Helpdesk migrations already have their own playbook on this site, the helpdesk migration referral playbook, which follows the cutover calendar. This page takes a different cut: the questions a consultant gets asked, or should ask, while replacing any ticketing platform, whether it is a customer helpdesk, an internal IT service desk or an MSP's own PSA.
Five questions a ticketing replacement puts on the table
1. Is this the moment to raise it? Often, because a replacement attaches a real date to the old history. Freshdesk's help center, for one, says a cancelled account is suspended after 24 hours and its account data permanently deleted 14 days after the subscription ends, and advises exporting first because an export can take up to 10 business days (a paraphrase of its cancellation guidance). An older Freshdesk article on data storage gives 90 days after termination instead. Two figures from one vendor is the practical lesson: get the deletion date from the outgoing vendor's current terms, in writing, and put it in front of the client.
Freshdesk2. Whose service history is it? For a customer helpdesk or an internal service desk, the client's. For an MSP replacing its own PSA, the MSP is the company and its CEO decides, but the tickets describe its clients' systems, which raises the rights question covered in whether an MSP can share client ticket data.
3. Who carries it to the CEO? Usually the head of support or service operations, who owns the macros, routing rules and quality program. That person is the natural sponsor. Under the program the CEO authorizes a licensing discussion.
4. Does the migration plan change? No. What to migrate, archive or delete is decided on its own merits; whether to migrate closed tickets weighs those options without reference to any referral.
5. What goes in the introduction? The company's name, the CEO's name and the CEO's request. Nothing from the ticket archive.
The service history referral worksheet
A ticket thread is not one record. Different people wrote different parts of it, and that difference drives both the rights review and what the company might reasonably offer. SourceX's screening page lists support workflows, QA records and internal knowledge bases among original documentation a company creates, and lists personal consumer data among things usually not a fit. SourceX's own illustrative summary of a support-ticket dataset lists agent actions, escalations, resolution, QA score and CSAT, with personal details marked to be removed before sharing and licensing rights pending review.
Fill the worksheet with the support owner, from what they already know. Nobody runs a query to complete it.
| Service history part | Who wrote it | Custodian: what you may note | Customer owner: who decides | SourceX: what it reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Customer requests and replies in threads | The company's customers | That threads exist, the channels (email, chat, phone notes) and the years covered | The CEO, with advice on what customers were told about their data | Personal details, rights and whether the material fits at all |
| Agent replies and resolutions | Company staff | The years covered and the support owner's own volume estimate | The CEO | Rights, privacy within the replies, fit with current programs |
| Internal notes and escalations | Company staff | Whether agents use internal notes and whether escalations link to engineering or field records | The CEO | Linkage, rights, fit |
| Macros, triggers, routing and SLA policies | Support operations | Roughly how many exist and whether their change history is kept | The CEO | Fit as workflow documentation |
| Knowledge base articles | Company staff | Roughly how many, and which are public and which internal | The CEO | Rights, and whether public articles add anything |
| QA scorecards and CSAT results | QA team; ratings and comments from customers | Whether a written QA rubric exists and the date range of scores | The CEO | Fit; customer comments carry the same questions as customer messages |
| Attachments | Mixed | Only whether attachments exist and what kinds | The CEO | Privacy and rights, item by item |
Three readings of a finished worksheet:
- Mostly company-written parts with long histories suggest a conversation worth having, and the company can describe them in its own application.
- Mostly customer-written content means the company should expect hard privacy and rights questions; say so honestly rather than overselling.
- Unknowns stay unknown. "Not sure whether change history is kept" is a fine answer for the CEO to take to SourceX.
What the implementation contract covers, and what it never covers
Your statement of work covers the replacement: mapping fields, moving the tickets the client chose, configuring the new platform, decommissioning the old one. It does not cover licensing, and the referral adds no authority of its own. Section 4.2 of SourceX's sample partner agreement gives a partner "no authority to share a supplier's inventory, records, raw data or personal information, or to access extraction systems."
In practice that means four things you do not do for a referral, however convenient the cutover makes them: run an extra export, keep a copy of the old archive, delay decommissioning, or size the archive with your admin tools so the introduction sounds better. If the client asks you to send the archive to SourceX, the answer is no, and the company deals with SourceX directly; the replies for that conversation are in when a client wants the consultant to upload everything.
If a license is ever signed, SourceX's process page says the data is extracted, transferred and de-identified through approved processing routes after SourceX gives the go-ahead. That is the company's agreement with SourceX, not your project.
Introducing the support owner's CEO without touching the archive
Send the introduction only after the CEO has asked for it in writing, and after you have signed the Channel Partner Agreement. Keep it to three facts: the company, the CEO and the request. If the CEO agrees, add a plain line such as "replacing its helpdesk after nine years on the same platform". Leave out ticket counts from your migration tooling, storage sizes and screenshots; the company gives its own estimates when it applies, listing its systems, years and what could be exported, and SourceX says no records are shared at that stage.
Check one thing first. If anyone at the company has already been in touch with SourceX, section 3 of the terms makes it a duplicate: you send nothing, and the company continues directly.
Fit facts to ask the CEO. Did full-time headcount ever reach 50 or more, leaving contractors out? How many years does the service history span, and did the company write the parts it would offer? Companies in the U.S., Canada and the EU qualify, as do companies in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, South Africa, Latin America, the UAE and Saudi Arabia when at least 70% of the data is in English. History that was ever licensed for AI training is excluded.
A service desk replacement at a 310-person field services firm (Illustrative)
Illustrative. The firm, its people and its figures are fictional, and no outcome is implied.
A consultant is moving a 310-person field services firm from an aging helpdesk to a new service platform. The outgoing vendor's written notice gives a deletion date six weeks after the contract ends. The head of service operations mentions, during field mapping, that nine years of dispatch escalations and resolution notes will mostly stay behind.
The consultant fills the worksheet with her in twenty minutes. Customer messages are mostly short scheduling emails. Agent resolutions, technician notes and escalation links to the field system make up most of the substance, and the macros have a change history back to 2019. The service head takes the worksheet and the deletion date to the CEO, who asks for an introduction. The migration plan does not change: the firm archives the old history under its own retention policy.
The consultant, already registered, sends a three-line introduction. The firm applies and lists its systems. If a license later closed and SourceX paid the firm $400,000 under its agreement, the consultant's reward would be $70,000, paid by SourceX separately and not taken from the firm's compensation.
Where the worksheet will not settle things
- It cannot clear rights. It shows where questions sit; customer contracts, privacy notices and SourceX's review answer them.
- Vendors differ and change. The Freshdesk figures above are one vendor's pages on one date, and they disagree with each other. Read the outgoing vendor's current terms.
- Internal service desks hold employee data. Tickets about laptops and access requests describe staff, which raises employee privacy questions the review has to weigh.
- It measures nothing. Nobody has published how often ticketing histories lead to licenses. To learn it, record for each replacement the worksheet's split, whether the CEO was told and whether the company applied.
The archive questions for a closely related replacement, the returns platform, are in the returns platform replacement archive checklist, and what makes support workflows useful in the first place is described on the customer support workflows page.
Next step
Refer a company. No cap on rewards. Default reward on a company's first qualifying transaction: the greater of $50,000 plus 5% and 15% of Actual Supplier Payout, with no cap; further qualifying transactions first agreed within 12 months of the first Closing pay 15%. Eligibility and payment conditions apply, including the USD 100,000 Minimum Transaction, and a signed Schedule A or addendum can differ. A lead, meeting or signature alone does not trigger payment.
When the CEO has seen the worksheet and the deletion date and asks to talk to SourceX, join as a partner, confirm the company against who qualifies and read the program terms before writing a three-line introduction. More playbooks for technology partners sit in the guides library.