Front-to-Intercom migration takes 3–6 weeks. The biggest risk is conversation history timestamps — test created_at in a sandbox first. Rules, dashboards, and drafts must all be rebuilt.
Migrating from Front to Intercom requires shifting from a shared email inbox paradigm to a messenger-first customer data platform (CDP), with no native one-click migration path between the two platforms. The fundamental data model differences are significant: Front organizes work around shared inboxes and rule-driven routing, while Intercom structures everything around a CDP with unified contact records, company associations, custom attributes, and dynamic segments. Conversation history import is technically possible via Intercom's Conversations API using the created_at field, but behavior varies by plan and must be validated in a sandbox. Rules, analytics dashboards, shared drafts, webhook integrations, and inbox-scoped routing cannot be migrated and must be manually rebuilt in Intercom's Workflows and Reports modules.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
CSV company import is not supported
As of July 2026, Intercom's native CSV importer supports people records only — not company data. If older guides say CSV can import companies into Intercom, update your plan. Use the Companies API instead. (intercom.com)
Load contacts first
If contacts do not exist when you create conversations, every conversation will have broken requester attribution. This is the most common mistake in DIY migrations.
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 Front
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 Intercom can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Intercom: 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 Front → Intercom 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.
Front → Intercom specifics
- Inbox-Scoped Channel Routing
- Intercom routing uses Workflows, team assignment rules, and Fin AI. Must be redesigned.
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 Front 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 Front 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 Front 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
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 Front → Intercom 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 Front → Intercom 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 Intercom 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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Contact deduplication
Front allows duplicate contacts by email. Intercom contacts are unique by external_id or email — attempting to create a duplicate returns a 409 Conflict error with a response body like {"type":"error.list","errors": [{"code":"conflict","message":"A contact matching those details already exists with id=..."}]}. Run a dedup pass on Front data before import and define a merge strategy (newest wins, most conversations wins, or manual review).
Front → Intercom specifics
- Front Conversations
- → Intercom Conversations and/or Intercom Tickets. This routing decision — which Front conversations become real-time Intercom Conversations vs. tracked async Intercom Tickets — is a key migration design choice. Segment by Front inbox, tag, or conversation metadata during the transform step.
- Front Messages
- (within conversations) → Intercom Conversation Parts (replies, notes, assignments). Each message becomes a "part" on the conversation.
- Front Conversation Comments
- (internal notes) → Intercom Conversation Parts with type = "note".
- Front Inboxes
- (shared inboxes) → Intercom Team Inboxes (configured per workspace, not per email address).
- Front Contacts
- → Intercom Contacts (unified model: role = "user" for known users, role = "lead" for anonymous visitors). Preserve the Front contact ID as Intercom external_id.
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 Intercom sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a Intercom 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 Intercom'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.
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Test with a canary address first
Route a low-volume alias (e.g., support-test@yourdomain.com) to Intercom before switching the primary address. Verify that conversations are created correctly, auto-replies fire, and Workflows trigger.
Front → Intercom specifics
- Sampling strategy
- Random sample of 50–100 conversations across date ranges. Manually verify threading, part ordering, author attribution, and attachment integrity. For long threads, do not rely on Intercom's readback alone — the retrieve-conversation endpoint returns only the 500 most recent parts.
- Attachment spot-check
- Verify that attachment URLs are accessible and rendering correctly in Intercom's UI. Test across file types (images, PDFs, CSVs).
- Agent UAT
- Have 2–3 agents review their own recent conversations in Intercom Inbox and flag discrepancies. Test that Workflows and Saved Replies work with migrated data.
- Fin AI behavior check
- If Fin AI is enabled, test it against open migrated conversations to verify it handles context correctly and does not produce confused responses from malformed historical data.
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 Intercom, 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 Front 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 Intercom'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 Front 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 Front read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.
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Contact model gap
Front contacts are simple records (name, email, phone, custom fields). Intercom contacts sit inside a full CDP with role (user vs. lead), company associations, custom attributes, custom events, browser/device data, and dynamic segments. You are migrating into a richer model.
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Disable Front inboxes post-cutover
Once Intercom is receiving all inbound email, disable or archive the corresponding Front inboxes to prevent agents from accidentally working in the wrong tool. Do not delete them — keep them in read-only mode for reference.
Front → Intercom specifics
- Shared inbox vs. CDP-powered messaging
- Front organizes work around shared email inboxes and rule-driven routing. Intercom organizes work around a customer data platform with Messenger, Inbox, Workflows, and Fin AI. Every workflow assumption changes.
- Conversation history import limitations
- Intercom does not have a dedicated bulk historical import API equivalent to Zendesk's Ticket Import API. The Conversations API accepts a created_at field described as "only recommended for migrating past conversations from another source into Intercom," but sandbox testing is required to confirm timestamp preservation on your specific plan.
- Forwarding rule (lower risk)
- Configure your email provider (Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, etc.) to forward incoming mail for support@yourdomain.com to your Intercom forwarding address. This preserves your existing MX records and allows quick rollback.
- MX record change (full cutover)
- Update MX records to point directly to Intercom's mail servers. This is a harder cutover with longer rollback time (TTL-dependent, typically 1–24 hours).
- Cut over during low-traffic hours
- Schedule the switch during your lowest-volume period. Monitor both Front (for stragglers) and Intercom (for incoming messages) for 2–4 hours after the cutover.
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 Front and Intercom 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 Intercom, 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 Front 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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Verify your support email domain in Intercom
Intercom requires DNS verification (DKIM and SPF records) before it can receive email on your domain. Add the required CNAME/TXT records and allow 24–48 hours for propagation.
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Record-count reconciliation
Conversations exported vs. created. Contacts vs. contacts. Messages vs. conversation parts. Tags applied vs. expected.
Front → Intercom specifics
- Timestamp verification
- Confirm imported conversations show original dates, not migration-date timestamps. This is the most common failure mode. Check at least 20 conversations across different date ranges.
- Email routing verification
- Send test emails to your support address and confirm they arrive in Intercom (not Front) after the DNS cutover.
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
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Contacts | low | Contacts can be migrated via CSV import or API with straightforward field mapping, though role assignment (user vs. lead) and external_id preservation require planning. |
| Conversations | high | Conversation history migration depends on the created_at timestamp field behavior which varies by Intercom plan, is subject to a 500-part limit, and requires API-only import with no bulk option. |
| Conversation Attachments | high | Front's authenticated attachment URLs may expire during migration, requiring local download and re-hosting before import into Intercom. |
| Tags | medium | Tags can be migrated via API but Intercom maintains separate namespaces for conversation tags and contact tags, requiring careful mapping and creation logic. |
| Custom Fields | medium | Front custom fields must be mapped to Intercom's typed custom attributes (string, integer, boolean, date, list), with dropdown fields requiring pre-enumeration of all valid values via the Data Attributes API. |
| Companies | medium | Front Contact Groups (Contact Lists) have no direct equivalent; company data cannot be imported via CSV and must be created through the Companies API, with static group membership approximated via tags. |
| Rules and Automations | high | Front Rules have no migration path and must be manually rebuilt as Intercom Workflows, requiring a complete redesign of routing, assignment, and automation logic. |
| Canned Responses | medium | Front Message Templates map to Intercom Saved Replies but Intercom lacks a folder structure equivalent, so organizational hierarchy is lost. |
| Internal Notes | medium | Front Conversation Comments can be migrated as Intercom Conversation Parts with type 'note', but they are subject to the 500-part-per-conversation limit alongside regular messages. |
| Webhooks and Integrations | high | Front webhook subscriptions have no migration path and must be decommissioned and rebuilt as Intercom webhook topics or Workflow triggers, with downstream systems requiring payload schema updates. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Conversation History Import Limitations
Intercom lacks a dedicated bulk historical import API, and its Conversations API has constraints including a 500-part limit per conversation, no HTML support in initial message bodies, and plan-dependent timestamp preservation behavior that requires sandbox testing.
Contact Model Architecture Gap
Front's simple contact records (name, email, phone, custom fields) must be mapped into Intercom's richer CDP model with role distinctions (user vs. lead), company associations, typed custom attributes, and dynamic segments that cannot be statically imported.
Automation and Rules Rebuild
Front Rules have no migration path and must be manually reconstructed as Intercom Workflows, often making this the most time-consuming post-migration task.
API Rate Limit Constraints
Front's API rate limits range from 50 to 200 requests per minute depending on plan tier, while Intercom enforces 1,000 requests per minute distributed into 10-second windows, requiring careful throttling to avoid 429 errors during large-scale data transfers.
Attachment URL Expiration Risk
Front's authenticated attachment URLs may expire during the migration window, requiring teams to download attachments locally and re-host them on services like S3 before importing into Intercom.
DNS and Email Routing Cutover
MX records and email forwarding rules must be reconfigured at go-live to route inbound email from Front's shared inboxes to Intercom's team inboxes, making DNS cutover a critical coordination step alongside data migration.
What breaks
Known failure modes. Have a recovery plan for each before you cut over.
Duplicate contacts
Front allows multiple contacts with the same email. Intercom enforces uniqueness and returns a 409 Conflict error with a body containing the existing contact's ID. Define your merge strategy before you start loading data.
Multi-channel conversations
A single Front conversation spanning email and SMS becomes ambiguous in Intercom, where conversations are typically tied to one channel. Decide whether to split or flatten.
500-part limit
Intercom caps conversation parts at 500 per conversation. Long-running Front conversations with hundreds of messages and internal notes will hit this ceiling and must be truncated or split.
Merged Front conversations
Messages and comments API calls for merged conversations can return HTTP 301 redirects. If your extractor does not follow the redirect and consolidate correctly, you will undercount history. (dev.frontapp.com)
HTML rendering differences
Front messages use rich HTML. Intercom conversation parts support HTML in replies, but the initial conversation body does not support HTML. Complex email templates with nested tables or CSS may also render differently in Intercom's UI.
Attachment URL expiration
Front attachment URLs served via the API are authenticated. Test whether they remain accessible for the full duration of your migration. If they expire, download attachments to local/cloud storage before starting the Intercom load phase.
Attachment size limits
Intercom accepts up to 10 image attachment URLs per conversation creation call. Messenger uploads allow individual files up to 100 MB, but inbound emails above 20 MB are rejected. Old oversized attachments may need external hosting.
Front Contact Lists API change
The old /contact_groups endpoint is deprecated — use /contact_lists (renamed September 2025). (dev.frontapp.com)
Company ID immutability
In Intercom, company_id cannot be updated after creation. Plan your company identifier scheme carefully before the first API call. If you use Front's internal company IDs and later need to align with your CRM, you cannot change them.
GDPR deletion requests during migration
If a customer requests deletion while data exists in both Front and Intercom, you must honor the request in both systems. Have a documented process before starting.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
How long does a Front to Intercom migration take?
For a mid-size team (30 agents, 150K conversations), expect 3–6 weeks end-to-end including planning, test migration, conversation history loading, Workflow rebuilds, and validation. Conversation history migration is the primary bottleneck due to API rate limits.
Can Front conversation history be imported into Intercom?
Yes, with caveats. Intercom's Create Conversation API accepts a created_at timestamp field for migrating past conversations. However, behavior varies by plan and must be tested in a sandbox workspace before committing to a full import. There is also a 500-part limit per conversation.
What data can't be migrated from Front to Intercom?
Rules/automations (must be rebuilt as Intercom Workflows), shared drafts, conversation links, per-inbox signatures, analytics dashboards, SLA compliance history, and integration configurations all cannot be migrated programmatically and must be rebuilt manually.
Can I migrate Front rules and automations to Intercom Workflows?
No. Front rules and Intercom Workflows are different automation systems — Front uses simple condition-action pairs while Intercom uses visual, multi-step, event-driven automations. Each rule must be manually redesigned as a Workflow.
Should I use Intercom Tickets or Conversations for migrated Front data?
Use Intercom Conversations for real-time messaging exchanges and Tickets for tracked async issues like bug reports and feature requests. Many migrations use both, routed by Front inbox, tag, or case type. This routing decision should be made during discovery.