Migration Playbook

Kustomer Gorgias

Kustomer to Gorgias: The Complete Migration Playbook

A 37-step runbook across six phases — track your progress, and open the right tool at every step.

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TL;DR

Kustomer to Gorgias migration requires API-to-API extraction (CSV exports lose message bodies), KObject flattening into tags/fields, and careful rate limit orchestration across both platforms.

There is no native migration path between Kustomer and Gorgias — Gorgias's built-in importer supports Zendesk but not Kustomer, and Kustomer offers no direct Gorgias export. The fundamental challenge is a data model downshift: Kustomer stores all interactions as a continuous, chronological timeline per customer record with support for custom objects (KObjects) and unlimited custom fields, while Gorgias is a ticket-centric inbox limited to 25 active ticket fields, 4 active customer fields, and no custom object support. Migration requires Kustomer API extraction, significant data transformation to flatten or discard CRM-grade structures, and Gorgias API loading — with custom engineering work needed to handle rate limits, pagination caps, attachment transfer, and the conversion of unified customer timelines into discrete standalone tickets.

Read this first

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

Moving from Kustomer to Gorgias means accepting a simpler data model

Gorgias has no custom objects, no Company hierarchy, a maximum of 25 active ticket fields, and only 4 active customer fields. If your Kustomer instance relies heavily on KObjects or complex Company→Customer relationships, those structures must be flattened or discarded.

The sent_datetime trap

If you omit sent_datetime when creating messages via the Gorgias API, Gorgias treats the message as new and will attempt to send it to the customer as a live email. Every historical message imported without this field becomes an outbound email to your customer. Always set sent_datetime to the original message timestamp. This is the single highest-risk failure mode in the entire migration.

Field type mismatches

Kustomer allows complex multi-select picklists. Gorgias relies heavily on tags for categorization. Script a transformation that converts Kustomer picklist values into Gorgias tags (e.g., Category: Returns → tag returns). Document the mapping table explicitly — agents will need it during the transition.

Kustomer's conversation export does not include full message bodies

You must call /v1/conversations/{id}/messages for each conversation to get the actual content. For 50,000 conversations, that's 50,000+ additional API calls — plan for this in your rate limit budget.

Custom field writes

Gorgias uses replace-all semantics for ticket custom fields. If you PUT custom fields on a ticket, it overwrites all existing values. Use a fetch-merge-put pattern to avoid losing data set by other processes.

Tickets created with message channel api do not trigger auto-reply rules in Gorgias,

Tickets created with message channel api do not trigger auto-reply rules in Gorgias, which is the correct behavior for historical imports. Always implement exponential backoff on 429 responses — both Kustomer and Gorgias return Retry-After headers that specify the wait time in seconds.

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 Kustomer

    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 Gorgias can hold your support model

    Solution architect 2-3 days

    Walk your current workflow through Gorgias: 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 Kustomer → Gorgias 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.

Kustomer → Gorgias specifics

Shopify-native integration
Gorgias surfaces order data, refund actions, and customer lifetime value inside every ticket without custom API work. Kustomer connects to Shopify, but key actions often require leaving the helpdesk or additional configuration.
Pricing model shift
Kustomer uses per-seat pricing with an 8-seat minimum billed annually — check kustomer.com/pricing for current rates, as tiers have changed over time. Gorgias uses ticket-based pricing starting at $10/month for the Starter plan (50 tickets/month), making it significantly cheaper for smaller DTC teams.
Simpler operational model
Gorgias is purpose-built for e-commerce support. Teams that don't need Kustomer's CRM-grade data model, custom objects, and enterprise routing find Gorgias faster to operate and maintain.
Agency use cases
Outsourced support agencies often standardize on Gorgias due to its multi-brand capabilities and predictable per-ticket pricing.
Mid-market e-commerce (5K–100K tickets)
API-to-API with rate limit handling, or managed service.

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. 0/7

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

  1. Take a full Kustomer 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 Kustomer 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 Kustomer 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
  7. Run a delta extract

    from Gorgias for any tickets created during the cutover window that need to be pushed back to Kustomer

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 Kustomer → Gorgias 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 Kustomer → Gorgias 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 Gorgias 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 Gorgias sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.

  1. Stand up a Gorgias 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 Gorgias'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. 0/7

Objective All in-scope data live in Gorgias, 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 Kustomer 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 Gorgias'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 Kustomer 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 Kustomer read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.

  7. Preserve the Gorgias import

    don't delete imported data, as it serves as validation reference

Kustomer → Gorgias specifics

Phased cutover
API or ETL for the historical backfill, middleware only for narrow delta sync.
Re-enable agent write access in Kustomer
and restore email/chat routing to Kustomer endpoints

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 Kustomer and Gorgias 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 Gorgias, 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 Kustomer 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.

Object Equivalent 12 fields high

Gorgias does not support custom objects, meaning KObject data with up to 500 attributes per Klass must be flattened to tags or ticket fields, with most structured data likely lost.

Kustomer fieldGorgias fieldNotes
Customer Customer Map email, name, phone. Preserve source IDs in external_id for validation. (developers.gorgias.com)
Company ❌ (No equivalent) Flatten to a customer tag (e.g., company:acme-corp) or use one of Gorgias's 4 customer custom fields.
Conversation Ticket Each conversation becomes one ticket.
Message Ticket Message Map body, direction, channel, sentAt.
Note Internal Note Preserve as internal messages on the ticket (from_agent: true, public: false).
KObject (Order, Shipment, etc.) ❌ (No equivalent) Flatten to tags, ticket fields, or rely on Gorgias's native Shopify integration.
Tag Tag Direct 1:1 mapping via tag name.
Knowledge Base Article Help Center Article Separate migration via Gorgias Help Center API (POST /api/articles). Requires mapping Kustomer KB categories to Gorgias collections and converting article bodies to Gorgias's expected HTML format.
User (Agent) User Create agents in Gorgias first, then map by email.
Team Team Create teams manually, then assign agents.
Workflow / Business Rule Rule Must be manually rebuilt — no export/import path.
Linked Conversation ❌ (No equivalent) Preserve cross-links in internal notes or an external reference table. (help.kustomer.com)
Kustomer Gorgias 13 fields
Kustomer fieldGorgias fieldNotes
customer.name customer.name Direct
customer.emails [].email customer.email Take primary email
customer.phones [].phone customer.channels [].address Map to phone channel
conversation.name ticket.subject Direct (max 998 characters) (developers.gorgias.com)
conversation.status ticket.status done → closed, open/snoozed → open
conversation.tags [] ticket.tags [] Map by tag name
conversation.assignedTeams ticket.assignee_team Map team by name after creating in Gorgias
conversation.assignedUsers ticket.assignee_user Map user by email
conversation.createdAt ticket.created_datetime ISO 8601
message.body message.body_html Sanitize HTML, replace attachment URLs (1MB body limit)
message.sentAt message.sent_datetime Critical — must be set to prevent live email sends
message.direction message.from_agent in → false, out → true
Custom KObject fields Ticket tags or ticket fields Flatten: e.g., order.status: shipped → tag order-shipped

Risk matrix

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

ObjectRiskNotes
Tickets/Conversations high Kustomer conversations exist as timeline events under customer records and must be decomposed into standalone Gorgias tickets, with potential loss of cross-conversation context and threading fidelity.
Contacts/Customers medium Basic customer records can be migrated via API, but Gorgias limits active customer fields to just 4, requiring significant field reduction from Kustomer's unlimited custom field schema.
Companies/Organizations high Gorgias has no company or organization object, so Kustomer's first-class Company→Customer hierarchies must be entirely discarded or encoded as tags or custom field values.
Custom Objects (KObjects) high Gorgias does not support custom objects, meaning KObject data with up to 500 attributes per Klass must be flattened to tags or ticket fields, with most structured data likely lost.
Custom Fields high Kustomer supports unlimited custom fields across KObject schemas, while Gorgias enforces a hard cap of 25 active ticket fields and 4 active customer fields, requiring aggressive field consolidation.
Tags low Tags map relatively cleanly between platforms, though Kustomer's tag taxonomy may need deduplication and cleanup before import into Gorgias.
Attachments medium Attachments are not included in CSV exports and only partially supported by third-party migration tools; full transfer requires API-to-API handling with inline images converting to standard attachments.
Internal Notes low Internal notes can be migrated as note messages on Gorgias tickets via the API, though they lose their position within Kustomer's unified customer timeline.
Knowledge Base Articles medium Both platforms have built-in knowledge bases, but article structure, categories, and translations require manual recreation or custom scripting as there is no automated transfer path.
Automations and Workflows high Kustomer Workflows and Business Rules cannot be exported and have no equivalent mapping to Gorgias Rules (capped at 70), requiring complete manual reconstruction with different trigger and action logic.

The hard parts

What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.

Data Model Downshift

Kustomer's customer-centric timeline with KObjects, Company hierarchies, and unlimited custom fields must be flattened into Gorgias's ticket-centric model with only 25 ticket fields, 4 customer fields, and no custom object support.

No Native Migration Path

Gorgias's native importer supports only Zendesk, and Kustomer has no built-in Gorgias export, requiring a fully custom API-to-API extraction, transformation, and loading pipeline.

Kustomer API Pagination Limits

Kustomer's standard search API caps at 100 pages per query and only returns records updated within the past two years, forcing date-range partitioning and use of the archive-search endpoint for older data.

Timeline-to-Ticket Conversion

Each Kustomer customer's unified timeline of conversations across email, chat, phone, and social must be split into individual standalone Gorgias tickets, breaking the single-stream view of customer history.

Custom Object Data Loss

Kustomer KObjects (custom objects with up to 500 attributes per Klass) have no equivalent in Gorgias and must be either flattened into tags, encoded into limited ticket fields, or discarded entirely.

Attachment and Inline Image Handling

CSV exports include no attachments, third-party tools migrate inline images only as attachments rather than embedded, and full attachment transfer requires direct API-to-API handling with significant bandwidth and storage considerations.

What breaks

Known failure modes. Have a recovery plan for each before you cut over.

Duplicate customers

Kustomer allows multiple customer records with the same email. Gorgias deduplicates by email and returns 409 Conflict on duplicates. Merge or choose a primary record before import.

Multi-channel conversations

A single Kustomer conversation can span email, chat, and SMS. Gorgias tickets are channel-specific. Split multi-channel conversations into separate tickets or import all messages under channel: api.

Kustomer Search API limits

The Search API returns a maximum of 10,000 records per query regardless of pagination (100 pages × 100 records). For larger datasets, use date-range filters to partition extraction into smaller windows. Use archive search (POST /v1/customers/archive-search) for records older than two years.

Message body size

Gorgias has a 1MB message body limit. Long enterprise email threads that exceed this limit are silently rejected — the API returns 200 but the body is truncated or empty. Validate message body size before import and split oversized bodies.

Ticket subject length

Gorgias limits ticket subjects to 998 characters. (developers.gorgias.com)

Message count per ticket creation

Ticket creation accepts 1 to 500 messages in the initial payload. Threads longer than 500 messages need an append phase via /api/tickets/{id}/messages. (developers.gorgias.com)

Attachments and expiring URLs

Kustomer stores attachments as AWS S3 signed URLs that expire after a short period (typically hours). If you simply pass the URL to Gorgias, the image breaks when the signature expires. Your migration script must download the binary file from the Kustomer URL, upload it to Gorgias via POST /api/upload, and replace the URL in the message body. Gorgias can return 413 Payload Too Large on oversized files — test your largest files early. (developers.gorgias.com)

Inline images

Kustomer inline images reference Kustomer CDN URLs. After migration and Kustomer account cancellation, these URLs become inaccessible. Download and re-host images before canceling your Kustomer subscription.

Snoozed conversations

Kustomer's snoozed status has no direct Gorgias equivalent. Import as open and tag with snoozed-from-kustomer for manual triage.

Company→Customer relationships

Lost entirely in Gorgias. If this hierarchy drives your routing or reporting, evaluate whether Gorgias is the right target platform before committing.

Linked conversations

Kustomer supports linked conversations; Gorgias tickets are independent. Preserve cross-links in internal notes (e.g., "Linked to original ticket: KUST-12345") or an external reference table. (help.kustomer.com)

Merged customer records

Kustomer allows merging customers. Sometimes the API returns historical data attached to a deprecated ID. Ensure your mapping table resolves merged IDs to the primary email address before pushing to Gorgias.

Email threading post-migration

Gorgias threads emails based on SMTP headers (In-Reply-To, References). When migrating via API, you force grouping via the Ticket ID, but customer replies post-migration might create new tickets if the original SMTP headers were not preserved. Agents need to be trained to manually merge these.

Tools used in this playbook

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

FAQ

Is there a native Kustomer to Gorgias migration tool?

No. Kustomer has no built-in Gorgias export, and Gorgias's native importer only supports Zendesk. The practical route is Kustomer REST API extraction, data transformation, and Gorgias REST API loading — or a third-party migration service like Help Desk Migration or ClonePartner.

What data do I lose migrating from Kustomer to Gorgias?

You lose KObjects (custom objects), Company/Account hierarchy, linked conversations, advanced routing rules, and custom status types. Gorgias supports only 25 active ticket fields and 4 customer fields — far fewer than Kustomer's unlimited custom attributes via Klasses.

How long does a Kustomer to Gorgias migration take?

At Gorgias's API rate limit of ~120 requests per minute (API key auth), a 50,000-ticket migration with 5 messages each takes roughly 42 hours of continuous API calls. End-to-end including planning, testing, and validation, budget 2–4 weeks.

What is the sent_datetime trap in Gorgias migration?

If you omit the sent_datetime field when creating messages via the Gorgias API, Gorgias treats each imported message as a new outbound email and sends it to your customers. Always set sent_datetime to the original message timestamp to prevent this.

How do Kustomer KObjects map to Gorgias?

Gorgias has no native custom object framework. KObject data must be serialized and flattened into Gorgias tags, ticket custom fields (max 25 active), or formatted internal notes. For Shopify-based teams, Gorgias's native Shopify integration often replaces order-related KObjects entirely.

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