The Complete Guide to Migrating from Zendesk to HubSpot Service Hub

Zendesk is a capable help desk, but it was built as a standalone ticketing system. As your business grows, the cracks start showing: your service team operates in a silo, customer context lives in a different database than marketing and sales data, and stitching it all together requires expensive middleware or clunky workarounds. HubSpot Service Hub takes a fundamentally different approach by embedding service inside the same CRM your revenue teams already use — giving agents instant access to every interaction a customer has ever had with your company.

The practical upside is significant. When a customer submits a ticket, your agent can see the deals they closed, the marketing emails they opened, the pages they visited, and the NPS score they left last quarter — all without switching tabs. That level of context doesn't just improve resolution times; it transforms the quality of every conversation.

Intake channels are the entry points through which customers reach your support team. In Zendesk, these typically include email addresses wired to your support domain, Facebook Messenger connections, web-based contact forms, and the live chat widget. Each of these channels has a direct counterpart in HubSpot, but the configuration approach differs enough that you need to plan the mapping carefully.

Start by listing every active intake channel in Zendesk. For each channel, note the email address or integration, the team or group that receives tickets from it, and any routing logic that applies. Then map each one to its HubSpot equivalent: connected inboxes for email, Facebook Messenger integration for social, HubSpot forms for web submissions, and chat widgets for live support.

Routing is one of the areas where Zendesk and HubSpot differ most in their approach. Zendesk uses a combination of triggers, automations, and group-based assignment to route tickets. HubSpot uses a combination of inbox-level routing rules, workflow-based assignment, and — for teams on Service Hub Professional or Enterprise — skill-based and capacity-based routing options.

Begin by documenting every routing rule currently active in Zendesk. For each rule, note the trigger conditions, the destination group or agent, and any priority or escalation logic. Then determine which HubSpot mechanism best replicates that behavior. Simple round-robin assignment can be configured directly in the inbox settings. More complex routing — such as assigning billing tickets to the finance-trained support team, or routing enterprise customers to a dedicated pod — is best handled through HubSpot workflows.

Zendesk uses a flat set of statuses (New, Open, Pending, On-hold, Solved, Closed) that apply to all tickets. HubSpot takes a more flexible approach by allowing you to create multiple ticket pipelines, each with its own sequence of statuses. This is a significant advantage if your team handles different types of requests that follow different workflows — for example, a “General Support” pipeline with simple triage statuses and a “Bug Reports” pipeline with stages like Reported, Reproduced, In Development, QA, and Resolved.

During planning, map your current Zendesk status usage to HubSpot pipeline stages. If you have been using tags or custom fields in Zendesk to differentiate ticket types, consider whether those distinctions would be better served by separate pipelines in HubSpot. Each pipeline can have its own automation rules, SLA targets, and reporting views, which keeps things clean and focused.

In Zendesk, macros serve as canned responses — pre-written replies and field updates that agents apply with a single click. HubSpot splits this functionality across two features: Snippets and Templates for canned text, and Playbooks for guided, multi-step agent workflows.

Snippets are short, reusable text blocks that agents can insert into any email, chat, or note using a simple keyboard shortcut. They are ideal for common phrases, standard greetings, troubleshooting steps, or policy language. Templates are full email drafts with personalization tokens that pull data directly from the CRM — think of them as smart macros that automatically fill in the customer's name, company, ticket number, and other context.

Playbooks go beyond what macros can do. They are interactive guides that walk agents through a structured process — for example, a churn-risk call script, a troubleshooting decision tree, or an onboarding checklist. Agents fill in fields as they go, and the responses are saved to the CRM record for future reference.

HubSpot's Customer Portal gives your customers a private, login-protected space where they can view their open and historical tickets, check resolution status, reply to agents, and submit new requests. This is a significant upgrade if you have been relying on Zendesk's Help Center request form or email-only communication, because it gives customers visibility and control without adding to your team's workload.

The portal is fully customizable to match your brand, and because it is tied to the CRM, access is managed through HubSpot contact records. You can control which tickets are visible, require authentication, and even segment portal access by customer tier or company. For B2B teams, this is particularly powerful — you can give an entire account team visibility into all tickets associated with their company.

Customer feedback is one of the areas where HubSpot Service Hub significantly outpaces Zendesk. Zendesk natively supports CSAT surveys triggered at ticket resolution, and you can add third-party tools for NPS or other survey types. HubSpot, by contrast, includes four survey types out of the box: CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), and fully custom surveys with unlimited questions and branching logic.

What makes this particularly valuable is the automation layer. HubSpot surveys are tied to the CRM, which means you can trigger workflows based on survey responses: route detractors to a retention specialist, send promoters a referral request, or flag low-effort scores for process review. This closes the loop between feedback collection and action — something that requires third-party integrations in Zendesk.

Data migration is the most technically demanding phase of any platform switch, and a Zendesk-to-HubSpot migration is no exception. You are moving ticket records, customer data, interaction history, and the relationships between all of those objects. The goal is not just to transfer data, but to transfer it cleanly — with accurate field mappings, preserved associations, and no duplicates.

Start with a comprehensive property mapping exercise. Every Zendesk ticket field, user field, and organization field needs a corresponding property in HubSpot. Some mappings are straightforward (subject maps to ticket name, requester maps to contact). Others require transformation — for example, Zendesk tags might map to HubSpot multi-select properties, and Zendesk organization fields might map to company-level properties in HubSpot.

Before rolling out to your entire support team, run a controlled pilot with a small group of agents. We recommend selecting three to five experienced agents who represent different teams or specializations, and having them handle real tickets in HubSpot for a minimum of two weeks. This pilot period surfaces configuration issues, workflow gaps, and usability concerns that are impossible to catch in a sandbox.

During the pilot, run Zendesk and HubSpot in parallel. Route a defined subset of tickets to HubSpot (for example, all tickets from a specific email address or customer segment) while keeping the bulk of your volume in Zendesk. This limits risk while giving you real-world data on how the new system performs under actual operating conditions.

Migration is not a project with a finish line — it is the beginning of a new operational chapter. The first 30 to 90 days after go-live are critical for identifying optimization opportunities, addressing adoption challenges, and tuning the system based on real-world usage patterns. Set up a structured review cadence and designate a HubSpot admin (or team) responsible for ongoing configuration and improvement.