Migrate from Zendesk

This guide walks through a complete Zendesk migration. Most teams finish in a single day for under 100k tickets, two days for larger archives. The migration is non-destructive: your Zendesk instance keeps running until you cut DNS over.

What gets migrated

• Tickets — every ticket, including comments, internal notes, and timestamps.
• Customers — end users with email, name, organizations, and custom fields.
• Macros — converted into Ochre saved replies.
• Attachments — files inline and on tickets.
• Ticket IDs — preserved as conversation aliases. The customer's old reference like #48201 keeps working forever. See Conversation aliases.
• Tags — kept as-is.
• Ticket fields and forms — mapped to Ochre custom fields. See Custom fields.
• Agents — matched by email to invited Ochre users so historical assignments line up.

What does not migrate

• Triggers, automations, and SLA policies. Ochre has its own system. Recreate them using Routing rules and SLA policies.
• Help center articles. Migrate these separately from your Notion or GitBook source, or import directly. See Connecting Notion.
• Apps and Marketplace integrations. Connect Ochre's native integrations: Stripe, HubSpot, Linear, GitHub, Slack.
• Talk (voice). Ochre does not have voice yet.

Before you start

You will need:

• A Zendesk admin account with API access enabled.
• A Zendesk API token (Admin Center, Apps and integrations, Zendesk API, add API token).
• An Ochre owner or admin account.
• Roughly 1 hour of attended setup, then 4 to 24 hours of unattended import.

Step 1: Connect Zendesk

In Ochre, open Settings, then Migration, then Zendesk. Paste:

• Your subdomain (the part before .zendesk.com).
• The admin email.
• The API token.

Ochre validates the credentials and runs a dry-run scan to count tickets, users, macros, and attachments. You see an estimate before anything imports.

Step 2: Map agents

Ochre lists every Zendesk agent. For each one, choose:

• Match to existing Ochre user — pick from the dropdown.
• Invite as new user — pick a role (admin, agent, or light agent).
• Skip — historical messages from this agent are preserved with their email but no live account.

Get this right before you start. Mapping is not retroactive. If you skip someone and want them later, you reinvite manually.

Step 3: Map ticket fields

Zendesk ticket fields map to Ochre custom fields. Defaults are sensible:

• Status, priority, type, and subject map directly.
• Custom dropdowns become Ochre dropdown fields.
• Free-text fields become Ochre text fields.

Review the mappings and edit anything that looks off, then continue.

Step 4: Choose what to import

Select:

• Date range. Last 6 months, last 2 years, or all time. All time is the default but most teams cap at 2 years to keep things fast.
• Statuses. By default, all statuses including solved and closed. You can exclude closed tickets older than X days if you want a leaner archive.
• Brands. If you have multiple Zendesk brands, pick which to import as separate Ochre channels.

Hit Start import.

Step 5: Wait

Imports run in the background. You can keep using Zendesk during the migration. The progress page shows live counts and lets you pause or cancel.

Typical throughput: 50k tickets per hour with attachments. Larger workspaces (multi-million ticket archives) coordinate with Ochre support to run a parallel import. Contact Support contact.

Step 6: Verify

When the import finishes, spot-check:

• Conversation count matches Zendesk's ticket count for the date range.
• A handful of tickets end-to-end: comments, attachments, internal notes, timestamps, agent attribution.
• Customer search returns the right people. See Customer search.
• Macros show up as saved replies and have the right placeholders.
• Old ticket IDs work. Search for #48201 in Ochre and the right conversation should open. See Conversation aliases.

Step 7: Cut over

When you are ready to switch live traffic:

1. Update DNS. Point your support email's MX records at Ochre. See Custom domain email.
2. Set Zendesk to read-only. Suspend new ticket creation in Zendesk.
3. Update auto-replies. New tickets now reply from Ochre.
4. Tell your team. Most teams put a 1-line note in their internal channel: "We are on Ochre as of today, use this URL."

For 24 to 72 hours after cutover, watch closely:

• New tickets land in Ochre as expected.
• Old #48201-style references in customer replies still resolve via aliases.
• Reports show normal volume. See Volume metrics.

Step 8: Wind down Zendesk

Keep Zendesk available read-only for at least 30 days as a fallback. Most teams cancel after 60 days, once they are confident nothing was missed.

If something goes wrong

• Migration stuck. See Migration stuck.
• Missing tickets. Re-run the import for a specific date range. Duplicates are detected and merged automatically.
• Wrong agent attribution. Remap and run an attribution-only re-sync from the Migration page.

Next steps

• Quick start — set up the rest of your workspace.
• Routing rules — recreate your Zendesk triggers.
• SLA policies — recreate your SLA targets.