Zoho's Zwitch tool drops tags, inline images, nested custom fields, and thread direction. A full-fidelity migration requires handling Zendesk's 10 req/min API cap and Zoho's credit-based system via custom scripts or an engineer-led service.
Migrating from Zendesk to Zoho Desk is a data-model translation problem disguised as a platform switch. Both organize around tickets, but Zoho Desk uses a department-centric hierarchy with a credit-based API system that behaves nothing like Zendesk's rate-limited endpoints. Zoho's native Zwitch tool drops tags, inline images, nested custom fields, groups, and collaborators. All thread replies are marked as "Incoming", destroying the distinction between agent responses and customer messages. A full-fidelity migration requires handling Zendesk's 10 req/min export cap and Zoho's daily credit budget via custom API scripts — with inline image re-hosting, tag migration via the Tag API, and multi-department routing that Zwitch cannot provide.
Read this first
Pair-specific gotchas that catch teams out. Each one has cost somebody a weekend.
The 10 req/min limit applies only to incremental export endpoints
Fetching individual ticket comments, attachments, and side conversations uses the standard API, which has separate per-plan limits (e.g., 200 req/min on Team, 400 on Growth). But for bulk data extraction, the incremental export bottleneck is the one that matters.
Attachment size limit
Zoho Desk enforces a 20 MB maximum attachment size for ticket creation. Zendesk attachments that exceed this limit will fail to import via the API. Workarounds include converting oversized attachments to secure cloud storage links (e.g., S3 or Google Drive) and embedding the URL in the ticket thread.
Tickets will fail to import if the associated contact (end user) does not already exist
Tickets will fail to import if the associated contact (end user) does not already exist in Zoho Desk. Zwitch does not auto-create contacts from ticket data. You must import Users before Tickets, and ensure email addresses match.
Do not deactivate your Zendesk account until you have verified all data
Inline images in migrated tickets are still served from Zendesk's servers. Once you deactivate, those images break permanently.
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 Zendesk
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 Zoho Desk can hold your support model
Walk your current workflow through Zoho Desk: 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 Zendesk → Zoho Desk 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.
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Create agents first
Agent email addresses must match between platforms. Add all agents to Zoho Desk and assign them to the correct departments before migrating tickets.
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Decide on department structure
If your Zendesk instance uses brands (separate customer-facing support portals under one account), groups, or queues for multiple business units, decide whether a single-department Zwitch import is acceptable or whether you need custom import logic.
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Document your triggers, automations, and macros
None of these migrate automatically. Export or screenshot your active Zendesk triggers, automations, macros, and SLA policies so you have a reference for manual recreation in Zoho Desk.
Zendesk → Zoho Desk specifics
- Inline images are not migrated by Zwitch
- Zoho's documentation states that inline images will remain visible only while the Zendesk account is active. Once you deactivate Zendesk, every inline image in every migrated ticket breaks permanently.
- Tags, groups, teams, and collaborators are not migrated
- If your Zendesk workflows depend on tags for routing, reporting, or automation triggers, that operational context vanishes on import.
- Thread direction is flattened
- All thread replies from Zendesk tickets are marked as "Incoming" in Zoho Desk, destroying the distinction between agent responses and customer messages. Thread replies without from or to addresses are assigned to the organization admin and mapped to the Help Center channel.
- Align statuses and priorities
- Zoho Desk's default statuses (Open, On Hold, Escalated, Closed) may not match your Zendesk configuration. Create custom statuses in Zoho Desk before import.
- Do not deactivate Zendesk prematurely
- Keep it active until all data — especially inline images — is verified in Zoho Desk.
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 Zendesk 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 Zendesk 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 Zendesk 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 -
Audit your Zendesk data
Count tickets, contacts, organizations, and attachments. Identify how many tickets contain inline images. List all tags in active use. Inspect attachment size distribution — anything above 20 MB needs a workaround plan.
Zendesk → Zoho Desk specifics
- Account exports are not enabled by default
- The account owner must ask Zendesk support to enable them. The export UI is not available on Team plans, though the REST API remains available. (support.zendesk.com)
- JSON exports omit items with a system-generated timestamp within six minutes of the request
- This creates a gap that requires a delta pass to close.
- Tickets exceeding 1 MB of data are exported without comments
- a separate JSON file is emitted explaining that comments were excluded.
- CSV exports are not a migration format
- They exclude deleted tickets, ticket comments, descriptions, multi-line text, multi-select fields, and custom date fields. CSV is a reporting snapshot, not ticket history.
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 Zendesk → Zoho Desk 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 Zendesk → Zoho Desk 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 Zoho Desk 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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Map your custom fields
Document every custom field type, name, and picklist value. Identify nested/dependent fields. Check whether your field count exceeds Zoho's edition limits (50 Standard, 150 Professional, 230 Enterprise). Labels over 50 characters will be truncated.
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 Zoho Desk sandbox that reconciles cleanly and has been reviewed by real agents.
Keep these open
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Stand up a Zoho Desk 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 Zoho Desk'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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Create a dedicated test department
Set up a temporary department in Zoho Desk (e.g., "Migration Test") and route all test-imported tickets there. This isolates test data from real agent queues. After validation, delete the test department and its tickets before running the production migration.
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Use a separate Zoho Desk trial portal
Spin up a free Zoho Desk trial on a different org. Run your test migration against this throwaway portal. This gives you a clean environment to validate field mapping, thread direction, attachment integrity, and contact associations without any risk to production. The trial portal has lower API credit limits (5,000/day), so you may need to test with a representative subset rather than your full dataset.
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Test against ugly tickets, not average ones
Pick examples with private notes, missing agents, oversized files, inline screenshots, non-English status values, and complex custom fields. Average-ticket sampling misses the real breakpoints.
Zendesk → Zoho Desk specifics
- Select a representative sample, not a random one
- Your test batch should include the hardest tickets: ones with inline images, oversized attachments, missing agents, private notes, non-English status values, nested custom fields, and tickets assigned to agents who are no longer active. If your test only covers clean, simple tickets, it will not surface the failures that matter.
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 Zoho Desk, 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 Zendesk 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 Zoho Desk'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 Zendesk 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 Zendesk read-only rather than cancelled — cancelling the old contract on day one removes your only fallback.
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Plan your cutover window
Decide whether you'll do a hard cutover (stop Zendesk, migrate, start Zoho) or a delta sync (migrate historical data, run both systems briefly, then sync the gap). Zendesk exports have a time gap near the request window, so a delta pass is almost always necessary for a clean 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 Zendesk and Zoho Desk 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 Zoho Desk, 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 Zendesk 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.
Module Module
| Zendesk field | Zoho Desk field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Ticket | Tickets, Ticket Comments, Threads, Attachments | |
| User (agent) | Agents | |
| User (end-user) | Contacts | |
| Organization | Accounts | |
| KB Sections, Root Categories, Article Translations | Knowledge Base (via API import) | Zwitch uses Zendesk APIs to pull KB content. Article body HTML is imported, but formatting may degrade — embedded media, code blocks, and complex layouts often require manual cleanup. Category and section hierarchy must be manually recreated as Zoho KB categories and sections. |
| Triggers, Automations, Macros | — | Not migrated by any method. Must be manually recreated in Zoho Desk. See note below. |
| SLA Policies | — | Not migrated. Zoho Desk SLAs use a different structure and must be configured manually. |
| Zendesk Explore reports / dashboards | — | Not migrated. Historical reporting data and dashboard configurations do not transfer. You can rebuild reports in Zoho Desk's analytics module using migrated ticket data, but pre-migration report definitions are lost. |
Zendesk Zoho Desk
| Zendesk field | Zoho Desk field | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | Subject | Direct map |
| Description | Description | Direct map |
| Status | Status | Requires picklist value alignment |
| Priority | Priority | Requires picklist value alignment |
| Assignee | Assignee | Agent emails must match; missing agents fall back to migration admin |
| Requester | Contact | Contact must exist or ticket import fails |
| Group | — | Not migrated by Zwitch |
| Tags | — | Not migrated by Zwitch |
| Type | Classification | Manual mapping needed |
| Custom Fields | Custom Fields (cf_*) | Zwitch auto-creates fields, except nested custom fields |
| Ticket ID | Zendesk-ID (custom field) | Stored for cross-reference |
| Inline Images | — | Not migrated. Break when Zendesk is deactivated |
| Side Conversations | — | No Zoho Desk equivalent |
| Satisfaction Ratings | — | No direct equivalent |
| Collaborators | — | Not migrated |
| Department routing | Single department via Zwitch | Zwitch migrates all data into one department |
Risk matrix
Per-object risk for this pair. Plan extra validation around anything marked high.
| Object | Risk | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Inline Images | high | Not migrated by Zwitch. Break permanently when Zendesk is deactivated. |
| Tags | high | Dropped by Zwitch entirely. Must be migrated via Zoho Desk's Tag API with custom scripts. |
| Thread Direction | high | Zwitch marks all replies as "Incoming," erasing the agent vs. customer distinction. |
| Side Conversations | high | No Zoho Desk equivalent. Must be archived or flattened into ticket threads. |
| Nested Custom Fields | high | Dependent picklists are skipped by Zwitch. Require custom API handling. |
| Attachments (20–50 MB) | medium | Exceed Zoho's 20 MB API limit. Must be converted to secure cloud-hosted links. |
| Satisfaction Ratings | medium | No direct Zoho Desk equivalent. Must be archived or stored in custom fields. |
| Groups / Collaborators | medium | Not migrated by Zwitch. Assignment and collaboration context is lost without custom logic. |
| Custom Field Labels | low | Auto-created by Zwitch, but labels over 50 characters are truncated and restricted characters replaced. |
| Ticket Comments | low | Comments transfer via Zwitch but lose correct thread direction and authorship if agents are missing. |
The hard parts
What makes this specific migration difficult, beyond the mechanics.
Zwitch Data Gaps
Zwitch drops tags, groups, inline images, nested custom fields, and collaborators. Thread direction is flattened to all "Incoming."
Credit-Based API Limits
Zoho Desk uses daily credit budgets instead of per-minute rate limits. Credits are shared across all integrations, and exhaustion blocks all API calls until the next reset.
Inline Image Breakage
Zwitch does not migrate inline images. They remain hosted on Zendesk's servers and break permanently once the Zendesk account is deactivated.
Single Department Limit
Zwitch migrates all data into one Zoho Desk department. Multi-brand or multi-group structures from Zendesk require custom API import logic.
Attachment Size Mismatch
Zendesk supports 50 MB attachments but Zoho Desk's API limit is 20 MB. Files between 20–50 MB must be rehosted as secure cloud links.
Tools used in this playbook
All free, all run entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded.
FAQ
Does Zoho Zwitch migrate tags and inline images from Zendesk?
No. Zoho's Zwitch documentation explicitly excludes tags, groups, teams, collaborators, and ticket inline images. Tags must be migrated via Zoho Desk's Tag API using custom scripts. Inline images remain hosted on Zendesk's servers and break permanently once the Zendesk account is deactivated.
What are the API rate limits for a Zendesk to Zoho Desk migration?
On Zendesk, incremental exports are capped at 10 requests per minute (30 with the High Volume API add-on). On Zoho Desk, imports consume daily API credits based on your edition and user count, plus an org-wide concurrency limit shared across all integrations.
Can I use a Zendesk CSV export for a full migration to Zoho Desk?
No. Zendesk CSV exports omit ticket comments, descriptions, multi-line text, multi-select fields, and custom date fields. CSV is only suitable for lightweight contact or account moves and reporting snapshots — not ticket history migration.
What happens to Zendesk attachments over 20 MB during migration?
Zendesk supports attachments up to 50 MB, but Zoho Desk's ticket-creation limit is 20 MB. Attachments between 20 and 50 MB will fail to import via the API. The standard workaround is to rehost oversized files as secure cloud links embedded in the ticket thread.
Can Zwitch migrate Zendesk tickets into multiple Zoho Desk departments?
No. Zoho's Zwitch FAQ states that the migration engine currently places all data into a single Zoho Desk department. Multi-department routing from Zendesk brands or groups requires custom API import logic.