The Complete Guide to Migrating from Kustomer to Trengo

Moving your customer support operations from Kustomer to Trengo is a significant transition that requires a thoughtful strategy to preserve your valuable data history.

This guide covers the process of moving your team, your customers, and your entire knowledge base into your new workspace — including the edge cases and failure modes that trip up most migrations.

Define your migration scope

Before you begin moving data, you must understand how different types of information will travel between platforms. Not everything fits into a simple automated process, so categorizing your data is the first step toward a successful transition.

What should be migrated via the API

Most of your core support data can be transferred using automated scripts. This includes the fundamental building blocks of your workspace such as your Users and Teams, as well as the Identity data found in your Customer records.

You will also want to move the actual work history, which consists of Conversations, Messages, and internal Notes.

To keep everything organized, your existing Tags and Shortcuts should also be moved through the API to match their new counterparts: Labels and Quick Replies.

Finally, your Knowledge Base, including all Categories and Articles, is best handled through automated import to maintain formatting and hierarchy.

What has to be configured manually

Some elements of Kustomer are governed by logic that does not have a direct digital bridge to Trengo.

Your Business Schedules, for instance, define when your team is available to help customers and must be recreated in the settings of your new workspace.

Similarly, the complex logic used for Queues and Routing rules needs to be rebuilt by hand to ensure that incoming requests are funneled to the correct Inboxes and Teams according to Trengo's specific workflow engine.

Snoozes and Sub-statuses are also Kustomer-specific modifiers that do not have an identical twin in Trengo. The mapping to Labels shown in the table below is a lossy transformation — you lose the temporal dimension of Snoozes and the structured hierarchy of Sub-statuses. An alternative approach is to append the original status history to internal Notes on each ticket, preserving the information even though it can no longer drive automation. Evaluate which approach matters more for your reporting and agent workflows before committing.

What has to be archived

Kustomer uses a unique data entity known as KObjects, or Custom Objects, to store specialized data like order histories or loyalty points. Trengo does not have a direct equivalent for these standalone objects.

To preserve this information, you should flatten the data into simple text strings and store it in Custom Fields on the customer's Profile or within specific Tickets. This is a non-trivial transformation: you need to decide which KObject fields are worth preserving, define a consistent serialization format (e.g., key-value pairs or structured text), and handle nested or multi-value fields explicitly.

This keeps the information searchable and visible to your agents without trying to force it into a data model that does not exist in your new environment.

Prepare Trengo for data import

Before the data starts flowing, your new environment needs a foundation. Every piece of information needs a clear place to land.

• Set up your Teams to mirror your organizational departments.
• Invite your Users and ensure they are assigned to the correct Teams so that historical tickets can be attributed to the right people.
• Define your Custom Fields for both Tickets and Contacts to accommodate any metadata or flattened KObject data you are bringing over.
• Create a library of Labels that corresponds to your Kustomer Tags so your reporting remains consistent.
• Build your Quick Replies to replace your Kustomer Shortcuts, ensuring your team has their canned responses ready to go.

Migrate objects

The order in which you move your data is crucial because many items rely on others already being in place. You cannot assign a ticket to a user who does not exist yet. Here is the logical path you should follow to bring your history to life in Trengo.

Foundation and Identity: Start with your team structure. You will move your Teams first, followed by your Users. Once the people are in place, you can move your Customers into Trengo Profiles and Contacts.

This step is vital because every conversation you migrate later must be attached to an existing contact.

Trengo is quite accommodating here: if you attempt to create a contact that already exists based on an identifier like an email, the system will simply return the existing record instead of throwing an error.

Knowledge Base Structure: Next, you should move your self-service content. Migrate your Kustomer KB Categories into Trengo Categories.

Be aware that Trengo offers an additional organizational layer called Sections, which you can use to further refine your Help Center hierarchy.

After the categories are set, you can bring over your Articles and link them to the appropriate sections.

Relational Support Data: Now you are ready for the core support history — the Conversations, Messages, and Notes that make up the actual record of customer interactions. Move your Conversations as Trengo Tickets, ensuring they are linked to the correct Profiles and assigned to the right Users.

Inside those tickets, you will import your actual Messages. Trengo has specific processes for importing text-based messages versus email messages to ensure they are formatted correctly in the timeline.

Any internal team discussions found in Kustomer Notes should be added to the tickets or contacts as Trengo Notes to keep that context alive.

Handling Attachments: Attachments require a two-step process. You must first upload the file to Trengo's temporary storage to receive a secure link.

You then include that link when importing the message. Be careful with your timing here because the system will automatically remove unused file uploads, so you should send the message import request as soon as the file upload is complete.

Data Mapping:

Post-migration validation

Before you declare the migration complete, verify the data actually made it across intact:

• Record count comparison: Export total counts for Contacts, Tickets, Messages, and Notes from both Kustomer and Trengo. The numbers should match. If they don't, use the external ID mapping (see Insider Secrets below) to identify which records are missing.
• Spot-check samples: Pick 10–20 tickets across different time ranges and agents. Open them in Trengo and compare against the originals in Kustomer. Verify that messages appear in the correct order, attachments are accessible, and internal notes are present.
• Contact integrity: Confirm that merged or deduplicated contacts in Kustomer resolved correctly in Trengo. Check that email addresses and phone numbers are linked to the right profiles.
• Label and field audit: Verify that Tags mapped to the correct Labels and that Custom Field values populated as expected.

Post-migration configuration

Once the data transfer is validated, there are several live elements you must configure to get your team back to full productivity.

• Rebuild your automation Workflows to handle actions like auto-replies, tagging, and ticket assignments.
• Configure your Inboxes and connect your various communication channels like Email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
• Manually set your Business Hours for each channel to manage customer expectations.
• Set up your SLA policies to ensure your team meets its response time goals.
• Test your routing rules to confirm that new tickets are flowing to the correct teams as expected.

Insider secrets

1. Keep a close eye on rate limits during the migration. Kustomer typically allows about 120 creation events per minute for objects like messages or conversations for a single customer. If you exceed this, you will receive an error and need to pause your script.
2. Use external IDs whenever possible. When you migrate objects from Kustomer, store the original Kustomer ID in a custom field in Trengo. This allows you to verify that every record was moved and helps prevent duplicates if you have to restart an import.
3. Resuming after failures. If your migration script crashes partway through, the external ID mapping from tip #2 is what saves you. On restart, query Trengo for records that already have a Kustomer external ID and skip them. This gives you idempotent re-runs without duplicate records.
4. Attachments require a quick follow-through. Because Trengo clears unused file uploads automatically, you must ensure your script links the uploaded file to a message or ticket immediately after the upload succeeds.
5. Handling pre-signed URLs. When dealing with draft attachments, the API provides a pre-signed S3 URL for a limited duration. Your migration tool must be ready to use these links right away before they expire.
6. Leverage Trengo's profile logic. Since Trengo returns the details of an existing contact instead of an error during creation, you can safely run your contact migration multiple times without worrying about breaking your database.

Summary

Migrating from Kustomer to Trengo is a manageable process when you break it down into logical steps.

By establishing your team structure first, followed by customer identities, and finally the conversation data (Tickets, Messages, Notes, and Attachments), you can build a complete picture of your support history in your new workspace.

Items like routing rules, business hours, and Snooze/Sub-status mappings require manual decisions and configuration. The result is a clean, organized workspace — but plan for a transition period where agents may need to reference Kustomer exports for historical reporting that doesn't carry over natively.

If you'd rather focus on your revenue instead of wrestling with mapping sheets and pagination loops, ClonePartner can handle the full migration for you. Every project gets a dedicated engineer who understands the nuances of both APIs and ensures zero downtime.

Further Reading:

• Kustomer API Reference
• Trengo API Reference