Freshdesk Import: Tickets, Contacts, Companies

Ten minutes of preparation saves a week of cleanup when you make Freshdesk import tickets, and most of it is getting your matching keys right.

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The routes to a Freshdesk import

CSV import for contacts and companies. It's the standard route for a migration or a one-off load.

The API for tickets with their full conversation history, which is what you'll use for a real migration.

Migration services, worth paying for above a few thousand tickets, because threading and attachments are fiddly.

Clean the data before Freshdesk imports tickets

This is the step that decides everything. Your new helpdesk either starts clean, or it starts carrying the mess you were trying to leave behind, and there's no third option.

Deduplicate contacts in the source system first. Import duplicates and you'll recreate them here, then watch every future ticket split between them.

Normalise email addresses, because case and whitespace differences are enough on their own to create separate records.

Decide the matching key. Email for contacts, domain for companies. Without one, every import you run is a duplicate generator.

Fix company domains, especially where one customer legitimately has several.

Test on fifty rows

Import fifty records, check every one by hand, then widen. It feels slow. It's also the difference between a smooth migration and a week of your life spent merging records.

Check four things specifically. Did contacts match or duplicate, did companies associate correctly, did threading survive, and did the attachments come across.

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