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The mechanical parts of a Zendesk migration are easy. The conceptual part is not, and getting it wrong produces a Tied instance that behaves like a worse Zendesk.

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The shift: tickets to conversations

Zendesk creates a ticket per issue. It opens, it closes, and next time there is a new one. History lives in whichever ticket someone thinks to search. Tied threads by person. Open a conversation and you see everything that contact has said to you, on any channel, in order.
This is not a cosmetic difference. It is why an agent does not have to ask a customer to repeat themselves, and why an AI agent can recognise that a customer’s next message is about something else entirely — which is one of the valid corroborators for a Tier 3 resolution.
The practical consequence: stop thinking in ticket lifecycle and start thinking in conversation state. Tied has four — open, pending, snoozed, resolved — and they mean specific things. See Inbox.

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What maps cleanly

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What needs thought

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Macros split

A Zendesk macro bundles text and actions. In Tied those are two things: a canned response is reusable text, a macro is a set of actions. Most Zendesk macros become one of each. This is a good moment to notice how many of your macros are actually doing three unrelated jobs at once.

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Triggers and automations both become automation rules

Zendesk distinguishes triggers (event-driven) from automations (time-based). Tied has one automation rule concept covering both. Simpler, but the migration is not one-to-one — expect to consolidate.

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Forms and ticket fields

Zendesk ticket forms have no direct equivalent. Depending on what they do:

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Light Agents

There is no Light Agent equivalent. The nearest thing is a custom role with conversation_participating_manage, which limits someone to conversations they are actually on. Custom roles are Enterprise.

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The order to move in

Export the Help Center

Longest lead time, highest value — it becomes your AI agent’s knowledge base as well as your public docs.

Audit before you migrate

Zendesk instances accumulate. Most teams find half their macros unused and their tag taxonomy largely accidental. Migrating that is migrating debt.

Bring contacts and custom fields across

See Importing contacts.

Rebuild groups, labels and canned responses

From the audited set, not the original one.

Connect one channel in parallel

Web chat on a traffic subset, with Zendesk still live.

Build the agent, then cut over

Only once it is resolving real conversations at a rate you are happy with.

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What you gain

  • Channels Zendesk treats as add-ons. Apple Messages for Business with Apple Pay, pickers and forms in-thread; RCS with verified sender and rich cards.
  • One thread per person, not a pile of tickets.
  • Outcome-based pricing you can audit — seven classes, each with a mechanical discriminator evaluated against a signed action trail.
  • Free handoff, and no charge at all for a conversation that did not resolve anything.

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Next

Inbox

The shared-inbox model, and why it is not a ticket queue.

Setup checklist

The order to stand things up in.