Migrating Email

This article will walk you through the process to migrate your support email from another support system to Pylon.

For a higher level overview on migrating to Pylon, see 📄 Migrating to Pylon

First off, ask the Pylon team if your support system you're using has a special migration process. For example, you can cutover Zendesk seamlessly and continue ongoing threads in Pylon.

Decision: What kind of email migration do you want?

You have 4 options with various tradeoffs. Generally speaking small teams should do Type 1, mid-size Type 2, and large teams Type 3. Type 4 is generally recommended for small to mid-sized teams.

Type 1: Forward to Both

Forward email to both Pylon and the old system until your team is ready. Recommended if you have low ticket volume and/or small (< 5 person) teams.

Pros

• Fast (few days). You hook up email, vibe it out whether you like it, and shut the old system down after a few days.

• Easiest upfront and least amount of work. You're essentially trading off ease of getting started with a data mess afterward.

• Run both systems in parallel. Note though, If you're looking to test in parallel, we recommend to use a test email or migrate an unimportant email instead.

Cons

• Confusion for your team and customers. We can't pick up replies from your old system so issues in Pylon will be lossy and vice versa. This is fine with a small team or low volume since you can more easily manually keep track of tickets.

• Bad data hygiene. Upon data migration, emails created in the overlap will be duplicated.

• Dropped tickets after switching. When your team moves over, ongoing old system tickets will be dropped. [Optional] You will need to blast customers to re-open tickets.

Type 2: One-Day Cutover

Setup email forwarding on Pylon and disconnect email from your old system on the same day. Immediately reply to all open old system tickets that to continue an issue they will need to open a new ticket. Recommended if you have short time to resolutions, you want minimal disruption to your team, and/or mid-size team.

Pros

• Fastest (1 day). Everything can happen on that one cutover day. No need to remember to do lingering tasks.

• Minimal disruption to your team. Your team only lives out of one system at a time. You're essentially trading off disruption of your team vs disruption of your customer.

• If you use Customer Portal, only a small gap in customer ticket visibility. We can kick off the data migration right after the cutover.

Cons

• Disruption to your customer. Any customers with open tickets will need to re-submit a ticket to your support email so it is tracked in Pylon. This is fine if you have very quick resolution times.

Type 3: Duration Cutover

Setup email forwarding on Pylon and and disconnect email from your old system on the same day. Allow for 1 week to 1 month for ongoing old system tickets to close before telling customers to move. Recommend if you have long time to resolutions, you want minimal disruption to your customers, and/or large teams.

Pros

• Minimal disruption to your customers. For most of your customers, the cutover will be seamless and they won't experience any change.

Cons

• Disruption to your team. Your team will need to juggle two support systems.

• Slowest (1 week - 1 month). This can delay shutting off your old system for an extra month.

• If you use Customer Portal, there's a large gap in customer ticket visibility for the duration of the cutover.

Type 4: Seamless Cutover

This cutover is only possible with certain support systems (Zendesk, Front, and manually with Intercom). The idea is to "email" the tickets into Pylon.

On cutover day, we need access to your support system as well as Google admin if you haven't enabled email forwarding yet. We walk you through a workflow that sends a message to your customers and creates that ticket automatically in Pylon. You would then be able to answer to that request from within Pylon and the whole thread would be visible to the customer.

PROs:

• Cleanest way to cutover. There is limited time between the cutover and the data migration

• You can answer all your open tickets in Pylon - You will also the whole thread in Pylon.

CONs

• You need to email your customer once. You can define the copy on this message.