Import data to HubSpot without errors or disruptions

Compliancy Group is a one-stop shop for hospitals or anyone looking for healthcare compliance solutions. Our tool is designed to help organizations get compliant and maintain oversight by introducing policies, providing training, and conducting risk assessments. It’s all the steps you need from a healthcare compliance perspective.

As for how we use HubSpot, both our billing and support teams operate from separate pipelines, using tickets. Emails sent to our billing address go to the billing queue, and those sent to our support address go to the support queue. This setup allows us to efficiently escalate tickets to our engineering team when we need tier-two support.

Right now, we're still maturing our system. But generally, our team handles basic ticketing, logs specific properties in HubSpot for each ticket, and builds reports and dashboards based on that data.

Not everyone in our company was at Freshdesk. Some people only had viewer licenses to see things, but they were tagged and had to switch between systems. So we weren’t really tracking everything in one place. A CSM might be looking at HubSpot for an account, but unless they also check Freshdesk, they could miss the support or billing pieces.

At our current company stage, Salesforce and Gainsight were overkill. Our team was really just using it to log information and didn’t take advantage of automations or the more advanced features that make these platforms powerful.

We wanted to consolidate multiple systems to create a better experience for both internal teams and customers. From an operations perspective—managed by just myself and two colleagues—we needed a system that could scale without a dedicated full-time ops team.

HubSpot provided a simpler, more maintainable solution without the extensive certifications required for Salesforce. I was also familiar with HubSpot’s ticketing system, which made transitioning from Freshdesk straightforward.

We then built all the properties and created the system's skeleton. From a HubSpot perspective, it was a lot of prep work—getting automation ready, setting up properties, follow-up surveys, and all the other pieces—so that when we were ready to go, we could just flip the switch.

1. Knowledge base migration

On the Freshdesk side, we didn’t use Help Desk Migration for our knowledge base because we could handle it ourselves. We reviewed all the articles, decided which to bring over, created new categories and subcategories, and cleaned things up along the way.

2. Ticket migration

The biggest effort started when we got to the tickets. After getting an initial quote, I realized we had a ton of junk tickets, so over a few weeks, we went through and cleared out 53,000 old, irrelevant tickets. That felt really good, and it was also a smart move to keep costs under control and make sure we were only bringing over the data that mattered.

3. Contact and company migration

Before migration, we also exported companies and contacts from both HubSpot and Freshdesk and merged them. That way, when we started using the migration tool, we were in a really good spot with our company and contact data.

Honestly, we didn’t really run into anything major. The first challenge—and you all solved it instantly—was that I didn’t realize at the start that I couldn’t export the full body of the tickets from Freshdesk. You could export all the properties attached to them, but what we really cared about was the content of the emails themselves. That was a bit of a “oh my gosh, what are we going to do?” moment, and it’s what led us to look for a tool like yours.

But once we got into the actual migration, it was smooth. In fact, I’ve had at least ten people come to me over the last couple of weeks and say that our migration from Freshdesk to HubSpot was the smoothest migration of any two systems in this company’s history. I immediately point to Help Desk Migration as the reason—it made the process so easy. Yes, we did a lot of preparatory work, but transferring over 65,000 tickets—even after cleaning out 50,000—could have been daunting.

Once we completed the Demo Migrations, confirmed everything, and moved forward with the Full Migration, it went so smoothly that I kept thinking, “Where’s the catch?” It almost felt too good to be true.

Since then, everyone I’ve spoken to has been impressed. I can honestly say this was the least headache I’ve ever had with a system migration, and I sing your praises every chance I get.

Outside of the tool simply doing what it’s supposed to do, the support was a huge reason. I always laughed because I never knew who would respond to me, but everyone who did was top-notch and always so quick.

When you’re going through a migration, that level of responsiveness matters. I’m young enough to understand technology, but old enough to be skeptical of anything that feels too good at first glance. So when I found the tool through the HubSpot marketplace, my first reaction was, “OK, I need to do additional research.”

Even though the reviews were good and everything on the website checked out, I still had that initial hesitation. But as I started talking more with the support team, going back and forth, connecting before the migration to walk through things, the quality of the support and the customer service immediately put those concerns to rest.

Throughout the entire process, there wasn’t a single moment where I wondered, “Where are they?” or felt unclear about what was happening. Everything was communicated clearly and handled well.

To me, you can build a great tool, but if it doesn’t come with great support and customer service, it doesn’t really matter.

I know you’re all based in Ukraine, and here in the States, a lot of companies just don’t provide real support anymore.

That’s how support should be, but unfortunately, it’s not typical these days. So, kudos to all of you for maintaining that level of service.

1. Do the preparation work

First, take snapshots of both systems and clearly identify what you love, what you want to bring over, what you don’t like, and what should be left behind. Understanding what data is truly important—and what isn’t—makes everything easier. Doing that prep work before you even start the migration is huge.

If we hadn’t set up the right properties and fields in HubSpot beforehand, the mapping exercise would’ve been much more complicated. It was simple because everything was already in place. I could match “support tag” to “support tag” instantly. So a big part of success is the groundwork you do before you ever click “migrate.”

2. Run a Demo Migration

Once the prep work is done, take your time with a demo migration. Start with a small subset of data, look at the results, and make tweaks early. Cleaning up 50 or 100 tickets is much easier than fixing issues across 60,000. If you put in the effort up front, the tool should make the Full Migration seamless. But even the best tools can only do so much if you haven't defined what the end result should look like.

And so, to me, it’s all about putting in the work ahead of time. If you do that, then with the way Migration Wizard works, the migration should be seamless for everyone. But I also think you can run into issues with any tool like this if you haven’t done the prep work—if you haven’t clearly established what you want and how you want it to look. Once that foundation is set, the rest is really just matching things together and sending them over.

3. Bring your team into the process

I also try to approach this as the type of leader who brings the team into the process. Throughout the prep phase, my support agents were right there with me. I wasn’t saying, “This is the way Eric is going to build it.” Instead, I asked, "What are your pain points? What works well?" And then I designed HubSpot in a way that kept the positives and turned the Freshdesk negatives into improvements.

Prep work isn’t just technical; it’s also about involving the people who live in the system every day. Support agents are living in the tickets, so giving them visibility into how the new system is being built helps them understand the bigger picture. It also gives them the ability to troubleshoot more effectively because they understand the why and the how behind the setup.

I love it when someone comes to me with a problem and a possible explanation—not just “I don’t know what’s wrong.” Projects like this help teams grow, improve collaboration, and deepen their understanding of the tools they use daily.