The Complete Guide to Migrating from Kustomer to Help Scout

Moving your support operations from Kustomer to Help Scout is a significant transition that requires a clear plan for your data.

This guide covers the process of migrating your historical information while ensuring your team is ready for action on day one.

Define your migration scope

When planning your move, the first step is determining how each piece of data will reach its new home. This involves deciding what can be moved automatically, what requires a human touch, and what is better left in the past.

API Migration Scope

The bulk of your core data will move through the programming interfaces provided by both platforms.

This includes foundational elements like your users and teams, which are essential for maintaining assignment history.

You will also migrate your structural data, specifically companies and customer profiles, to ensure every interaction is linked to the correct person.

The most critical data for your team, your conversation history and knowledge base articles, are also part of this scope. By using the API, you can preserve the relationships between messages, internal notes, and their associated file attachments.

Manual Configuration Scope

Not everything has a direct equivalent that a computer can map on its own. Your automation logic, such as Kustomer workflows that use conditional branching, must be recreated manually to align with Help Scout's workflow engine.

Similarly, your routing structures, known as queues in Kustomer, are often better represented as distinct inboxes or folders within Help Scout.

You will also need to manually set up your organization settings, such as business schedules and custom snooze options, to match your team's specific operational hours and habits.

Archive and Cleanup Scope

Migration is a perfect time to declutter your database by archiving data that is no longer useful. For example, tracking events that record every click a customer made on your website often carry high volume but low long-term value for support history.

You might also choose to archive conversations that are several years old rather than moving them into your active Help Scout instance.

Custom objects that were used for specific integrations in Kustomer may not need to be migrated if those integrations are being retired or replaced.

What you will lose

No migration between platforms with fundamentally different data models is lossless. Being upfront about what cannot survive the transition helps you plan around those gaps.

• Kustomer tracking events — page views, clicks, and behavioral data tied to customer timelines do not have an equivalent in Help Scout. This data must be archived or exported separately.
• Complex KObject relationships — Kustomer custom objects can represent relational data structures (e.g., orders linked to subscriptions linked to customers). Help Scout's Customer Properties are flat key-value pairs and cannot replicate these relationships. If your Kustomer implementation relies on multi-level KObject hierarchies, expect a lossy transformation.
• Workflow automation logic — Kustomer workflows with conditional branching, SLA triggers, and multi-step sequences cannot be exported. They must be rebuilt manually using Help Scout's workflow engine, which has a different feature set.
• Custom reporting configurations — any dashboards or reporting views built inside Kustomer will not transfer.

Prepare Help Scout for data import

Before you start pushing data into Help Scout, you must build the environment that will house it. Completing these steps beforehand prevents errors during the import process.

• Create all your team members as users in Help Scout so that historical conversations can be assigned to the correct people.
• Build out your team structures to mirror your Kustomer departments, allowing for accurate reporting on historical data.
• Set up your Docs collections so that you have a destination ready when you begin moving your knowledge base categories and articles.
• Define your custom fields for customers and conversations if you plan to move data from Kustomer's custom attributes or objects.
• Establish your tags in Help Scout to ensure that any tags appended to conversations during migration are recognized correctly by the system.

Migrate objects

The migration follows a specific logical sequence to maintain the integrity of your data. You cannot attach a message to a conversation that does not exist yet, nor can you link a conversation to a customer who has not been created.

Kustomer views data as a timeline of events associated with a customer profile. Help Scout uses a more traditional inbox model where conversations contain threads.

When migrating, we first move the structural "containers" and then fill them with content. You will start with users and teams, then move to the organizational level with companies and customers.

Next, you will move the knowledge base to ensure your help center is live. Finally, you move the support history, creating the conversation containers first and then inserting messages, notes, and attachments as threads.

Data Mapping

Difficulty and effort by object type

Validation and rollback

A migration without a validation plan is a gamble. Before you consider the migration complete, verify your data landed correctly.

• Record count comparison — export counts of users, customers, companies, conversations, and threads from Kustomer and compare them against what now exists in Help Scout. Any discrepancy needs investigation.
• Spot-check conversations — pick a sample of conversations across different date ranges and verify that all threads, notes, attachments, and timestamps are intact.
• Verify assignment and status — confirm that conversation owners, statuses, and tags match the originals.
• Test search and reporting — run a few common queries and reports to make sure the migrated data is indexed and returning expected results.

If the migration fails partway through, external IDs (see Insider Secrets below) are your recovery mechanism. Because each migrated object is tagged with its original Kustomer ID, you can identify exactly which records were successfully created and resume from the point of failure without duplicating data.

GDPR and data compliance

Migrating customer PII between SaaS platforms carries data protection obligations. If you serve customers in the EU or are otherwise subject to GDPR, CCPA, or similar regulations:

• Review your data processing agreements with both Kustomer and Help Scout to confirm you are permitted to transfer data between processors.
• Check data residency requirements — understand where each platform stores data and whether the transfer crosses jurisdictional boundaries that require additional safeguards.
• Document the migration as a processing activity in your records of processing, including what data was transferred, when, and the lawful basis for doing so.
• Consider a pre-migration data purge — this is a natural opportunity to delete data you are no longer legally required or permitted to retain.

Post-migration configuration

Once your data is successfully residing in Help Scout, you need to rebuild the logic that makes your team productive. This phase focuses on automation and workflow management.

• Recreate your automated workflows to handle conversation routing and status updates based on your new inbox structure.
• Configure your folders to replicate the functionality of Kustomer's saved searches for organized viewing.
• Set up your satisfaction survey settings to begin collecting new ratings on your Help Scout conversations.
• Verify that your incoming email and chat channels are correctly connected and routing to the right inboxes.
• Rebuild your saved replies (shortcuts) so agents can quickly respond to common customer inquiries.

Insider secrets

1. Respect the rate limits: Both platforms enforce strict API rate limits — Kustomer allows roughly 10 requests per second on many endpoints, while Help Scout's API permits up to 400 requests per minute (see Kustomer API docs and Help Scout API docs for current values). Build retry logic with exponential backoff into your migration script. A basic pattern:

   import time
   import requests
    
   def api_request_with_retry(url, headers, payload=None, max_retries=5):
       for attempt in range(max_retries):
           response = requests.post(url, headers=headers, json=payload)
           if response.status_code == 429:  # Rate limited
               wait = 2 ** attempt  # Exponential backoff: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16s
               time.sleep(wait)
               continue
           response.raise_for_status()
           return response
       raise Exception(f"Failed after {max_retries} retries")

2. Use external IDs: When creating objects in Help Scout via the API, always store the original Kustomer ID as an external identifier. This allows you to verify data integrity and prevents you from creating duplicate records if you need to restart the migration.

3. Handle attachments carefully: Attachments in Kustomer often provide temporary pre-signed URLs that can expire quickly. You must download the actual file data from Kustomer and then upload it to Help Scout immediately rather than just moving the link.

4. Preserve timestamps: To keep your historical reporting accurate, use the "imported at" or equivalent fields to set the original creation dates for conversations and messages. Without this, all your old tickets will look like they were created on the day of the migration.

5. Audit your merges: Kustomer handles customer merges by giving precedence to specific fields like email and phone. Check for any merged profiles in Kustomer before migrating, as you may want to clean up these duplicates to ensure the Help Scout customer list is pristine.

Summary

Migrating from Kustomer to Help Scout is an organized transition that moves your support history into a new, inbox-focused environment.

By following a logical order, starting with users and teams and ending with individual messages, you can preserve the context of every customer interaction.

While your core data moves via the API, remember that your automation logic and routing rules require a thoughtful manual rebuild in Help Scout. Some data — particularly complex KObject relationships and tracking events — will not survive the migration and should be archived or exported separately.

Managing rate limits and using external IDs will ensure that your migration is not only successful but also accurate and reliable.

Further reading

• Kustomer API Documentation
• Help Scout API Documentation