Enterprise data migrations require careful planning, especially when historical records play an important role in everyday operations. For Wealthsimple, completed support tickets served as a valuable knowledge base, helping employees resolve recurring issues and onboard new team members.
When the company moved to Jira Service Management, it needed to preserve this information while keeping its support operations running. This case study explores how Wealthsimple approached the migration, customized the process, and transferred its data with Help Desk Migration.
About Wealthsimple
Wealthsimple Inc. is a Toronto-based Canadian investment management company. It was established in September 2014 by three co-founders: Michael Katchen, Brett Huneycutt, and Rudy Adler. The company’s main goal is to make investing more accessible through low-cost solutions and accounts with no minimum investment requirements.
The Wealthsimple team consists of financial experts and IT professionals who previously worked at enterprises like Google and Amazon. Their investment approach combines globally diversified portfolios built around low-cost index funds.
What makes Wealthsimple stand out is its desire to put clients’ interests first. Their main strategies include: 1) offering best-in-class financial products, 2) minimizing fees, and 3) ensuring complete transparency in investment vehicles. Moreover, their customer service agents add a human touch and ensure clients receive an excellent experience.
Enterprise Data Migration Goals and Scope
Wealthsimple’s IT team has a huge knowledge base in the form of completed tickets. These help with repetitive tasks, as new team members can easily search how tasks were handled before. The team needed to preserve this information.
What was migrated:
2K Contacts
1 Companies
9 Agents
How Wealthsimple Planned Their Enterprise Help Desk Migration
Before committing to the migration project, Wealthsimple explored other options. This stage included other third-party services and building a custom migration tool with public APIs. However, other providers had poor ratings, while developing an in-house solution would take too much time.
After Wealthsimple chose Help Desk Migration, they started with a sample migration to confirm it met their requirements. During this step, they configured auto-field mapping and built-in customization options, like migrating inline images as attachments, side conversations as private comments, and adding tags to imported tickets.
Once the team confirmed the approach, they opted for a Premium support plan to cover the weekend migration window. Help Desk Migration's sales and dev engineers answered all migration-related questions and provided hands-on assistance throughout the enterprise data migration to help resolve any issues that arose.
The Wealthsimple team also used the migration dashboard to monitor progress and track the transfer in real time.
Challenges During the Jira Service Management Migration
Wealthsimple had a few requirements for this enterprise data migration:
- Strict timeline: The Wealthsimple team had a specific timeframe to migrate from one help desk to another.
- Data integrity: The enterprise migration also required exceptionally high fidelity. In their case, every piece of metadata, including tags, inline images, and side conversations, could influence clients’ investment decisions.
- Historical data migration: The Wealthsimple team used old tickets as references and training resources for their new staff.
- No downtime: The enterprise help desk migration ran over the weekends, so Wealthsimple didn't have to put their customer support on hold.
How the Jira Service Management Migration Was Customized
Wealthsimple started with a Free Demo Migration to test out our service and identify any customization needs. The team ultimately opted for a self-serve migration with several built-in options to preserve metadata.
| Option | What it did | Why the team needed it |
|---|---|---|
| Tags to migrated tickets | Added a tag to all imported tickets in Jira Service Management. | Agents could easily search the old tickets for cross-reference using a specific tag. |
| Inline images as attachments | Converted inline images into issue attachments. | Jira Service Management doesn't support migrating inline images. Otherwise, they would have been lost. |
| Side conversations as private comments | Migrated Zendesk side conversations as private comments. | Jira Service Management doesn’t have a side-conversation feature. This option preserved private conversations between staff. |
Results of Jira Service Management Migration
Expert Tips from the Wealthsimple Team
Why Wealthsimple recommends Help Desk Migration:
It was a great experience overall, especially thanks to the sales and support team. The IT Manager appreciated being able to ask questions before committing to the service, as well as the free demo. That gave the IT Manager the confidence that the service would meet the team’s requirements.
Tips for teams planning a migration:
1. Choose a highly rated service over a custom tool
Look into a highly rated migration service before you commit too much engineering effort to building a custom tool.
2. Ask your questions before you commit
Contact the migration team with your questions before you commit to the service, and use the Free Demo to see how it works.
3. Automate to save time and money
Choose an automated self-serve migration tool over custom API development and manual migration. An engineer-led migration tool like Help Desk Migration offers automatic field mapping, data filtering, real-time validation reports, and customized solutions for companies of any size and industry.
Plan Your Enterprise Migration Ahead
Wealthsimple's experience highlights three main lessons for anyone planning an enterprise help desk migration: choose a reliable service, test before committing, and prioritize data integrity.
With Help Desk Migration, Wealthsimple avoided the time and expense of developing a custom API solution, preserved essential ticket metadata, and moved its historical support data without disrupting operations. The result? A more unified support environment in Jira Service Management and a smoother workflow for developers and support teams.
