Migrate from Kustomer to Zendesk

Kustomer Customers map to Zendesk End Users (the requester on a ticket). We use email as the primary dedupe key during import. Phone, name, and custom properties migrate as user fields and custom user fields. Customer Id from Kustomer is preserved in a custom field kustomer_id__c for cross-reference. All Customers are imported before Conversations so that requester references are satisfied at ticket creation time.

Each Kustomer Conversation becomes a Zendesk Ticket. The conversation subject becomes the ticket Subject, the most recent message body becomes the ticket Description, and the conversation status (Done/Open) maps to Zendesk Ticket Status (Solved/Open). We flag Zendesk's 28-day auto-close automation on Solved tickets — the customer's admin should either disable it or accept that migrated Solved conversations will transition to Closed 28 days after migration. Conversation priority and SLA flags map to Zendesk Priority and SLA Policy assignment.

Public Kustomer Messages (customer-facing, agent replies) map to Zendesk Ticket Comments with the public boolean set to true. Author attribution resolves to the Zendesk agent or end-user record by email match. Message timestamps become comment timestamps to preserve the conversation sequence.

Kustomer internal Notes map to Zendesk private Ticket Comments. We set the public boolean to false. Private notes authored by agents who are not provisioned in Zendesk are assigned to a default agent specified during scoping and flagged for the customer's admin to reattribute post-migration.

Kustomer Users (agents and admins) map to Zendesk Agents. Email is the match key. We extract agent roles (admin, agent) from Kustomer and map them to Zendesk's role structure (light agent, agent, admin), adjusting for the destination plan tier. Agent availability status (active/inactive) migrates; suspended agents in Kustomer become suspended in Zendesk.

Kustomer Teams map directly to Zendesk Groups. Group membership is resolved during user provisioning so that agents belong to the correct group before ticket import begins. Routing assignments in Kustomer (which conversation goes to which team) are preserved as ticket Group assignments in Zendesk.

Kustomer Companies map to Zendesk Organizations. Organization Id from Kustomer is preserved in a custom field kustomer_company_id__c. Companies with no linked Customers are imported as orphan Organizations and flagged for the customer's admin to merge or re-link.

Tags applied to Kustomer Customers and Conversations migrate as Zendesk Tags. We require user and organization tagging to be enabled in the Zendesk Admin > Security settings before migration begins; without this setting enabled, tag import silently fails. Tags that exceed Zendesk's tag-length limit are truncated and flagged for the customer's admin to review.

Kustomer KObjects (user-defined Klasses) have no standard equivalent in Zendesk. We discover all KObject definitions during the pre-migration audit — field types, relationships, and validations — and recreate them as Zendesk Custom Objects. We map Klass relationships to Zendesk Custom Object lookup fields. Legacy Custom Object migrations use the new Custom Objects API; we avoid the Legacy Custom Object endpoint entirely since Zendesk retires it in July 2026. KObject records are imported last, after all standard objects, because they often contain lookups to Customers and Companies.

Kustomer custom properties attach to Customers, Conversations, Companies, and Channels. We enumerate all custom attributes during discovery, classify them by parent object, and recreate them as the equivalent Zendesk field type. Dropdown and multi-select properties map to Zendesk dropdown and tag fields. Validation rules from Kustomer properties do not migrate — we note them in the schema document for the customer's admin to implement in Zendesk's validation rule engine post-migration.

Files attached to Kustomer Messages and Notes are extracted from the export, re-uploaded to Zendesk, and linked to the parent Ticket Comment record. We preserve original filenames and MIME types. Attachments without a valid parent ticket (orphaned) are collected in a holding folder and reported for the customer's admin to redistribute.

Kustomer Satisfaction ratings map to Zendesk Ticket Satisfaction ratings. Rating values (positive/negative) migrate with the ticket. The satisfaction comment, if present, attaches as a private note on the ticket.