In global retail, data silos aren’t just a technical issue; they block customer loyalty. For Pandora, the world’s largest jewelry brand, digital transformation was the key to moving from fragmented support to a unified, enterprise-level customer experience.
As part of this transformation, Pandora migrated from Zendesk to Salesforce Service Cloud (Agentforce Service). For a company of this scale, even a short migration downtime could cost millions. That’s why they partnered with Help Desk Migration to ensure a smooth, secure, and zero-downtime data transfer.
About Pandora
Pandora is the world’s largest jewelry brand, delivering “affordable luxury” across 6,500+ points of sale and a global workforce of 37,000. In 2024, the company generated $4.6 billion in revenue and sold over 100 million pieces of jewelry.
To keep up this momentum, Pandora launched a digital transformation. The goal was to move away from siloed tools and consolidate support operations into a single ecosystem. This way, their support team can ensure every customer enjoys a seamless experience, no matter where they are in the world.
Why Pandora Migrated from Zendesk to Salesforce
As Pandora’s digital operations grew, they decided to migrate from Zendesk to consolidate their other platforms within the Salesforce ecosystem. Most importantly, Salesforce Service Cloud (Agentforce Service) is designed better to integrate customer service operations with other internal systems and create a more unified platform for managing customer interactions.
This move lets customer service data flow seamlessly across their existing systems and supports their long-term operational goals. Agents now access a 360-degree customer profile, including purchase history, repair claims, and past interactions. So Salesforce Service Cloud (Agentforce Service) replaced isolated tickets with a unified view of customer data.
Migration Goals and Scope
The goal was a high-fidelity migration of Pandora’s entire support history. It wasn’t a simple move, since it involved years of customer data they needed under their historical data retention strategy.
What was migrated:
- Tickets and contacts: Full interaction history and complete customer profiles.
- Call recordings: Critical for quality assurance, training, and compliance across global operations.
- Attachments: Product images and documentation essential for repair workflows and warranty claims.
- Side conversations: Internal notes and third-party communications from Zendesk to retain full context behind each ticket.
Moreover, Pandora audited large volumes of historical data to migrate only what mattered. This way, their team ensured Salesforce (Agentforce Service) contained all mission-critical context.
How the Migration Was Planned
With Help Desk Migration, Pandora engineered an enterprise-level transition that comes down to the following steps:
1. Data governance
The Pandora team obtained security and compliance approvals for all migration tools. Sensitive customer data remained protected at every stage.
2. Data strategy
Next, the enterprise established a data retention policy and selected which historical records to retain. Retaining only high-value data reduced clutter and kept Salesforce (Agentforce Service) efficient.
3. Field mapping
Pandora performed detailed mapping of fields and objects between Zendesk and Salesforce (Agentforce Service). After that, they worked closely with business teams and stakeholders to validate the mappings.
4. Testing phase
The team ran multiple Demo Migrations in a sandbox environment. This step detected conflicts with automations and validation rules before the Full Migration.
Help Desk Migration guided Pandora at every step. Our team provided excellent support, responding quickly to questions and resolving issues efficiently.
Support reps guided the Pandora team through the license procurement process and clearly explained how the migration would work. Our expertise and hands-on support were key to completing the migration.
Challenges During Salesforce Migration
Even with the best tools, enterprise migrations face hurdles. Pandora encountered a common challenge: Salesforce’s validation rules and automations.
In enterprise environments, help desk platforms often include complex business logic that can alter incoming data during migration. In addition, specific automaitons can flag historical records as invalid during migration. They can also enforce compliance and reduce manual, repetitive tasks for support agents.
To avoid disruptions, the team used a 3-step approach. They temporarily turned off these rules, migrated the data without errors or unnecessary triggers, and then re-enabled them once the process was complete.
Results
Pandora’s migration delivered a seamless enterprise-scale transformation. The Salesforce (Agentforce Service) platform now supports global operations without service disruption, giving its business a solid foundation for growth. Here are the key results:
- Successful enterprise migration: Global support operations moved from Zendesk to Salesforce Service Cloud (Agentforce Service) to align with digital goals.
- Complete data integrity: All customer records, including tickets, attachments, call recordings, and internal conversations, migrated with full accuracy.
- Zero downtime: Pandora handled all automated workflows carefully to ensure uninterrupted support.
- Scalable, unified platform: Consolidated data provides a 360-degree customer view, enabling faster decision-making, better reporting, and consistent service worldwide.
Expert Tips from Pandora Team
Pandora’s approach offers a clear blueprint for enterprise teams planning a similar migration:
Map fields, objects, and relationships before starting the migration. During the process, you get to decide how to match each field for tickets, articles, customers, and organizations. You can skip a field or choose a default value. This process ensures data stays accurate, structured, and usable in the new help desk platform.
2. Run multiple test migrations.
For an enterprise migration, a Demo Migration in a Sandbox environment is a must. This step helps identify automation conflicts, validation errors, missing dependencies, or field mismatches.
Using a staging environment for Demo Migration also helps prevent disruption to support operations if your team is already working on the target platform during the migration. As a result, your team can address problems before the Full Migration impacts live operations.
3. Disable automations.
Review and temporarily turn off complex automations or validation rules during migration. Temporarily switching them off prevents errors, duplicate or blocked records. Once the data has migrated safely, turn on the automations to maintain normal operations and protect ongoing processes.
Key Takeaways for Enterprise Teams
Planning an enterprise migration isn’t an easy task. Because of its scale and complexity, such a migration touches every layer of operations, from data integrity to automated workflows.
However, teams that plan strategically and anticipate system-level conflicts can minimize risk and maintain business continuity. Here are three key principles of Help Desk Migration to follow:
Migration = Data + Process + Systems
Enterprise migration is a complete alignment of data, workflows, and business logic across systems. You need to preserve every dependency, relationship, and automation to ensure the new platform works as expected.
Start with these pre-migration steps:
1. Audit your source data
Clean up outdated, incomplete, or invalid records before migration. This way, you reduce clutter, prevent errors, and ensure only relevant data is transferred.
2. Prepare the target platform
Configure settings in advance. For instance, you can create agent profiles, set up custom fields, and adjust business rules if needed.
3. Plan your migration timeline
Choose a time that minimizes disruption and align your team in advance. If your support team continues working in the source platform, use Delta Migration to migrate new and updated tickets. You can also consider Interval Migration to control timing.
Testing is Critical
At scale, assumptions can be costly. Multiple test migrations in a sandbox environment are essential to validate data, check workflow continuity, and identify potential issues before they impact live operations.
Testing also allows you to fine-tune configurations and prepare your team to work in the new system using real data.
Automation Conflicts are Expected
Complex platforms like Salesforce Service Cloud (Agentforce Service) use validation rules and automation triggers that may block or flag data during migration. Plan a controlled deactivation window and carefully re-enable automations post-migration to prevent errors and maintain support flow.
Ready to Migrate?
Growth shouldn’t come at the cost of downtime. Pandora’s migration journey shows that you can move from an outdated system without pausing support or risking data accuracy.
If your team needs to stay fully operational right up to the switch, automated migration ensures continuity, accuracy, and speed. Request a Free Demo Migration to see how your customer records move without downtime. Or download a PDF case study to learn more about enterprise-level migrations.
