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Milind Ighe replied

Hello Carol,

Thank you for getting back to us with this follow-up. That is a very creative and insightful approach to handling historical data, and it allows me to provide a more detailed, technical possibility.

Let’s address your idea and the potential workflow.

To clarify a key technical point, SupportCandy tickets are not stored as standard WordPress posts or Custom Post Types (CPTs); they use their dedicated database tables for performance and security. For this reason, importing your old tickets as posts would not make them appear within the SupportCandy system itself.

However, your question has prompted a deeper look into a potential migration path, though it requires a combination of automated scripting and significant manual effort.

A Possible Migration Path (Requires Development & Manual Effort)

Please be aware that this is a developer-level task and is not a built-in feature.

Initial Setup: First, you would need to manually create all of your necessary ticket fields (Categories, Statuses, Priorities, Custom Fields) within SupportCandy to match your Freescout setup. Your customers and agents would also need to exist as WordPress users on the site.

Automated Ticket Creation (REST API): Next, a developer could prepare your exported Freescout tickets in a CSV or JSON format. They could then write a script that uses our REST API to create a new ticket in SupportCandy for each of your old tickets, mapping the historical data (subject, description, custom fields, etc.) to the corresponding fields.

The Limitation & The Manual Work: Here is the critical part. As I mentioned previously, the REST API will create all of these tickets under the ownership of the user whose credentials are used for the script (e.g., your administrator account), not the original customer. This is where the manual effort comes in.

After the automated import is complete, you or your team would need to go through each imported ticket and manually change the ‘Raised by’ customer to the correct person.

In summary, while there is no direct import tool, you can use the REST API to bulk-create the historical tickets and their data, and then manually re-assign them to the correct customers. This preserves the ticket data but does require a significant amount of technical and manual work to ensure accuracy.

I know this is a very complex process, but I wanted to be fully transparent about what is technically possible.

Best Regards,
Milind Ighe
Support Executive | SupportCandy Helpdesk
milind@supportcandy.net
supportcandy.net
Support Docs
Need Help? Support Portal

https://supportcandy.net/support-ticket/?wpsc-section=ticket-list&ticket-id=19398&auth-code=gLTqi2Ij

Our standard office hours are 9 am to 6 pm IST (UTC+05:30), Monday through Friday.

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Carol Stambaugh

replied

What are the possibilities of importing old tickets from FreeScout as regular posts (maybe use a CPT) with categories and tags that allow us to sort on assignee, etc. Obviously the post would not be a working ticket, but it could have historical information that can be easily accessed and then a new ticket can be added with our notes and comments that can link to the post with the history. 

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Milind Ighe

replied

Hello Carol,

Thank you for reaching out and for your interest in migrating to SupportCandy. I hope you are doing well.

That’s an excellent question, as a smooth data import process is very important when switching helpdesk systems.

After a thorough review of our system’s capabilities, I must be clear that it is not currently possible to import or migrate ticket history, agents, and customers from Freescout, or any other helpdesk, into SupportCandy.

The core technical limitation is with ticket ownership. Any new tickets must be created by the customers themselves, either through the support portal or via email piping. Our system does not support programmatically creating tickets on behalf of other users, which is a critical requirement for importing historical data. Furthermore, any attempt at a manual database migration would carry an extremely high risk of data corruption due to the complex and differing database structures between helpdesk platforms.

However, we understand that an import tool is a very important feature for users looking to switch platforms. I have logged your request for an import utility from Freescout with our development team. Feedback like this is essential as we consider new features for future releases.

I know this isn’t the direct import tool you were hoping for, but we believe it’s better to be transparent about the current technical limitations. We truly appreciate you considering SupportCandy.

Best Regards,
Milind Ighe
Support Executive | SupportCandy Helpdesk
milind@supportcandy.net
supportcandy.net
Support Docs
Need Help? Support Portal

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Carol Stambaugh

reported

I’d like to import a CSV containing tickets, agents and customers from Freescout, which addon enables that?