Migration Playbook

Crisp Enchant

Crisp to Enchant: The Complete Migration Playbook

A 35-step runbook across six phases — track your progress, and open the right tool at every step.

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TL;DR

Migrating Crisp to Enchant requires API-to-API transfer with careful object mapping, respecting Enchant's 100 credits/min and 6 req/sec limits, and accepting that only email-type tickets can be created via API.

Migrating from Crisp to Enchant requires a fully custom API-led integration, as no native one-click migration path exists between the two platforms. Crisp is built around a conversation-centric model anchored on session_id within Website workspaces, while Enchant organizes work around Tickets belonging to Inboxes — a fundamentally different structural paradigm. The profile model diverges equally: Crisp People profiles support arbitrary key-value data and segments, whereas Enchant Customers are flatter entities with a limited contact type set. Custom engineering is required to extract data from Crisp's REST API, transform it to Enchant's schema, handle attachment re-upload, manage timestamp loss, and replay messages with correct directionality.

Read this first

Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.

Do not route open work through the managed import

If a ticket still needs replies, reassignment, reporting visibility, or label changes after cutover, it must be recreated through the API. (help.enchant.com)

Should you migrate everything? Not necessarily

If you have years of chat-only conversations auto-resolved by bots, leave them in Crisp as a read-only archive. Focus your migration budget on conversations that have operational or compliance value.

The 6 req/sec burst limit on Enchant is the real bottleneck

Even if you stay under 100 credits/minute, hitting more than 6 requests in a single second triggers a 429. Build a request queue with per-second throttling, not just per-minute averaging.

File size mismatch

Crisp allows some image uploads up to 12MB. Enchant caps total attachments per message at 10MB. (help.crisp.chat) Combined with the ~33% base64 overhead, a 7.5MB raw file will exceed 10MB after encoding. You need a preprocessing rule for oversized files: resize images, upload to external storage and link in the message body, or catch the error and log it for manual review.

Enchant does not support setting custom created_at timestamps via the API

Migrated tickets will show the migration date, not the original conversation date. The subject-tag and migration-note patterns above are the only workarounds available through the public API. (dev.enchant.com)

The runbook

Work top to bottom. Tick steps as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.

01 Discovery Establish why you are moving, what "done" means, and who signs off. 0/5

Objective A written scope with agreed success criteria, a named owner per workstream, and a budget approved by finance.

  1. Pull the real numbers out of Crisp

    Support ops 1 day

    Export counts for tickets (open and closed separately), contacts, organisations, attachments, macros, triggers, automations, views and SLA policies. Note the oldest ticket date — history depth drives the whole timeline. Estimating from memory is the single most common cause of a blown migration window.

    Data Profiler Get real record counts instead of estimating from memory
  2. Decide what history actually moves

    Support lead 2 days

    Agree a cut-off with the support lead: all history, last 24 months, or open tickets plus a read-only archive. Every extra year of closed tickets adds API time and cost without adding much agent value. Get this in writing — it is the decision people relitigate mid-cutover.

    A "move everything" default is what turns a two-week migration into a two-month one.

    COI & ROI Calculator Build the 36-month business case you will need for sign-off
  3. Confirm Enchant can hold your support model

    Solution architect 2-3 days

    Walk your current workflow through Enchant: multi-brand, business hours, SLA targets, CSAT, side conversations, public vs internal notes, and any channel you depend on (voice, chat, WhatsApp, social). List anything with no native equivalent — those are project risks, not configuration details.

  4. Build the business case

    Project sponsor 1-2 days

    Model licence delta, migration effort, agent retraining, and the cost of staying put (Cost of Inaction). Executives approve a number, not a plan, and you will be asked for it again at the go/no-go.

    Helpdesk Migration Planner Turn ticket volume into a dated Crisp → Enchant timeline
  5. Name owners and set the go/no-go date

    Project manager 1 day

    One named owner each for data, configuration, integrations, and agent enablement, plus a decision-maker who can call a rollback. Put the go/no-go meeting in calendars now, 48 hours before the freeze.

Crisp → Enchant specifics

Structured ticket management
Enchant's discrete states (open, hold, closed, snoozed, archived) give more workflow control than Crisp's simpler conversation states.
Per-inbox isolation
Enchant provides inbox-level security permissions, labels, rules, and folders — useful for teams managing multiple brands or departments.
Email-first support
Enchant treats email as a first-class citizen, while Crisp's email handling is layered on top of its messaging core.
Phone channel support
Enchant has native Twilio-based phone channels with call recording and queuing.

Don't move on until

  • Record counts confirmed for tickets, contacts, organisations and macros
  • Success criteria signed off by the support lead
  • Freeze window provisionally booked with the business
02 Data Audit Find out what is actually in the data before you try to move it. 0/6

Objective A profiled, cleaned export with every quality defect either fixed at source or explicitly accepted.

  1. Take a full Crisp export and profile it

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Export to CSV or JSON and profile every file: row counts, null rates per column, distinct values, and type consistency. Compare row counts against the API totals from Discovery — a gap here means your export is silently truncated, usually by pagination.

    Data Profiler Profile the Crisp export for nulls, outliers and type drift
  2. Validate file structure before anyone writes a transform

    Data engineer 1 day

    Check delimiters, quoting, encoding (expect UTF-8, watch for BOMs and Latin-1), duplicate headers, and embedded newlines in ticket bodies. Ticket descriptions with raw newlines and commas break naive CSV parsers and silently shift columns.

    A single unescaped quote in one ticket body can shift every subsequent column without any error.

    CSV Validator Catch broken headers and ragged rows in the raw export
  3. Inventory PII and set retention

    Compliance / DPO 2 days

    Scan for emails, phone numbers, payment card fragments, national IDs and anything else regulated in ticket bodies and custom fields — support tickets are where customers paste things they should not. Decide what gets migrated, masked, or dropped, and record the legal basis.

    Ticket bodies and attachments routinely contain card and ID data that never appears in a structured field.

    PII & Compliance Scanner Find regulated fields before they land in a new system
  4. Quantify duplicates, orphans and dead references

    Support ops 1-2 days

    Count duplicate contacts (same email, different casing), tickets whose requester no longer exists, organisations with no members, and attachments whose parent ticket is gone. Fix these in Crisp where you can — migrating them just moves the mess.

    Data Cleaner Strip empty rows, stray whitespace and dead columns
  5. Clean and normalise the export

    Data engineer 2 days

    Trim whitespace, drop empty rows and columns, normalise casing on emails and tags, and standardise every timestamp to UTC ISO 8601. Timezone drift is invisible at load time and shows up weeks later as SLA reports nobody can reconcile.

  6. Produce a masked copy for sandbox work

    Data engineer 0.5 day

    Generate a realistic but fake version of the export for testing and for any vendor who needs sample data. Loading real customer PII into a sandbox is a breach in most jurisdictions, and sandboxes are rarely covered by your DPA.

    PII Masker Generate a safe copy for sandbox and vendor testing

Don't move on until

  • Export parses cleanly with no ragged rows or encoding errors
  • PII inventory complete and retention decisions recorded
  • Duplicate and orphan records quantified and triaged
03 Field Mapping Turn two schemas into one signed-off mapping spec. 0/6

Objective A reviewed field-level mapping covering every object, with an explicit decision for every field that has no target.

  1. Generate the first-pass Crisp → Enchant field map

    Solution architect 2 days

    Start from an automated match on both schemas, then review every row by hand. Automated matching gets the obvious 70% right and is confidently wrong on the rest — especially anything named "type", "status" or "custom_field_1".

    Schema Mapper Opens pre-loaded with the Crisp → Enchant field pair
  2. Map status, priority and channel values, not just field names

    Support lead 1-2 days

    Enumerate every value in each picklist on both sides and map them explicitly. Value-level mismatches are the defect class that survives all the way to production because the field itself mapped fine — a ticket that should be "Pending" arriving as "Open" reopens SLA clocks.

    Statuses with no target equivalent (on-hold, pending-customer) need a policy decision, not a best guess.

  3. Decide how custom fields land

    Solution architect 2 days

    Create the target custom fields first, matching type exactly (a dropdown mapped to free text can never be mapped back). Where Enchant has no equivalent, decide between a new custom field, a tag, or a note appended to the ticket body — and record which.

  4. Resolve identity and threading

    Data engineer 1 day

    Decide how source IDs are preserved — most platforms will not let you set the primary key, so keep the original ID in a custom field. Without it, reconciliation becomes fuzzy matching and every future support question about an old ticket is unanswerable.

    Losing the original ticket ID makes reconciliation and rollback effectively impossible.

  5. Plan attachments, inline images and threading order

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Confirm size limits, allowed MIME types, and whether inline images survive as attachments or need rehosting. Decide the comment ordering and author attribution rules: comments loaded out of order, or all attributed to the API user, destroy the conversation history agents rely on.

  6. Freeze and sign off the mapping spec

    Project manager 1 day

    Version the spec, walk the support lead through it row by row, and get explicit sign-off. Any change after this point goes through change control — mid-flight mapping edits are how partial loads happen.

Don't move on until

  • Every source field is mapped, deliberately dropped, or parked in a custom field
  • Status, priority and channel value maps agreed with the support lead
  • Mapping spec version-controlled and signed off
04 Test Migration Prove the pipeline on a small, representative slice. 0/6

Objective A pilot load into a Enchant sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.

  1. Stand up a Enchant sandbox that matches production config

    Solution architect 2-3 days

    Create the custom fields, groups, brands, business hours and SLA policies first. A pilot into a default sandbox tests nothing, because the failures you care about are all configuration mismatches.

  2. Pick a deliberately nasty pilot sample

    Data engineer 0.5 day

    Take 500-1000 records chosen for difficulty, not convenience: the longest ticket threads, tickets with the most attachments, non-Latin character sets, merged and split tickets, deleted requesters, and every status value. A clean random sample proves only that easy records are easy.

  3. Run the load with masked data and instrument everything

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Log every API request and response with its source record ID. When 40 records fail out of 10,000 you need to know exactly which ones and why, without re-running the whole batch.

    PII Masker Never load real customer PII into a sandbox
  4. Measure real throughput against the rate limit

    Data engineer 1 day

    Record achieved records-per-hour under Enchant's actual rate limits, including retries and backoff. Extrapolate to the full volume: if the maths says the full load exceeds your freeze window, you fix that now, not on cutover night.

    Published rate limits are ceilings, not throughput. Assume real-world rates are meaningfully lower once retries and backoff are counted.

  5. Reconcile the pilot and triage every failure

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Diff source against target on record counts and field-level values. Every discrepancy gets a root cause and a fix — "probably fine" at pilot scale becomes thousands of broken records at full scale.

    Migration Validation Tool Diff the pilot batch against source before scaling up
  6. Put real agents in front of the pilot data

    Support lead 2 days

    Have two or three agents work sample tickets end to end in the sandbox. They find the things reconciliation cannot see: unreadable threading, missing context, macros that no longer make sense. Fix the mapping, then re-run.

Don't move on until

  • Pilot batch reconciles to 100% on record counts
  • Agents have reviewed sample tickets and confirmed they are workable
  • Measured throughput extrapolates to a viable full-load window
05 Cutover Execute the switch inside a controlled, reversible window. 0/6

Objective All in-scope data live in Enchant, agents working in the new system, and a rollback path that stayed available throughout.

  1. Pre-load history before the freeze

    Data engineer 3-10 days

    Load closed tickets and contacts days or weeks ahead while Crisp stays live. Only open tickets and the final delta need to move inside the freeze — this is the single biggest lever on window length.

    Helpdesk Migration Planner Size the freeze window from Enchant's real API limits
  2. Publish the runbook with times, owners and abort criteria

    Project manager 1 day

    A timed sequence: freeze start, final export, delta load, channel switch, smoke test, go/no-go, agent switch. Name who does each step and the explicit condition that triggers a rollback. Decide the abort criteria before the night, when nobody wants to be the one to call it.

  3. Freeze Crisp and take the final delta

    Support ops 2-4 hours

    Stop new ticket creation, let agents finish in-flight replies, then export everything changed since the pre-load. Announce the freeze to the whole business, not just support — someone always tries to raise a ticket during it.

    Tickets created during an unenforced freeze land in the old system and are the most common source of permanently lost data.

  4. Load the delta and open tickets

    Data engineer 2-6 hours

    Run the delta load, then reconcile counts before touching any channel. Do not repoint email until the delta has verified — an inbound ticket arriving mid-load is far harder to untangle than a few extra minutes of freeze.

    Migration Validation Tool Confirm the final delta landed before you reopen
  5. Repoint channels and verify with live traffic

    IT / integrations 2-4 hours

    Switch email forwarding and MX or connector settings, update chat widgets and web forms, and re-authorise integrations. Then send real test tickets through every channel and confirm each lands, routes and triggers the right automation.

    Email forwarding changes can take up to a full DNS TTL to propagate — check the TTL days in advance and lower it if needed.

    Cron Expression Builder Schedule the delta syncs that run through the freeze
  6. Run the go/no-go and switch the agents

    Project sponsor 1-2 hours

    Walk the exit criteria with the decision-maker, call it explicitly, then move agents over with a named person on hand for the first few hours. Keep Crisp read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.

Don't move on until

  • Full historical load complete and counts matched
  • Inbound channels repointed and verified with live test tickets
  • Rollback decision point passed explicitly, not by default
06 Validation Prove the migration is complete, then close it out. 0/6

Objective Documented evidence that data, workflow and reporting all survived, and a signed acceptance.

  1. Run the full reconciliation

    Data engineer 1-2 days

    Compare source and target on every object: total counts, counts by status, counts by group, attachment counts, and field-level spot checks on a random sample. Produce one report you can hand to an auditor.

    Migration Validation Tool Reconcile Crisp and Enchant record-for-record
  2. Verify field completeness, not just record counts

    Data engineer 1 day

    Re-profile the loaded data and compare null rates per field against the source profile. Matching record counts with a field that silently arrived empty is the failure mode counts alone will never catch.

    Data Profiler Prove field completeness held up through the load
  3. Rebuild reporting and compare against baselines

    Support ops 2-3 days

    Recreate your core dashboards — volume, first response time, resolution time, CSAT — and compare to pre-migration figures for the same period. Explain every variance; a changed SLA calculation is a real finding, not a rounding error.

    SLA and first-response metrics are usually recalculated from the loaded timestamps, so they will differ if any timestamp mapping was approximate.

  4. Test the workflow layer end to end

    Support ops 2 days

    Fire every trigger, automation, SLA escalation, macro and notification with a live ticket. Workflow does not migrate — it gets rebuilt — so it is untested until someone has actually watched it run.

  5. Confirm compliance and produce the audit trail

    Compliance / DPO 1 day

    Re-scan the loaded data for regulated fields, confirm retention and deletion policies are configured in Enchant, and file the evidence with your PII decisions from the audit phase.

    PII & Compliance Scanner Produce the compliance evidence your auditor will ask for
  6. Sign off, then decommission on a schedule

    Project sponsor 1 day

    Get written acceptance against the Discovery success criteria. Keep Crisp read-only for an agreed period (30-90 days is typical), take a final archive export, and only then cancel. Diarise the decommission date so it does not quietly renew.

Don't move on until

  • Full reconciliation report attached to the project record
  • Reporting baselines match pre-migration figures within agreed tolerance
  • Formal acceptance signed and archive retention scheduled

Field mapping reference

The field-by-field mapping for each object. Use this as the starting point for your mapping spec.

Crisp Enchant 13 fields
Crisp fieldEnchant fieldNotes
Website (workspace) Account 1:1 mapping
Operator User Map by email. Create users in Enchant before importing tickets.
People profile Customer Map nickname → first_name / last_name. Split on first space.
People email Contact (type: email) Direct mapping
People phone Contact (type: phone) Direct mapping
Conversation Ticket (type: email) Only email type supported via API
Conversation state Ticket state See state mapping below
Segments Labels Crisp segments are workspace-wide; Enchant labels are per-inbox
Conversation custom data Customer summary Flatten key-value pairs into text
Message (text) Message (type: reply) Map direction based on author
Message (note) Message (type: note) Direct mapping
Message (file) Attachment + Message Download, base64-encode, upload to Enchant
audio, picker, field, carousel, event, animation No direct equivalent Flatten into a note body or archive externally
State State 5 fields
Crisp fieldEnchant fieldNotes
pending open Awaiting first response — maps to needing agent attention
unresolved open Active conversations
resolved closed Completed conversations
N/A hold No direct Crisp equivalent
N/A snoozed Enchant supports snoozing with a snoozed_until timestamp

Risk matrix

Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.

ObjectRiskNotes
Conversations / Tickets high Every Crisp conversation must be individually extracted via paginated API calls, transformed to Enchant's email-type ticket schema, and written through the API — with no timestamp preservation and no guarantee of state fidelity across the two platforms' differing state models.
Messages / Replies high Crisp supports a wide variety of message types including text, note, file, animation, audio, picker, field, carousel, and event, but only text and note types map cleanly to Enchant replies and notes — all other types require custom handling or will be lost.
Attachments / Files high Each file attachment must be downloaded from Crisp's storage and re-uploaded to Enchant as a base64-encoded payload, introducing significant transfer time, potential data loss if source URLs expire, and payload size constraints.
Customers / People Profiles medium Crisp People profiles carry arbitrary key-value custom data, notepad content, and company details that cannot be fully represented in Enchant's flat Customer model, requiring decisions about what to flatten into the <code>summary</code> field and what to archive externally.
Contacts medium Enchant Contacts are limited to email, Twitter, and phone types, so any Crisp People identifiers outside these categories — such as custom social handles or platform-specific IDs — cannot be migrated without data loss.
Segments / Labels medium Crisp segments are workspace-wide constructs, while Enchant labels are scoped per inbox and must be pre-created before ticket import, meaning segment-to-label mapping requires upfront structural decisions and manual setup before any data load begins.
Operators / Users medium Enchant does not expose a user creation endpoint in its public API, so all agents must be manually invited through the admin interface before migration begins, and operator identity in Crisp messages requires a pre-built lookup table to preserve message attribution.
Bot and Anonymous Conversations low Conversations that were handled entirely by Crisp's chatbot or that captured no email address cannot be meaningfully linked to an Enchant customer, and industry estimates suggest 20–70% of chat sessions may fall into this category depending on chatbot usage — these are best left archived in Crisp.
Conversation Custom Data medium Crisp conversation-level custom key-value metadata has no dedicated field in Enchant and must be flattened into the Customer <code>summary</code> text field or stored in an external system, resulting in loss of structured queryability.
Campaign Messages / Bot Events low Crisp marketing campaigns, visitor browsing events, geolocation data, and real-time widget events have no equivalent in Enchant's data model and cannot be migrated, making them candidates for external archival only.

The hard parts

What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.

No Native Migration Path

There is no one-click or built-in export/import tool connecting Crisp and Enchant; all data transfer requires custom API-to-API engineering or use of Enchant's managed import service, which produces read-only archive tickets unsuitable for active work.

Ticket Type API Constraint

Enchant's public API only supports creating tickets of type <code>email</code>, meaning all Crisp conversations — regardless of whether they originated as live chat, bot sessions, or messaging — must be migrated as email-type tickets.

Historical Timestamps Not Preserved

Enchant's API does not accept custom <code>created_at</code> values on ticket or message creation, so all migrated records receive the current system time rather than their original Crisp timestamps.

Attachment Re-Upload Complexity

Files shared within Crisp conversations cannot be transferred by reference; each attachment must be individually downloaded from Crisp and re-uploaded to Enchant as a base64-encoded payload during migration.

Profile and Segment Data Model Mismatch

Crisp People profiles support arbitrary key-value custom data and workspace-wide segments, while Enchant Customers offer only a flat <code>summary</code> text field and per-inbox Labels, requiring significant data flattening or external storage for richer profile data.

Rate Limit Complexity on Both APIs

Crisp enforces a daily request quota per plugin token that can halt large exports until the following day, while Enchant enforces both a 100-credits-per-minute account-wide limit and a hard burst cap of 6 requests per second, requiring a carefully throttled request queue.

Tools used in this playbook

All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

FAQ

Can I migrate Crisp conversations to Enchant as normal working tickets?

There is no native one-click migration. You need to extract data from Crisp's REST API, transform it to match Enchant's ticket/customer model, and write it via Enchant's REST API. Enchant's managed import is an alternative, but imported tickets are read-only and cannot be assigned, replied to, or included in reports.

Does Enchant support importing non-email conversations from Crisp?

No. Enchant's API only allows creating tickets of type 'email'. Chat, WhatsApp, SMS, and social conversations from Crisp will all be imported as email-type tickets. Use labels like 'migrated-from-chat' to preserve the original channel context.

Can I preserve original timestamps when migrating to Enchant?

The Enchant API does not accept custom created_at timestamps — tickets and messages receive the current system time. To preserve historical context, include original dates in ticket subjects and internal notes. Enchant's managed import may support historical timestamps, but those tickets become read-only.

What are Enchant's API rate limits for migration?

Enchant allows 100 credits per minute across the entire account with a burst limit of 6 requests per second. A 10,000-conversation migration with 5 messages each requires roughly 75,000 API calls, taking approximately 15–16 hours at a sustainable pace.

How do Crisp segments map to Enchant?

Crisp segments map to Enchant labels. Segments are free-form, case-sensitive strings; labels are structured objects scoped per inbox. Pre-create labels in Enchant before migration, normalize segment names to avoid duplicates, and build a lookup map from segment strings to label IDs.

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