No native migration path exists between Thena and SurveySparrow. API-to-API is the only method that preserves comments and custom fields. Account hierarchy loss is the biggest risk.
Migrating from Thena to SurveySparrow Ticket Management requires a fully custom approach, as no native migration path, built-in importer, or verified third-party connector exists between the two platforms. The fundamental data model difference is structural: Thena organizes data in an account-centric hierarchy (Organization → Account → Contact → Ticket) with multi-channel conversation threading, while SurveySparrow uses a flatter, contact-centric schema (Contact → Ticket → Comments) designed around feedback-driven workflows. All migrations require extracting data via Thena's Platform APIs, transforming it to match SurveySparrow's ticket and contact schema, and loading it through SurveySparrow's REST API v3, with custom engineering work needed to handle field mapping, comment preservation, and the loss of account-level hierarchy.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
No native importer exists
Neither Thena nor SurveySparrow offers a built-in migration tool for this direction. SurveySparrow documents ticket export, contact import, and survey-response import — but not a native historical ticket import flow. Plan for a custom API-based migration from day one. (developers.surveysparrow.com)
Recommendation
For most Thena-to-SurveySparrow migrations, API-to-API is the only method that preserves comments, custom fields, and contact relationships. If your team doesn't have the bandwidth to build and maintain a custom pipeline, a managed migration service is the pragmatic choice.
Account context loss is the #1 risk
Thena groups tickets by account; SurveySparrow does not. Create a custom "Company" field on SurveySparrow tickets before migration and populate it from Thena's account data to preserve this relationship. (developers.surveysparrow.com)
Historical created_at risk
SurveySparrow's POST /v3/tickets does not accept a custom creation timestamp in the public schema. All migrated tickets will show the migration date as their creation date unless you store the original timestamp in a custom field. Confirm this behavior with a test ticket before running production. (developers.surveysparrow.com)
Thena's comments endpoint is tier-gated
It's only available for Standard and Enterprise tier organizations. Confirm API access before scoping the migration. (docs.thena.ai)
Attachments are a silent failure point
SurveySparrow ticket and comment uploads accept only pdf, png, jpeg, mp3, csv, and wav, with a 15MB maximum. If Thena contains other MIME types or larger files, export them to object storage and insert a download link in the migrated ticket body instead of silently skipping. Log every skipped attachment. (developers.surveysparrow.com)
The runbook
Work top to bottom. Tick steps as you go — your progress is saved in this browser.
01 Discovery Establish why you are moving, what "done" means, and who signs off.
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 Thena
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 Surveysparrow Ticket Management can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Surveysparrow Ticket Management: 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 Thena → Surveysparrow Ticket Management 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.
Thena → Surveysparrow Ticket Management specifics
- Stale tickets
- Tickets closed >12–18 months ago with no active business value
- Duplicate contacts
- Thena may have duplicate contacts from different channels (Slack user vs. email contact for the same person)
- Account-level metadata
- SurveySparrow has no native account object — decide upfront whether to encode account names in a custom ticket field or contact property
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 Thena 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 Thena 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 Thena 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
Thena → Surveysparrow Ticket Management specifics
- Tickets/Requests
- Total count, statuses (OPEN, ASSIGNED, CONVERTED_TO_TICKET, CLOSED), date ranges
- Contacts
- Count, email uniqueness, associated accounts
- Accounts
- Count, contact-to-account relationships, custom metadata (ARR, segment)
- Comments/Replies
- Count per ticket, internal vs. external, author attribution
- Attachments
- File count, total size, file types — check against SurveySparrow's supported types (pdf, png, jpeg, mp3, csv, wav) and 15MB limit (developers.surveysparrow.com)
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 Thena → Surveysparrow Ticket Management 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 Thena → Surveysparrow Ticket Management 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 Surveysparrow Ticket Management 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
Thena may have separate entries for the same person across Slack and email channels
Thena → Surveysparrow Ticket Management specifics
- Custom Fields
- Field names, types, picklist values, mandatory fields
- Obsolete custom fields
- Remove empty or dead fields before migration to reduce mapping complexity
- Status mapping
- Thena's OPEN/ASSIGNED/CONVERTED_TO_TICKET → SurveySparrow's configurable status values (see status mapping table above)
- Markdown conversion
- Slack-formatted text (bold, _italic_, <url|text>) → HTML or plain text
- Account flattening
- Account name and metadata → custom ticket fields
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 Surveysparrow Ticket Management sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a Surveysparrow Ticket Management 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 Surveysparrow Ticket Management'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 Surveysparrow Ticket Management, 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 Thena 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 Surveysparrow Ticket Management'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 Thena 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 Thena 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 Thena and Surveysparrow Ticket Management 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 Surveysparrow Ticket Management, 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 Thena 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 automations
Thena's workflows, routing rules, and auto-responders do not transfer. Recreate them using SurveySparrow's workflow builder (trigger → condition → action).
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Update integrations
Any webhooks, Slack bots, or third-party integrations pointing at Thena need to be redirected to SurveySparrow.
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Monitor for 2 weeks
Watch for orphaned contacts, missing comments, custom field data gaps, unmapped statuses, and workflow loops. Keep an error log and push any failed records through manually.
Thena → Surveysparrow Ticket Management specifics
- Reconfigure SLA policies
- SLA rules need to be set up fresh. Historical SLA compliance data (breach/meet status) does not migrate — document it separately if needed for reporting.
- Decommission Thena
- Revoke Thena's access to your Slack workspace (or other channels) to prevent duplicate ticket creation during the cutover.
- Train agents
- SurveySparrow's ticket interface is fundamentally different from Thena's account-centric views. Plan a walkthrough covering ticket templates, comment workflows, the survey-feedback connection, and how account context is now stored in the "Company" custom field.
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 SurveySparrow Equivalent
| Thena field | Surveysparrow Ticket Management field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Organization | (no equivalent) | Top-level container in Thena; SurveySparrow has no org concept |
| Account | (no native equivalent) | Flatten into contact properties or a custom ticket field |
| Contact | Contact | Map by email; create via /v3/contacts |
| Ticket / Request | Ticket | Core migration object; create via /v3/tickets |
| Comment / Reply | Ticket Comment | Create via /v3/tickets/{id}/comments; preserve public/private split |
| Team | Team | Create matching teams in SurveySparrow first |
| Group | (map to Team) | SurveySparrow uses Teams for agent grouping |
| Tag | (custom field or dropdown) | No native tag object on SurveySparrow tickets |
| SLA Policy | SLA Policy | Recreate manually; historical compliance data does not migrate |
| Custom Ticket Fields | Custom Ticket Fields | Create matching fields first; map by internal_name |
Thena SurveySparrow
| Thena field | Surveysparrow Ticket Management field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| id / ticketIdentifier | custom_fields.thena_ticket_id | Prefix with THENA- for traceability |
| subject / original_message_text | subject | Truncate to 200 chars if needed |
| description | description | Strip Slack markdown, convert to plain text or HTML |
| status (OPEN, ASSIGNED, etc.) | status | Map to SurveySparrow's numeric status IDs (see status mapping table below) |
| priority | priority | Map LOW→Low, MEDIUM→Medium, HIGH→High, URGENT→Urgent |
| created_at | custom_fields.source_created_at | Public create schema does not expose writable system timestamps |
| assignee / agent | agent (user ID) | Lookup SurveySparrow user ID by email |
| team / group | team (team ID) | Lookup SurveySparrow team ID by name |
| account.name | custom_fields.company | Custom text field; no native account field in ticket API |
| contact.email | requester (contact ID) | Create or match contact first |
| tags [] | custom_fields.tags | Concatenate with commas or map to dropdown |
| source (SLACK, EMAIL, etc.) | custom_fields.original_channel | Custom dropdown field |
| comment.body | ticket_comment.body | Preserve chronological order and public/private visibility |
| comment.author | ticket_comment.author (user ID) | Match by email |
Status SurveySparrow Status
| Thena field | Surveysparrow Ticket Management field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| OPEN | Open | Default initial status |
| ASSIGNED | In Progress | Or a custom status matching your workflow |
| CONVERTED_TO_TICKET | Open | Thena-specific lifecycle state; no direct equivalent |
| RESOLVED | Resolved | Verify this status exists in your SurveySparrow instance |
| CLOSED | Closed | Terminal status |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Tickets | medium | Tickets can be migrated via API with subject, description, priority, and status, but original timestamps, SLA history, and channel-of-origin metadata may not map cleanly to SurveySparrow's schema. |
| Contacts | medium | Contacts can be created via SurveySparrow's API, but multi-channel duplicates from Thena require deduplication, and account association is lost without custom field encoding. |
| Accounts | high | SurveySparrow has no native account or company object, so the entire account hierarchy and account-level metadata (ARR, segment, routing rules) must be abandoned or manually encoded into custom fields. |
| Comments and Replies | medium | Comments can be created on tickets via API, but Thena's multi-channel threaded conversations must be flattened into linear ticket comments with manual handling of author attribution and internal/external visibility. |
| Custom Fields | medium | Custom field values can be mapped between platforms, but type mismatches (e.g., Thena field types not supported in SurveySparrow), picklist value differences, and file-upload fields require individual transformation logic. |
| Attachments | high | SurveySparrow supports only specific file types with a 15MB limit, and Thena's CSV export excludes file-upload custom fields, making complete attachment migration difficult without direct API-based extraction and format validation. |
| Tags | low | Tags are simple text values that can be mapped to SurveySparrow ticket fields or custom properties with minimal transformation effort. |
| SLA Policies | high | SLA configurations and historical SLA compliance data from Thena cannot be directly migrated and must be manually recreated in SurveySparrow, with all historical first-response and resolution-time metrics being lost. |
| Teams and Assignments | low | Teams and agent assignments can be recreated in SurveySparrow and mapped during ticket creation, though agent user IDs will differ and require a lookup table. |
| Parent-Child Ticket Relationships | medium | SurveySparrow supports parent-child ticket relationships via parent_ticket_id and child_ticket_ids, but Thena does not document this feature in its public API, so any informal ticket groupings may need manual reconstruction. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Account Hierarchy Loss
SurveySparrow has no native account or company object, so Thena's Organization → Account → Contact → Ticket hierarchy must be flattened and encoded into custom fields or contact properties to preserve any account-level context.
Restrictive API Rate Limits
Thena's standard API rate limit of 60 requests/minute combined with SurveySparrow's empirically observed limit of approximately 120 calls/hour means bulk migrations of even moderate datasets can take many hours and require robust throttling and retry logic.
No Native Ticket Import
SurveySparrow does not offer a native historical ticket import mechanism via CSV or bulk upload — contacts and survey responses can be imported, but tickets and their comments must be created individually or in batches through the API.
Comment and Thread Preservation
Thena's threaded replies are linked to original channel messages across Slack, Teams, and Discord, and must be reconstructed as flat ticket comments in SurveySparrow with careful attention to author attribution, internal vs. external visibility, and chronological ordering.
Duplicate Contact Deduplication
Thena may store duplicate contacts originating from different channels (e.g., a Slack user and an email contact for the same person), requiring deduplication before loading into SurveySparrow's contact-centric model to avoid orphaned or split ticket histories.
Attachment Size and Format Constraints
SurveySparrow restricts attachments to specific file types (pdf, png, jpeg, mp3, csv, wav) with a 15MB limit, while Thena's CSV export excludes file-upload custom fields entirely, creating potential data completeness gaps for attachment-heavy tickets.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Is there a built-in migration tool from Thena to SurveySparrow?
No. Neither Thena nor SurveySparrow offers a native migration tool or importer for this direction. No major third-party tool currently provides a pre-built connector either. You need a custom API-based migration.
What are the API rate limits for Thena and SurveySparrow?
Thena's Standard tier allows 60 requests per minute. SurveySparrow's limits vary by plan but have been documented at approximately 120 calls per hour and 1,000 calls per day. Both return 429 errors when exceeded.
Can I migrate Thena account data to SurveySparrow?
SurveySparrow Ticket Management has no native account or company object. You must create a custom ticket field (e.g., 'Company') and populate it with Thena's account name during migration to preserve account context.
Will ticket comments and conversation history transfer?
Yes, but only through the API. Comments must be extracted from Thena and created individually via SurveySparrow's Ticket Comments API, preserving chronological order. Original comment timestamps are not writable, so store them in custom fields if needed.
Can I use CSV to migrate from Thena to SurveySparrow?
Only partially. Thena supports CSV ticket export, but SurveySparrow does not offer a native CSV ticket importer — only contacts and survey responses can be imported via CSV. Comments, attachments, and relationships require API work regardless.