Migrate from House-on-the-Hill Service Desk to Freshdesk

House-on-the-Hill stores Contacts in a separate database and exports them as a flat CSV with name, email, phone, and company fields. Freshdesk Contacts require at least ten tickets to exist in the account before the contact import succeeds, so we sequence ticket creation before contact import. We map the source email address as the dedupe key, preserve any custom contact fields as Freshdesk custom contact fields created before import, and set the primary company via the Companies import pass that precedes this step.

House-on-the-Hill Companies (organisations) export with name, domain, and address fields as a flat CSV. Freshdesk Companies require the company name as the primary key. We create the Companies pass before Contacts so that Freshdesk can resolve the company association on each contact record at import time. House-on-the-Hill's flat company model maps directly to Freshdesk's company structure without transformation.

House-on-the-Hill agent accounts are stored in a distinct database but the HTTPS Report API does not expose agent records for automated export, so we export agent data from the UI CSV export where available. Freshdesk agents are provisioned in Admin > Agents before migration. We map House-on-the-Hill agent email addresses to Freshdesk agent accounts by email match, and any House-on-the-Hill agent without a corresponding Freshdesk account is held in a reconciliation queue for the customer's admin to provision before record import resumes.

Tickets are the primary House-on-the-Hill record type and migrate cleanly via CSV export from Settings Cog > More Tools. We map source columns to Freshdesk ticket schema: subject becomes subject, description_text becomes description, source priority and status map to Freshdesk priority and status enums. The source ticket reference number is preserved as a custom field for audit traceability. Ticket import is sequenced after Contacts and Companies but before Conversations to ensure requester and company lookups resolve at insert time.

Ticket conversations (public replies and internal notes) in House-on-the-Hill are stored as a related table. We export the conversation thread linked to each ticket by ticket reference number and import them in ticket-ID order after the ticket base is loaded in Freshdesk. Public replies become Freshdesk conversation notes with the is_reply flag; internal notes become Freshdesk private notes. The source timestamp is preserved on each conversation record to maintain thread ordering.

KB articles are stored separately from tickets in House-on-the-Hill. We export them as structured records and map them to Freshdesk Help Center articles, preserving article-body HTML, category assignments, and any custom article fields. Freshdesk requires the Help Center to be configured before article import (Admin > Help Center settings). Article-to-category mapping uses the category names exported from House-on-the-Hill as the matching key. Pair-specific risk: Freshdesk's native import tools have been reported to duplicate KB articles on re-import, so we use API-based article creation with idempotent keying by source article ID to prevent duplication.

File attachments in House-on-the-Hill are stored in the document management system and linked to tickets by an internal document ID. The ticket CSV does not embed attachment binary data. We export all attachment records as a separate pass, download each file, then upload to Freshdesk using the attachments API endpoint and re-associate by matching the source ticket reference to the migrated Freshdesk ticket ID. This two-phase approach (ticket load first, then attachment upload and re-link) is required to avoid broken attachment references in the final dataset.

Custom ticket and contact fields are defined in the House-on-the-Hill form designer. We inspect the field schema via the CSV export template and create equivalent Freshdesk custom fields in Admin > Support Operations before any data import begins. Dropdown, multi-select, date, number, and boolean field types map directly. Any custom field in House-on-the-Hill without a Freshdesk equivalent is created as a text custom field and flagged for the customer to review for type accuracy post-migration.

SLA policies and their association with tickets are not independently exportable from the House-on-the-Hill ticket record; the HTTPS Report API does not expose SLA records independently. We extract SLA name and breach time from the ticket export where present and recreate SLA rules as Freshdesk Admin > SLA Policies configurations before ticket import. Ticket-level SLA assignments are then mapped by ticket reference after the SLA Policy configuration is complete.

Tags in House-on-the-Hill are a flat label system applied to tickets, stored as a comma-separated string per ticket in the CSV export. We split the tag string at import time and create Freshdesk tags via the tags API before or alongside ticket import. Tags used for ticket categorisation migrate directly; tags used for internal routing or workflow context are flagged for the customer's admin to reassign using Freshdesk's automation rules post-migration.