Data import to Freshdesk with Help Desk Migration — no stress, no downtime

Gianluca Pereyra: At Visor aI, we help our customers—mainly organizations—automate their services using artificial intelligence. We primarily operate in a business-to-business model, working with banks, insurance companies, and other businesses. Our software includes features like virtual assistants, such as chatbots, for live chat or process automation within companies.

We provide our own software as a service. Our clients subscribe to it, and when they have questions, they can reach out to our customer success team.

Gianluca Pereyra: Joana and I were trying to gather all the information from the different parties. We migrated from other software to Freshsales for our sales team and from Jira Service Management to Freshdesk for our customer success team.

Initially, we engaged with the team of Freshworks, who sold both solutions. We required a partner to help us with managing all these teams. They recommended a partner to assist with the early configurations of all the solutions. And then mostly it was Joanna and I trying to put all the pieces together, managing the communication between Freshworks, the partner, our sales teams, and our customer success team, and coordinating all configurations to ensure a successful implementation.

Gianluca Pereyra: To this extent? Probably no. But we’ve already done other migrations between software, either from sales or CRM systems, though not with the volume of data we are dealing with now.

Gianluca Pereyra: Honestly, no. The drivers for our previous migrations were different. This time, we had a very concrete deadline due to our annual contract renewal with Jira. So, we had to beat this deadline and move a lot of information between systems. Although we’re still using Jira software, we needed to transition away from Jira Service Management.

The previous migrations were more about trying new software—finding alternatives, putting some information from place A to place B, and assessing whether the new software would meet our needs.

Gianluca Pereyra: Honestly, there was a little bit of concern about not being able to either meet the deadline or if the new software would not live up to our needs. So, we’ve chosen new software to migrate to, and while putting in a lot of effort, there’s a fear that it might not work well or meet our expectations and needs.

To compare, you asked if we’ve done other migrations before—although they weren’t as large, we did try to implement other software or solutions. These processes were very time-consuming and took a lot of effort from different people in our teams. And even though we had a partner, it didn't go well.

We spent a lot of time trying to implement a new analytics dashboard with a specific partner and technology, but it didn’t go well. So that was also one of our concerns during these migrations: What if we don’t meet the deadline? What if the partner doesn’t deliver what we need? What if the new software can’t accommodate the data we’ve gathered over the years? Will it be suitable for our needs? These were some of the concerns we had.

Joana Rocha: I believe the tool is amazing. One of our main concerns was exporting all the fields, especially since we have many fields in Jira Service Management that are crucial for our customer support team. In this case, we can move all the information during the initial test. This is the most important aspect for us.

Gianluca Pereyra: If I can add to that, I’d say it was nearly perfect—not just the tool, but also the support we got from your customer success team. And in this case, I'm talking about Elvira and Yaroslav.

We came across your solution at a time when things were starting to look not so good. The other tools we were using for the migration weren’t meeting our expectations, and we were beginning to lose a little bit of trust in them. That’s when Joane and I decided to explore other options, and we came across your solution.

It was meaningful for us because Freshworks had your solution in their marketplace. So they managed to leverage the relationship between you as a provider and us as their client. And when we got to your solution, I’d rate it a solid nine for meeting our needs at that time. However, there was one part that didn’t go as planned—our attempt to migrate Confluence, which didn’t work out.

But for our main goal of migrating some information and custom fields, your team was perfect in assisting and very quick. After we signed up and tried the first demo, we immediately began receiving relevant information on how things were going. So that actually made us move forward.

Gianluca Pereyra: When setting up and configuring a migration, we can choose the specific project we want to migrate from Jira Service Management. We can go actually into a lot of detail with custom fields, assignees, and so on, and data mapping works quite well. We needed to pay a lot of attention to details to make sure that we didn’t mess up the fields.

However, when it came to Confluence, where we wanted to add the knowledge base, things were different. The Jira Service Management migration was perfect since it was our main priority, but when we tried the Confluence migration, it didn’t go as well.

When we migrated Confluence, it pulled almost all the articles from the original Confluence, including internal manuals we use for our sales reps and so on. Unfortunately, these were automatically made public in the Freshdesk solution, which was an issue for us. We struggled to match all the data because the process wasn’t as easy as it was with the Jira Service Management migration, which led to some challenges.

Gianluca Pereyra: There were a few details I really enjoyed. For example, when setting up the URL for Jira Service Management, you have a little tooltip with a link that took us directly to Jira Software to generate the API key. Given that Jira Software is a large and complex platform, you’ve made it quite easy to go and fetch that information. Overall, the migration went very well. While the platform’s design is more functional than visually appealing, it served its purpose effectively. However, there was an issue when matching some elements during configuration. Joana, would you like to share the parts that we had for that migration when configuring?

Joana Rocha: I don’t recall the exact page, but I remember when we started the migration, we encountered an issue with closing a page. When we clicked to close the page, it didn’t disappear, and we were unsure how to skip or close it properly. We were concerned about losing all the fields and data we had entered. So I believe this is one of the things that we have concerns about when we didn’t see the close page and how to skip.

Gianluca Pereyra: The issue was with the wizard modal during field configuration; it didn’t have a close button in the top right corner. This raised concerns that we might lose our progress if we needed to go back. Although it was a minor detail, it was something we were worried about. On a positive note, being able to test with 20 different custom data points was very helpful. It allowed us to quickly identify any missing elements.

I also liked that you had your team help us migrate the custom field into a custom field and did so very quickly. That was a very nice thing as well. In general, everything went pretty well, except for the confluence part.

Gianluca Pereyra: I think it's very important to have an owner of the project or someone responsible for taking care of the migration. And I think in these migrations you need to set your priorities right.

Be aware that the person working with Freshdesk should already have their client management workflow defined. Consider how this may differ from the original setup. Additionally, check if other teams are involved. We gathered a lot of information, and our customer success team had specific requirements they wanted to keep checking. So, try to get these requirements beforehand. Also, make sure the person in charge of the migration has the necessary permissions to generate API tokens and change group permissions.

One of things Joana and I encountered during the migration, especially from Jira, was dealing with a lot of different security groups, access levels, and people subscribed to various products. There could be things that I might see in Jira and those I don’t have access to. Some colleagues might not have the permissions to see certain data, leading to confusion about whether the data was missing when it was actually there all along. Understanding these aspects thoroughly is crucial. Therefore, having a checklist that includes permissions, desired outcomes, and platform differences is very important.