution), and body content. In Zendesk, each Item becomes a Comment on the corresponding Ticket, with the original channel preserved in a custom field original_channel__c so agents know whether the interaction originated as email, chat, SMS, or voice.

Gladly Topics are taggable labels applied to Conversations for routing and analytics. We export Topic assignments and apply them as Zendesk Tags. Tags serve as the primary classification mechanism in Zendesk equivalent to Gladly's Topic model. Tag names are preserved exactly to maintain continuity in any reporting or routing rules that reference them.

Gladly User records include name, email, role, and permission set. We export all active and inactive agents and map them to Zendesk User records, preserving role assignments (Agent, Admin) and group memberships. Agents without an email match in the Zendesk destination are held in a reconciliation queue for the customer's admin to provision before record import proceeds.

Gladly Workflows encode routing logic, spam filtering, required disclosures, and agent handoff rules as configuration rather than data records. There is no bulk API endpoint to export Workflow definitions. We audit every active Gladly Workflow during discovery, document the trigger conditions and actions in a written specification, and deliver it to the customer's Zendesk admin for manual reimplementation as Zendesk Triggers and Automations post-migration.

Gladly Answers articles, categories, and metadata export via API and map to Zendesk Guide Articles, Sections, and Categories. Zendesk Guide must be activated manually in the destination account before migration begins (it is a separate product). Article HTML bodies transfer directly; translated articles require a locale mapping step before import because Gladly and Zendesk handle multilingual article hierarchy differently.

Gladly's custom object configuration requires extensive testing per G2 reviewers. We audit every custom object in the customer's Gladly account and design an equivalent Zendesk Custom Field (on Ticket or User) or Custom Object (Enterprise tier) schema before migration. Field types are mapped: Gladly text to Zendesk text, Gladly dropdown to Zendesk single-select, Gladly multi-select to Zendesk multi-select with the caveat that Zendesk generates tags from these fields automatically.

Gladly exposes a webhook system with configurable events, retry policies, and ping events. We export webhook endpoint URLs, subscribed events, and retry configurations as a written inventory. The customer's admin re-establishes these as Zendesk Targets and Triggers in the Zendesk Admin UI post-migration, since Zendesk webhooks use a different configuration model (Extensions API rather than Gladly's webhook API).

Gladly exports CSV and JSON reports via the UI and API. The Work Sessions Report retains old Customer IDs after profile merges, which we flag during scoping. We recommend exporting CSVs before migration and mapping them to Zendesk's Explore reporting workspace post-migration, noting that any existing Zendesk Guide report hierarchy will need to be rebuilt. Custom dashboards do not transfer.