How to migrate from Help Scout

To migrate from Help Scout, export your conversations from their admin settings to a CSV or JSON file before you cancel your subscription. You will need to manually set up your new help center and redirect your support email address. Most migrations lose internal notes and custom fields, so keep a local backup of your raw data for reference.

How do I export my data from Help Scout?

I have spent years moving data between systems. It is never as simple as pressing a button and watching everything land perfectly in a new home. Before you do anything else, you need a full backup of what you have. Help Scout allows you to export your conversations from their admin settings. This usually results in a large file containing the text of your emails, the dates, and the customer names.

I always tell the shops I worked with to do this on a Tuesday morning. Don't do it on a Friday afternoon when you are tired. You want to be alert so you can check the file. Open the export and make sure the columns look right. If you have thousands of tickets, the file might be big. That is fine. Just make sure it is on your hard drive before you touch your subscription settings.

You should also export your customer list. This is your database of people. In the dental practice I managed, our patient list was our most valuable asset. In a service business, your customer history is your memory. If you lose it, you are starting from zero with every phone call. Export the contacts separately to ensure you have their names, email addresses, and phone numbers in a clean format.

What information is lost during a help desk migration?

I have to be honest here. No two tools talk to each other perfectly. When you move from Help Scout to any other platform, including ours, things will break. The most common casualty is threading. Help Scout does a great job of keeping a long chain of emails together. When you move that data, it often arrives as individual messages or a single block of text that is hard to read.

Internal notes are another problem. These are the private comments your team left for each other. Maybe a receptionist left a note about a grumpy customer or a specific billing issue. Most migration tools struggle to map these notes to the right place in a new system. They often end up mixed in with the customer-facing text or they vanish.

Custom fields rarely survive the trip. If you have been using specific tags or boxes to track things like "type of repair" or "office location," that data is structural. It belongs to Help Scout's database. When you move to a new tool, you are moving into a different house with different cabinets. You will likely have to set those fields up again from scratch and manually re-tag your most important active tickets.

How do I move my knowledge base articles?

Help Scout has one of the nicest Docs products in the business. It looks clean without any design work. Because of this, many people forget that the content is locked inside their system. There is no magic "move my site" button that works perfectly across the industry.

You will need to copy and paste your articles. I know that sounds tedious. I have sat in a restaurant office at midnight doing exactly this for menu updates and training manuals. It is the only way to ensure the formatting stays clean. When you move an article, you also need to move the images. Don't just copy the text and hope the images stay hosted on Help Scout's servers. Once you close your account, those image links will break.

Download every image from your help articles and re-upload them to your new knowledge base. LastWorker provides a public help center for free, but it starts as a blank slate. You have to build the structure. If you have fifty articles, set aside a few hours. It is a good time to prune old information anyway. Most businesses have articles about services they no longer offer or prices that are three years old.

When should I turn off my Help Scout subscription?

Do not cancel your old account the moment you open a new one. This is a mistake I have seen businesses make repeatedly. They want to save the twenty-five dollars per seat immediately, but they end up losing active conversations.

I recommend a two-week overlap. First, set up your new inbox and knowledge base. Then, change your email forwarding. If you use a [email protected] address, you are likely forwarding that into Help Scout. Change that forwarder to point to your new LastWorker address.

For the next week, new emails will go to the new system. Old emails will still be sitting in Help Scout. Your team can finish the active conversations in the old system while starting all new ones in the new one. Once the "Pending" folder in Help Scout is empty, you are safe to shut it down.

Help Scout's entry price is the Standard plan at about $25 per user per month. You can check their current rates at https://www.helpscout.com/pricing/ to see exactly what you are paying. If you have five people on the team, that is $125 a month. That is a decent chunk of change for a small service business. Just make sure the transition is complete before you cut the cord.

How do I handle the email redirection?

Your email address is the front door of your business. If you are moving away from Help Scout, you need to make sure the door still opens. Help Scout uses a specific way of handling email that involves either forwarding or connecting via OAuth.

If you are using forwarding, it is simple. Log into your email provider, like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365. Find the forwarding rules. Delete the rule that sends mail to Help Scout. Add a new rule that sends mail to your new LastWorker inbound address.

Inbound email is free on our platform. You don't have to worry about a per-message charge just for people reaching out. I have worked with systems where every incoming ping felt like a tax. We decided to keep live chat and email support free forever. We include the shared inbox and contacts as well. This means you can have your whole team in the inbox without seeing the bill go up by $25 for every new hire.

What are the costs of switching to LastWorker?

LastWorker does not have a subscription fee. We do not charge per seat. In the dental practice I ran, we had staff come and go. Adding a new receptionist to the software shouldn't cost the business more money every month.

When you move to us, the core tools are free. This includes the shared inbox, the tickets, and the knowledge base. We only charge when you use AI or phone services. If you want the AI to reply to an email or a chat, it costs $0.04. That only happens if the AI actually generates the response. If a human answers, it is free.

If you want a phone number, it is $1 a month. If you want the AI to answer a phone call, it is $0.01 per minute. This includes the carrier costs. Outbound SMS is $0.03 per segment, and inbound SMS is free. This is a different way of thinking about software. You pay for the work done, not for the right to log in.

How does LastWorker handle AI compared to Help Scout?

Help Scout offers AI Answers for $0.75 per resolution. They often give a three-month trial for new accounts. It is a good feature for companies with a lot of simple questions.

At LastWorker, AI is OFF by default. I don't like tools that start doing things without me telling them to. When you set up a new channel, it is manual. Nothing is generated and nothing is charged until you choose to turn it on. A human answers until you decide otherwise.

Our AI reply cost is $0.04. This is a significant difference from the $0.75 per resolution model. We believe AI should be a tool that helps you scale, not a luxury that makes your bill unpredictable. If the AI answers a quick question about your hours or your location, it costs four cents. If it takes a phone call and talks for five minutes to book an appointment, it costs five cents for the time and a few cents for the segments.

How many other tools have free tiers?

When you are looking at the market, it helps to know where Help Scout sits. Out of the twelve major tools we track, eight of them offer some form of a free tier. Help Scout is one of them. Their free plan is actually very generous compared to others. It covers 5 users, which is more than the 2 users you get from HubSpot, Crisp, or Chatwoot.

However, Help Scout limits their free plan to one inbox and one Docs site. If your business grows or you start a second location, you will likely find yourself pushed into their paid plans. This is where the $25 per user per month starts to add up.

Some tools, like Zendesk and Intercom, have no free tier at all. They start charging you from day one. Help Scout is a much better neighbor to small businesses than those giants. But if you have reached the point where the per-seat cost is bothering you, or you need more than one inbox without paying hundreds of dollars, it might be time to move.

Is the migration worth the effort?

Moving is hard. I have managed office moves and software moves. Both involve heavy lifting and the risk of breaking something. If you only have one or two people in your inbox and you love the Help Scout interface, you might want to stay put. It is a great product.

But if you are watching your bill grow every time you hire a new assistant, or if you are tired of paying for a subscription even during your slow months, a usage-based model makes more sense. In a restaurant, I didn't pay for the ovens by the hour. I paid for the gas I used to cook the food. Software should work the same way.

Export your data. Set up your new help center. Redirect your mail. Keep your old account open for two weeks just in case. If you follow those steps, you can move your operations without losing the history you worked eighteen years to build.