Help desk software migration can seem to be a challenging and intimidating task. As a result, many businesses often step back, fearing it as a complicated, expensive, and time-consuming process. Help desk software migration needs a lot of things to be taken into consideration. But this fear should not stop you from making the change for good. Help desk migration prevents you from being stuck with subpar software and helps you improve your business processes. Here in this article, we have discussed some reasons, benefits, and tips for help desk migration. But before diving deeper,  let’s find out what help desk migration means.

What is Help Desk Migration? 

Help desk migration is an automated online tool and data migration service which allows data transfer between different help desk systems. Businesses have knowledge management software that keeps all kinds of data, including notes, attachments, contact information, etc. However, with the expansion of business and increased customer queries, companies may need to upgrade their help desk platform.

Why Do You Need Help Desk Migration?

During the inception days, companies often let go of the limitations of the help desk platforms they use. However, they feel the punch once the business grows and realize that their current help desk platform is not enough to tackle the increasing number of customer queries and pool of data. This is when the need for help desk migration arises. There are numerous reasons why businesses decide to pursue help desk migration:

• They want to move one step ahead from email support and multiple channels for customer interaction ranging from chat, phone, social media, etc.
• They prefer cloud-based customer support and data management solutions to reduce costs and improve accessibility. As a result, 91% of the companies maintain their data on cloud platforms.
• Dissatisfaction with the current support system and its lack of competency is one of the most common reasons for migration.
• Some companies with multiple support platforms merge help desk data into a centralized solution to avoid the strain.
• The lack of advanced features in the current help desk platform is another reason for migration.

Benefits of Help Desk Data Migration

Help desk data migration is a great way to eliminate junk data from your system like old notifications and alerts, non-customer conversations, out-of-date or inaccurately saved replies, typos, workflow or process, etc. Migration is an excellent opportunity to:

• Clean stale data
• Revisit forgotten information
• Update processes
• Bring uniformity to your data
• Get easy access to the customer interaction history

Tips For Doing Help Desk Migration

Consider these tips before, during, and after undergoing helpdesk migration:

• First, create a data migration strategy with details like the data migration process, responsibilities, and possible risks and plan to deal with them.The 2020 Deloitte report states ‘strategy,’ as an essential element for a successful migration.
• Before doing the final migration, try to run the migration at a smaller level of smaller data sets. Then, get it tested by multiple people for accuracy. This will help you do the final migration seamlessly.
• Create agents’ accounts in the new help desk platform before transferring their tickets into the new system to avoid unnecessary delays and confusion.
• Try finding a vendor with similar data structures and experiences in migrating other customers’ data from the existing platform. These commonalities will ease the entire migration process for you.
• Your data, applications, and systems should be adept with the new technology. The migration to the target source and automation could become problematic if these are outdated.
• Be careful with the data objects and fields. These must not get swapped. For example, the emails, numbers, addresses, and other customer information must not get mixed up.
• Allow enough time for migration, especially when dealing with a lot of data for the transfer—schedule migration tasks when there is minimum downtime.
• During the migration process, do not make any last-minute changes to avoid errors.
• Be well prepared for the ‘post-migration’ phase. First, check if all the records are correctly migrated. Then, check for the notification and automation features and turn it on once the migration is done.
• Make sure that your staff is well trained to work on the new help desk software. 

Checklist for Help Desk Data Migration 

You need to keep a checklist of the before and after migration process to ensure that it takes place hassle-free. Here are some common points that you can include in your checklist:

• The list of data that you want to transfer.
• Changes required, if any, in the records.
• A step-by-step plan for the migration process.
• Trained staff to work with the new platform.
• Find access credentials to your source and target platforms.
• Turning off all notifications and automation to avoid interruption in the migration process.
• Turning on all notifications and automation post-migration to the new system.
• Creation of agent profiles in the new help desk platform.

Help desk data migration is the last thing any business would like to do, provided how taxing the process can be. However, it will only help you upgrade your business processes and data management in the long run if your current platform cannot cope with the pace of your business growth. A good strategy and proper preparation can help you ease the process. Helplama is a fully managed customer support system that provides all kinds of help desk support services. Helplama makes sure your customers get expert advice whenever required. In addition, we have US-based remote agents that work as an integrated extension to your internal team.