How to migrate from Freshdesk to LastWorker

Export your ticket history and contact lists from your Freshdesk admin settings into CSV files before you cancel your subscription. You will likely lose internal notes and complex threading during the move, so keep these files for your records. LastWorker allows you to import contacts directly, ensuring you keep your customer list as you stop paying per-seat fees.

I have spent eighteen years running customer operations for service businesses. I have managed a two-location restaurant group and a regional dental practice that had eleven different front desks. In those years, I learned that moving your data is never as easy as the sales team promises. Software companies want to make it easy to join and hard to leave. When you decide to move, you need a plan that does not involve losing your history.

I have watched good leads die in a voicemail box because a migration went wrong. I have seen front desk staff get frustrated because they could not find a customer's previous email. If you are moving from Freshdesk, you are likely looking for a different way to manage your costs or your team. Freshdesk is a mature tool. It is good at deep ticketing and reporting. But the cost of adding seats can become a burden as you grow.

How do I export my data from Freshdesk?

The first step is to get your data out of their system. You should do this while your account is still active. Once you cancel, your access to the export tools might vanish. You should navigate to your admin settings and look for the export options for tickets and contacts. These usually come out as CSV files.

I always tell the shops I worked with to save these files in a secure, shared folder. Do not just rely on the new system to hold your history. A CSV file is a simple spreadsheet. It is not pretty, but it is permanent. You can search it if a customer calls and asks about a repair you did three years ago.

You need to export your contacts separately from your tickets. The contact list is the most valuable part of your data. It contains the names, email addresses, and phone numbers of the people who keep your business running. LastWorker allows you to upload this list so you do not have to start from scratch.

What will I lose during the migration?

I have to be honest here: you will lose things. Every helpdesk software uses a different logic for how it stores data. Freshdesk uses specific threading for emails. When you move those to a new tool, the threads often break. A conversation that looked like one long chain might turn into ten separate entries.

Internal notes are another casualty. These are the private comments your staff left for each other on tickets. Most export tools do not package these notes neatly with the customer's message. If your dental office relied heavily on internal notes to track patient preferences, you might find that information hard to move.

Custom fields are the third thing to watch. If you created a special box in Freshdesk to track "Type of Insurance" or "Favorite Table," that data might not have a direct home in a new system. This is why keeping those CSV files is vital. You are moving for a reason, usually to save money or simplify your workflow, but the cost of that move is a bit of manual data lookup for a few weeks.

How does the pricing compare between the two?

The market for support tools is crowded. There are twelve major tools I track, and eight of them offer some kind of free tier. Freshdesk is one of them. Their free tier covers 2 agents with basic ticketing. If you have a small operation, that might work. But once you hire a third person, you have to move to a paid plan.

The Growth plan at Freshdesk is approximately $19 per agent per month when you pay for a full year upfront. You can check their latest rates at https://www.freshworks.com/freshdesk/pricing/ to be sure. If you have a team of five people, you are looking at nearly $100 every month just to let them answer emails.

LastWorker does things differently. There are no per-seat fees. You can have ten people or fifty people in the inbox and the cost for the software remains zero. Live chat and email support are free forever. This includes the shared inbox, contacts, tickets, and the knowledge base.

We make our money on usage. If you choose to use our AI to reply to a chat or an email, it costs $0.04 per generation. If you don't use the AI, you don't pay. It is a model based on how much work is actually getting done, rather than how many people you have sitting in chairs.

Why is AI handled differently here?

In my experience, automation is a double-edged sword. Freshdesk includes their Freddy AI Agent in their paid plans, with the first 500 sessions bundled in. It is always there. At LastWorker, we believe you should have total control over when a machine talks to your customers.

AI is OFF by default in our system. When you move your channels over, they are manual. A human answers every message. Nothing is generated and nothing is charged unless you specifically turn it on. If you decide to use it for phone calls, the cost is $0.01 per minute, which includes the carrier cost.

I have written phone scripts at 2am for tired receptionists. I know that sometimes you just need a human to handle the nuance of an angry customer. Other times, you just need a machine to tell someone what time you close. We let you choose which is which.

How do I set up my new LastWorker inbox?

Once you have your Freshdesk data saved, setting up your new space is a matter of connecting your channels. You can bring your email addresses over and place the live chat widget on your site. Since there is no credit card required to start, you can test it without any financial risk.

You will want to set up your knowledge base early. This is the public help center where customers can find answers themselves. It is free on LastWorker. In my old dental practice, we used the help center to explain our cancellation policy and what to do in a tooth emergency. Having that information live and searchable reduces the number of tickets your team has to handle.

You can also get a phone number for $1 per month. If you want to send outbound SMS messages to confirm appointments, those are $0.03 per segment. Inbound SMS is free. This allows you to centralize all your communication in one place without the high overhead of a traditional call center platform.

Is LastWorker right for every business?

I am not here to tell you that every single business should leave Freshdesk. If you are a massive corporation that needs complex SLAs, deep reporting modules, and heavy enterprise features, Freshdesk is a very strong tool. They have built a mature product that serves large teams well.

But I have worked with the smaller shops. I have worked with the regional groups where every dollar matters. For a business that is tired of paying for "seats" that are only used part-time, the move makes sense.

When you move, you are trading some of that enterprise complexity for a simpler, more transparent cost structure. You are getting rid of the monthly subscription and replacing it with a system where you only pay when the technology actually does a piece of work for you.

What are the final steps of the move?

After you have imported your contacts and set up your email forwarding, you should run both systems in parallel for a few days. Do not shut off Freshdesk immediately. Watch the new tickets come into LastWorker and make sure your team is comfortable with the shared inbox.

Check your "Saved Replies." In Freshdesk, these might be called canned responses. You will need to copy these over to LastWorker. I have written hundreds of these over the years. They are the lifeblood of a fast support team. While they do not always transfer automatically, having them ready in your new dashboard will make the first day of the transition much smoother.

Once you are sure that every new customer message is hitting your new inbox, you can finally cancel the old subscription. You have your CSV files as a backup. You have your contacts in the new system. You have eliminated a monthly per-seat bill. That is how you execute a migration without losing your mind or your data.---