Freshchat to Salesforce Service Cloud migration requires API-based extraction, schema translation (conversations → Cases, messages → CaseComments), and careful handling of rich chat formats with no direct Salesforce equivalent.
There is no native import path between Freshchat and Salesforce Service Cloud; this is a full schema translation project requiring API-based extraction, transformation, and loading. The fundamental challenge lies in mapping Freshchat's streaming conversation-and-message model to Salesforce's relational hierarchy of Cases, CaseComments or EmailMessages, Contacts, and Accounts. Rich chat formats—including interactive elements, carousels, WhatsApp templates, and inline media—have no direct Salesforce equivalent, meaning custom transformation logic and deliberate fidelity trade-offs are required for every migration.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
Decision point
Most migrations land on CaseComment for historical archive (acceptable loss of rich formatting) or EmailMessage for higher fidelity (HTML body preserved, but semantically odd for chat data). There is no option that preserves Freshchat's exact interactive message format inside Salesforce. Salesforce retired Legacy Chat (LiveChatTranscript) on February 14, 2026 — do not target the deprecated LiveChatTranscript object.
Rate limit reality
Freshchat's per-tier rate limits are not comprehensively documented in the public API reference — some limits appear in account-level documentation and vary by plan tier. The API returns HTTP 429 when limits are exceeded, with X-RateLimit-Limit and X-RateLimit-Remaining headers. The dashboard API limit is documented at 100 requests/minute. In practice, expect extraction throughput of approximately 1,500–2,500 conversations/hour (including message sub-requests) at sustainable rate-limit headroom. Implement exponential backoff on every extraction script. (developers.freshchat.com)
JWT Bearer flow is the recommended authentication method for backend migration scripts
JWT Bearer flow is the recommended authentication method for backend migration scripts against Salesforce. It is certificate-based, requires no refresh tokens, and no human login. Configure a Connected App with the api and refresh_token OAuth scopes.
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.
Objective A written scope with agreed success criteria, a named owner per workstream, and a budget approved by finance.
Keep these open
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Pull the real numbers out of Freshchat
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 -
Decide what history actually moves
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 -
Confirm Salesforce Service Cloud can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Salesforce Service Cloud: 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.
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Build the business case
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 Freshchat → Salesforce Service Cloud timeline -
Name owners and set the go/no-go date
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.
Freshchat → Salesforce Service Cloud specifics
- Enterprise CRM consolidation
- The organization standardizes on Salesforce across sales, marketing, and service. Running Freshchat alongside Salesforce creates a data silo that breaks 360-degree customer views.
- SLA enforcement
- Salesforce Entitlements and Milestones offer built-in SLA tracking with automated breach notifications — capabilities that go beyond Freshchat's native SLA features. Note: Entitlements require Enterprise Edition or higher.
- Scale and customization
- Salesforce supports custom objects, complex Apex-driven automation, and Flow orchestration at enterprise scale.
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.
Objective A profiled, cleaned export with every quality defect either fixed at source or explicitly accepted.
Keep these open
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Take a full Freshchat export and profile it
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 Freshchat export for nulls, outliers and type drift -
Validate file structure before anyone writes a transform
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 -
Inventory PII and set retention
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 -
Quantify duplicates, orphans and dead references
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 Freshchat where you can — migrating them just moves the mess.
Data Cleaner Strip empty rows, stray whitespace and dead columns -
Clean and normalise the export
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.
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Produce a masked copy for sandbox work
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
Freshchat → Salesforce Service Cloud specifics
- Compliance and audit trails
- Salesforce's EmailMessage records are read-only and immutable, creating compliance-grade audit trails that Freshchat's conversation model does not natively provide. Organizations with compliance requirements should also evaluate Salesforce Shield (Platform Encryption, Event Monitoring, Field Audit Trail) for encryption-at-rest and granular audit logging — these are add-on features not included in base Service Cloud licenses.
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.
Objective A reviewed field-level mapping covering every object, with an explicit decision for every field that has no target.
Keep these open
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Generate the first-pass Freshchat → Salesforce Service Cloud field map
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 Freshchat → Salesforce Service Cloud field pair -
Map status, priority and channel values, not just field names
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.
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Decide how custom fields land
Create the target custom fields first, matching type exactly (a dropdown mapped to free text can never be mapped back). Where Salesforce Service Cloud has no equivalent, decide between a new custom field, a tag, or a note appended to the ticket body — and record which.
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Resolve identity and threading
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.
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Plan attachments, inline images and threading order
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.
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Freeze and sign off the mapping spec
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.
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Flatten message parts
Freshchat messages use message_parts arrays with types like text, image, file. Flatten to plain text for CaseComment or HTML for EmailMessage. See the channel-specific transformation rules table above for WhatsApp, Messenger, and other channel formats.
JSON to CSV Converter Flatten nested API responses into a reviewable sheet -
Map statuses
Freshchat's new / assigned / resolved → Salesforce's Status picklist values.
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Resolve agent IDs
Build a lookup table mapping Freshchat agent UUIDs to Salesforce User IDs.
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.
Objective A pilot load into a Salesforce Service Cloud sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a Salesforce Service Cloud sandbox that matches production config
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.
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Pick a deliberately nasty pilot sample
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.
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Run the load with masked data and instrument everything
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 -
Measure real throughput against the rate limit
Record achieved records-per-hour under Salesforce Service Cloud'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.
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Reconcile the pilot and triage every failure
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 -
Put real agents in front of the pilot data
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.
Objective All in-scope data live in Salesforce Service Cloud, agents working in the new system, and a rollback path that stayed available throughout.
Keep these open
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Pre-load history before the freeze
Load closed tickets and contacts days or weeks ahead while Freshchat 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 Salesforce Service Cloud's real API limits -
Publish the runbook with times, owners and abort criteria
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.
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Freeze Freshchat and take the final delta
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.
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Load the delta and open tickets
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 -
Repoint channels and verify with live traffic
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 -
Run the go/no-go and switch the agents
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 Freshchat 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.
Objective Documented evidence that data, workflow and reporting all survived, and a signed acceptance.
Keep these open
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Run the full reconciliation
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 Freshchat and Salesforce Service Cloud record-for-record -
Verify field completeness, not just record counts
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 -
Rebuild reporting and compare against baselines
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.
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Test the workflow layer end to end
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.
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Confirm compliance and produce the audit trail
Re-scan the loaded data for regulated fields, confirm retention and deletion policies are configured in Salesforce Service Cloud, and file the evidence with your PII decisions from the audit phase.
PII & Compliance Scanner Produce the compliance evidence your auditor will ask for -
Sign off, then decommission on a schedule
Get written acceptance against the Discovery success criteria. Keep Freshchat 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.
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Rebuild automation
Freshchat's assignment rules, IntelliAssign, and bot flows do not transfer. Rebuild using Salesforce Omni-Channel Routing (Enterprise Edition+), Flows, and Einstein Bots.
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Configure Omni-Channel
Set up presence statuses, routing configurations, and skill-based routing to replace Freshchat's group-based assignment.
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Monitor for gaps
Run daily reports for the first two weeks comparing Freshchat conversation counts against Salesforce Case counts to catch missed records.
Freshchat → Salesforce Service Cloud specifics
- Agent training
- Salesforce Service Cloud's console is a different paradigm from Freshchat's inbox. Budget time for agent onboarding on the Service Console, macros, and Knowledge.
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.
Object Object
| Freshchat field | Salesforce Service Cloud field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| User (contact/visitor) | Contact | If no Account exists, create a default or derive from email domain. |
| Agent | User (with Service Cloud license) | Role and Profile assignment required. Deactivated agents need a mapping strategy. |
| Group | Queue | Freshchat groups map to Salesforce Queues for case routing. |
| Conversation | Case | Each conversation becomes a Case. Status mapping required. |
| Message | CaseComment or EmailMessage or ConversationEntry | The fidelity decision — see below. |
| Conversation Property | Case Custom Field | Freshchat supports up to 50 custom conversation properties. Each maps to a custom field on Case. |
| Channel | Case Origin / custom field | Web chat, WhatsApp, email map to Case Origin picklist values. A custom field is often cleaner. |
| CSAT Score | Custom field on Case | No native equivalent. Create a custom CSAT field. |
| Attachment | ContentVersion / ContentDocumentLink | Salesforce Files with ContentDocumentLink to the parent Case. |
Channel Message Format
Channel identifiers map to Salesforce Case Origin picklist values or a custom field, though multi-channel conversations may require a custom field for cleaner representation.
| Freshchat field | Salesforce Service Cloud field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Web Chat | message_parts with text, image, file types | Flatten to plain text (CaseComment) or HTML (EmailMessage). Inline images → ContentVersion attachments. |
| Template messages with parameters, media messages, location pins, contact cards | Template messages: extract parameter values and reconstruct as readable text (e.g., "Your order #{{1}} ships on {{2}}" → "Your order #12345 ships on Jan 5"). Media: download and attach as ContentVersion. Location: convert to "Lat: X, Lng: Y" text. | |
| Facebook Messenger | Rich cards, carousels, quick replies, persistent menus | Cards: flatten to " [Card Title] [Subtitle] [URL]" format. Carousels: render each card sequentially. Quick replies: record as " [User selected: Option X]". |
| Apple Business Chat | List pickers, time pickers, rich links | Flatten interactive elements to descriptive text: " [Time picker: User selected 2:00 PM]". Preserve rich link URLs. |
| Email (via Freshchat) | HTML body, standard attachments | Most direct mapping to EmailMessage. Preserve HTML body. Map From/To headers. |
Freshchat Salesforce
| Freshchat field | Salesforce Service Cloud field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| conversation_id | Case.Freshchat_Conversation_ID__c | Store for deduplication and relationship linking |
| status (new/assigned/resolved) | Case.Status | Map to Salesforce picklist values deliberately |
| created_time | Case.CreatedDate | Requires "Set Audit Fields" permission via Bulk API |
| assigned_agent_id | Case.OwnerId | Map agent UUID → Salesforce User ID |
| assigned_group_id | Case.OwnerId (Queue) | If no agent assigned, route to Queue |
| channel_id | Case.Origin | Map channel name to Origin value |
| user.email | Contact.Email | Primary match key |
| user.id | Contact.Freshchat_User_ID__c | Stable external key for relational mapping |
| user.reference_id / org_contact_id | External ID or join key | Useful for adjacent CRM joins |
| message.message_parts | CaseComment.CommentBody | Flatten rich message parts to plain text; strip HTML if needed |
| message.created_time | CaseComment.CreatedDate | Requires "Set Audit Fields" permission |
| message.actor_type | CaseComment.IsPublished | user → true (public), agent → false, or vice versa based on your convention |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Conversations → Cases | medium | One-to-one mapping is straightforward, but status picklist translation, custom conversation properties (up to 50), and channel-to-Origin mapping require deliberate configuration. |
| Messages → CaseComments/EmailMessages | high | Rich message parts, inline images, interactive elements, and threaded structure cannot be fully preserved in any Salesforce target object, making this the highest-fidelity-risk entity in the migration. |
| Users → Contacts | medium | Freshchat users must be matched or created as Contacts with Account association, and standalone Freshchat lacks full CRM company data, requiring default Account creation or email-domain derivation. |
| Agents → Users | medium | Active agents require Service Cloud licenses and proper Role/Profile assignment, while deactivated agents need a mapping strategy to maintain historical ownership references on migrated Cases. |
| Attachments → ContentVersion | high | Chat attachments and inline media must be downloaded from Freshchat, uploaded as Salesforce ContentVersion records, and linked via ContentDocumentLink to parent Cases, with file storage costs a significant factor. |
| Custom Conversation Properties | low | Freshchat's up to 50 custom conversation properties map directly to custom fields on the Case object, though each requires page layout, permission, and reporting configuration. |
| Groups → Queues | low | Freshchat groups map cleanly to Salesforce Queues for case routing, requiring straightforward configuration with minimal data transformation risk. |
| CSAT Scores | low | No native Salesforce equivalent exists, but CSAT data migrates easily as a custom numeric field on Case with minimal transformation required. |
| Channels → Case Origin | low | Channel identifiers map to Salesforce Case Origin picklist values or a custom field, though multi-channel conversations may require a custom field for cleaner representation. |
| Timestamps and Audit Data | medium | Preserving original created and modified timestamps requires the non-default 'Set Audit Fields' permission and Bulk API usage, and failure to configure this results in all records stamped with migration-date timestamps. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Conversation-to-Case Schema Translation
Freshchat's continuous message stream within a conversation must be decomposed into discrete Salesforce records (Case + CaseComments or EmailMessages), requiring complex relational mapping and parent-child linking.
Rich Message Format Loss
Interactive chat elements such as WhatsApp template messages, Facebook Messenger carousels, quick replies, and Apple Business Chat pickers have no Salesforce equivalent and must be flattened to plain text or HTML with unavoidable fidelity loss.
API Rate Limit Constraints
Both Freshchat's REST API (Pro/Enterprise plans only) and Salesforce's Bulk API 2.0 impose rate limits and governor limits that require careful throttling and batching strategies for large-scale extractions and loads.
Timestamp and Audit Preservation
Preserving original CreatedDate values on Cases and CaseComments requires enabling the 'Set Audit Fields' permission in Salesforce via Bulk API, which is a non-default configuration that must be explicitly activated.
Agent and Ownership Mapping
Freshchat agent UUIDs and groups must be mapped to Salesforce User IDs and Queues, with a deliberate strategy needed for deactivated agents who no longer have active Salesforce licenses.
Multi-Channel Message Normalization
Each Freshchat channel (web chat, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Apple Business Chat, email) produces distinct message formats that each require channel-specific transformation rules before loading into Salesforce.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Can I export Freshchat conversations directly into Salesforce Service Cloud?
No. There is no native import path between Freshchat and Salesforce. You must extract data via Freshchat's REST API (conversations, messages, users endpoints), transform it to match Salesforce's Case/Contact/CaseComment schema, and load it through Salesforce's Bulk API 2.0 or REST API.
How do Freshchat conversations map to Salesforce objects?
Each Freshchat conversation becomes a Salesforce Case. Individual messages become CaseComments (plain text) or EmailMessages (HTML-supported). Freshchat users map to Contacts, agents to Users, groups to Queues, and conversation properties to custom Case fields.
Can we migrate Freshchat attachments to Salesforce?
Yes, but Freshchat attachment URLs often expire or require authentication. Your script must download the binary files immediately during extraction and upload them to Salesforce as ContentVersion records linked to the corresponding Case via ContentDocumentLink.
How long does a Freshchat to Salesforce Service Cloud migration take?
Typically 4–8 weeks end to end. The data migration itself may take days, but Salesforce org configuration — custom fields, Flows, Omni-Channel routing, page layouts, and agent training — is the larger workstream and must be completed before data loading begins.
What happens to Freshchat bot messages during migration?
Freshchat bot messages (Freddy AI) have an actor_type of 'system' or 'bot.' You can import them as CaseComments for historical reference or exclude them entirely. Interactive elements like buttons and carousels have no Salesforce equivalent and must be flattened to text.