Merging Help Scout Instances for Stacking the Bricks

Stacking the Bricks logo

2010

founded

3

employees

USA

location

Data migrated
  • Tickets
  • Contacts
  • Agents
  • Companies
  • Attachments
  • Notes
  • Knowledge base
Company: Stacking the Bricks
Industry: Computer Software
Location: USA, Philadelphia
Type of migration: Help Scout to Help Scout
Challenge: The client had two separate Help Scout accounts and was frustrated by logging out of one business's Help Scout account to log into another.
Services: Customization to assign all Tickets to one User; Automatic data migration.
Result: The migration process took only three hours. Once the data was imported, the client started working in a single environment.

...one of the best parts of the Help Desk Migration process is the ability to run a small "sample" migration to see how it works.

Alex Hillman
Alex Hillman Co-founder at Stacking the Bricks

Could you tell a bit about what your company does and your background?

My partner Amy and I both come from backgrounds in software. We've both bootstrapped our own businesses separately after transitioning away from full-time employment and consulting. Amy has designed and launched multiple SaaS products (Freckle, Sweep), I started and ran one of the world’s first and longest running coworking spaces called Indy Hall.

Together we run stackingthebricks.com, a website, and podcast where we focus on how to build a business without needing any outside funding. Our flagship course, 30x500, is our battle-tested and completely systematic approach to launching a product that will have customers on day one. We also teach smaller courses and workshops, publish ebooks, and run conferences for our community of bootstrappers.

Having excellent customer support is something we take very seriously in our respective businesses, and the venture we have together is no exception!

Recently, you used Help Desk Migration service to transfer data from one Help Scout to another. How did it go? Was the procedure confusing at any point?

Once Help Scout told us that they couldn't move our Stacking the Bricks mailboxes into a different, shared account, I expected us to be totally out of luck. Thankfully, Help Scout support recommended Help Desk Migration!

It took me a couple of minutes to set up the first demo migration. The field mapping was a little confusing at first, but one of the best parts of the Help Desk Migration process is the ability to run a small "sample" migration to see how it works. I did that once (it only took a few minutes) and instantly understood how it worked and trusted that this could be a reliable way to move our entire inbox (over 7000+ tickets).

I realized that there would be a problem in that we were moving between two Help Scout accounts, and the migration service was designed to map agents who have the same email address automatically. Unfortunately, Help Scout forces agents to have unique email addresses even across accounts, so this was impossible. We really wanted to try to preserve as much of our ticket history as possible - a lot of our support happens with students over longer periods of time, so we reference that history a lot.

Thankfully, the team at Help Desk Migration was able to offer simple customization of their migration tool that allowed us to migrate the way we wanted.

Most impressively, it worked as expected on the first try! I've done a lot of data migration, and that almost never happens.

The support team worked quickly, communicated clearly, and within a couple of days, we had our entire account contents moved over.

Hopefully, we don't have to migrate again, but if we do (or know anybody who does) we will absolutely be recommending Help Desk Migration!

What can you advise to people who are also looking to migrate their data?

HDM will help you seamlessly move your tickets and customer data (they do knowledge bases too, though we didn't use that part). Leave that part to them. Their migration tools work great!

But I realized that we have various settings, including a bunch of saved responses, that won't get migrated automatically. It's easy enough to set them up in the new account, but don't forget to take screenshots of your settings and other parts of your original source helpdesk software before you close it!

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