Switching Live Chat Providers: Migration Checklist and Vendor Exports

Leaving a chat tool is mostly a sequencing problem. Do the steps out of order and you lose something you cannot get back: transcripts deleted with the account, a help center that went offline before the new bot learned from it, or another year of fees because the notice window closed during testing.

This checklist is for the founder, support lead or store owner leaving Intercom, Zendesk, Tidio, Crisp, HubSpot, Gorgias, LiveChat or tawk.to for another chat tool or AI support agent. It covers each vendor's export routes and cancellation terms, the knowledge base rebuild, a test week, cutover day, the first month's numbers and old transcripts. The pre-launch checks themselves are in the AI chatbot launch checklist, which this post does not repeat.

PepoChat is our product. Its import, widget and inbox behaviour below was checked in its code and documentation on 22 October 2026, and every vendor row comes from that vendor's own help center, developer docs or terms, read the same day. Export menus and terms change, so check the vendor's page before relying on a row.

When does switching live chat providers make sense?

Switching live chat providers makes sense when the bill grows on a meter you do not control, when you pay for a whole suite but mostly use its chat widget, or when the AI cannot answer from your own content.

The first trigger is the meter. Seat-based tools charge for everyone who might answer, and AI agents are often billed per resolution or outcome on top, as the breakdown of Intercom Fin pricing shows, so the bill rises as the AI improves. A suite is the second trigger: worth it if your team lives in the helpdesk's email queue, phone routing and SLA reports, less so if most support starts in the website widget.

Switching does not make sense in three situations: mid-contract with months left, when the fees are owed anyway, so prepare now and switch a month before renewal; the weeks before your busiest season; and when the real problem is content, because a bot that keeps saying "I don't know" often lacks pages, and those gaps follow you to any vendor.

What can you export from Intercom, Zendesk, Tidio and five other chat tools?

As of October 2026, Intercom, Zendesk, Tidio, Crisp, HubSpot, Gorgias, LiveChat and tawk.to all offer some route to your transcripts and six of them document a contact export, but only Intercom, Crisp and Gorgias document an in-app export of canned replies.

An export route is the path a vendor documents for getting one type of data out: a button in the app, an emailed file, an API, or a request to support. Each one ends with a file you store yourself.

Export routes from each vendor's help center or developer docs, checked 22 October 2026. "Not documented" means the vendor's help center says nothing about that export.

Transcripts are the slow part. Tidio downloads one conversation at a time, Crisp and LiveChat email one at a time, and HubSpot points to its Conversations API for past chat transcripts, so a long history means a developer or a sample. Intercom's conversation export guide states that its CSV exports do not include message content, so use the Inbox's text or PDF export or the API for full text.

Two vendors need lead time. Zendesk's account exports are off by default: the account owner asks Zendesk support to switch them on, and they need Suite Growth or Support Professional and up, while Team plans use the REST API. Gorgias offers a custom export through support that can include message bodies. Ask in week one, not on the last day.

Download links expire, so save each file as it arrives: Intercom's contact export link lasts one hour, Zendesk Chat's transcript link 24 hours, Gorgias's 14 days and HubSpot's 30 days. Where a row says "not documented", ask support in writing. If you are still choosing a destination, the Intercom alternative and Tidio alternative pages compare the products.

How do you rebuild the knowledge base in the new tool?

When you switch chat tools, rebuild the knowledge base from what the old bot learned from, such as help center articles, documents, canned replies and bot flows, rather than from its conversations.

A knowledge source is any page, file or connected app the new agent may answer from. Each old asset has a natural place to land in PepoChat:

PepoChat limits from its documentation and code, checked 22 October 2026.

Import the old help center before you cancel, because a hosted help center lives inside the account you are closing; Zendesk deletes help center data on the same schedule as tickets. In PepoChat, a crawled page that stops loading keeps its last stored copy, since the weekly re-fetch skips failed pages, but that copy never updates again. So move the articles to a home you control, such as your own site or the new tool's help center, import from there, and delete rows that point at old addresses.

If the old help center ran on your own subdomain, such as help.example.com, keep it and redirect each old article address to its new one, because order emails, saved replies and search results keep linking to them for years.

Canned replies make good Q&A pairs once you take the agent's voice out. A Q&A pair is a stored question with the exact answer you want, phrased the way visitors ask it, which helps retrieval match the visitor's wording. Take this helpdesk macro:

Macro: Returns - window
Hi {{ticket.requester.first_name}}, thanks for reaching out. Our returns
window is 30 days from delivery for unused items. I've started a label
for you, and it should arrive within 24 hours.

It becomes one pair, minus the greeting, the placeholder and the agent's action:

Question: How long do I have to return an item?
Answer: You can return unused items within 30 days of delivery. To start
a return, email [email protected] with your order number.

Skip agent-only macros such as refund approvals, apologies and internal steps. With 100 pairs on the Free plan, rank the rest by use: Intercom's macro usage export counts daily uses, and elsewhere your agents know which ten they paste most. The text snippets and Q&A pairs docs list the field limits.

Vendor AI training needs a manual pass: Tidio documents an export of Lyro's data sources only through its OpenAPI on the Plus plan, so copy the most-used Q&A pairs by hand, and turn the old bot's rules into agent instructions.

What should you test before the new chat widget goes live?

Before a new chat widget goes live, test it for about a week on a staging domain, using the questions your visitors actually asked the old tool, a handoff drill inside and outside business hours, and every integration run with real inputs.

Start with allowed domains, the list of sites that may start a chat with your workspace. PepoChat refuses sessions from any page whose origin is not listed, so add the staging host now and production on cutover day; subdomains are included automatically, up to 20 entries, as the allowed domains docs show.

Your old transcripts are the best test set you have. Pull the 30 questions visitors asked most in the last three months, ask each in PepoChat's Test the agent drawer, and compare the reply with your team's answer. Test chats are free and stay out of analytics, contacts and, by default, the inbox, but bookings, actions and emails run for real. For edge cases and prompt injection, add the 40-question test script.

Then drill the handoff: ask for a person, confirm the team received the "A visitor needs a person" email, and repeat outside your hours with Team availability set as you will run it. One difference catches teams out: Tidio emails a transcript to a visitor who left with a missed message 15 minutes after they leave, as its transcript documentation describes, and Crisp emails one about an hour after the last message. PepoChat does not email inbox replies, so answer anyone who left by email, with the alert's Reply by email button or the inbox's Send Email.

Finally, run each integration once with a test order, subscription or ticket, and work through the launch checklist's 30 checks.

What is the right order for cutover day?

On cutover day, remove the old widget everywhere it loads before adding the new one once, then purge caches, update every link that opened the old chat and brief the team. Plan a quiet weekday morning, not a Friday afternoon.

1. Run the final exports. Export conversations and contacts created since your first export, then freeze the old tool's macros and articles.
2. Remove the old snippet everywhere it loads. Check the theme footer, the vendor's WordPress plugin or Shopify app, tags in Google Tag Manager and pages with hand-pasted code, such as landing pages. Removing an app is not cancelling it: Gorgias notes that uninstalling its Shopify app does not cancel the subscription.
3. Add the new snippet once, site-wide. On WordPress, the PepoCloud AI Support Agent plugin adds the widget to every page and clears the common page caches when you save. In Google Tag Manager, use a Custom HTML tag on All Pages and publish the change.
4. Add the production domain to allowed domains. Keep the staging entry for a week to test fixes.
5. Purge caches and check. Clear the page cache and the CDN, open the site in a private window and view the page source: the new script should appear once and the old one not at all.
6. Update every path into the old chat. "Chat with us" buttons that called the old vendor's JavaScript can call window.EchoWidget.show(). Swap links to the old hosted chat page for PepoChat's hosted chat page, switching on Allow the hosted chat page if you use allowed domains, and check email signatures, order emails, the help center footer and your support inbox's auto-reply.
7. Brief the team. Say where escalation emails come from, which inbox filters to watch and who covers the first evening.
8. Close the old inbox gently. Keep the old account until its open conversations are answered by email, because those visitors can no longer reach the old widget.

If something breaks, use the launch checklist's rollback table.

How do you cancel the old chat contract without paying for another year?

To avoid paying for another year, find the renewal date and the notice clause first, cancel auto-renewal before the deadline, remove add-ons separately, and request deletion in writing once your final exports are stored safely.

Cancellation terms from each vendor's help center or terms page, checked 22 October 2026. A contract signed with a sales team can override them.

This buyer's checklist is practical guidance, not legal advice; your signed contract has the final word.

1. Put two dates in your calendar. The notice deadline, such as 30 days before the term ends for Intercom contracts and Zendesk, and the last day of access. Start exports at least two weeks before the deadline.
2. Cancel in writing and keep the proof. Self-serve accounts cancel on the billing page; contract customers send written notice to their account manager.
3. Remove every subscription. Gorgias removes AI Agent, Voice and SMS separately, and tawk.to cancels each subscription on its own.
4. Revoke the old tool's access. Uninstall its Shopify, WordPress and Slack apps, and rotate API keys you pasted into it, such as Stripe or helpdesk tokens.
5. Download what you will need later. Three months of reports for your baseline, invoices for your accountant and any audit logs.
6. Request deletion with a confirmation. Ask for deletion of all personal data in the workspace, including backups, and a date when it will be complete. If you signed a data processing agreement, quote its end-of-contract clause.
7. Update your privacy policy. Remove the old vendor from your list of processors and add the new one.

A data processing agreement (DPA) is the written contract between you and a vendor that handles personal data on your behalf. Under Article 28(3)(g) of the GDPR it must require the vendor, at your choice, to delete or return all the personal data at the end of the service and delete existing copies, as the ICO's guidance on processor contracts sets out.

Vendors' own timelines vary widely. Zendesk's Service Data Deletion Policy starts deletion 90 days after an account is cancelled, completes it within 40 days for tickets and the help center or 120 days for live chat and messaging, holds help center and ticket backups up to 130 days after deletion begins, and offers no expedited deletion. LiveChat's security and data storage page says stored data has no expiration date and remains even when a license is not extended, so ask for deletion explicitly.

How do you measure the first month against the old tool?

Measure the first month on the new tool against the last full month on the old one, using four numbers both can produce: conversations, the share handed to a person, new leads and satisfaction votes.

Take the baseline before you cancel, because reports leave with the account. Count from raw exports rather than each vendor's dashboard, since every vendor defines a "resolution" or a "billable conversation" its own way; the chatbot metrics guide has the formulas. Here is a worked example for a store that switched in September:

Illustrative numbers for a worked example, not a benchmark.

In that example the switch worked: conversations rose, the share handed to a person fell from 35% to 25%, and leads held. If leads drop, check whether lead capture asks at a different moment than the old pre-chat form did before blaming the tool.

Time to first human reply needs a sample. As of October 2026, PepoChat's conversation CSV gives each conversation's start and last-message times but no time on each message, so for the first month ask whoever picks up an escalation to note the alert's arrival time and their reply time in a shared sheet, then compare the median with the old tool's report.

What should happen to old chat transcripts after you switch?

Old chat transcripts should become a dated, access-controlled archive that you review for gaps, never a knowledge source the new AI support agent answers from.

Three reasons: transcripts are full of personal data such as names, emails and order numbers; they contain answers that were wrong, or right only until a price changed; and anything in a knowledge base can be quoted to any visitor. PepoChat's upload documentation puts it plainly: "The agent can only quote what it can read, but it can read everything you upload."

PepoChat has no transcript import and no contact import, so the new inbox starts empty and the Contacts page fills as visitors share an email. Your old contact list belongs in your CRM or email tool, not in the chat tool.

Treat the archive like any other personal data. The ICO's storage limitation principle says "You must not keep personal data for longer than you need it", so give the archive a deletion date, such as 12 months after cutover, limit access to its reviewers and keep it off shared drives. Access and erasure requests still reach it, so make sure you can find a person's conversations by email in the export files.

The archive's useful life is the review. Read a sample each month, list questions the new agent could not answer, and write the fixes into help articles or Q&A pairs in your own words. The GDPR guide for chatbots covers retention on the new side; in PepoChat, the data retention setting deletes resolved conversations after 30, 90, 180 or 365 days and is off by default.

What to do next

• Put the notice deadline and the export start date in your calendar today.
• Import the old help center with a sitemap import and include paths, as the add your website docs describe, before the old account closes.
• Compare plans on the pricing page: the Free plan includes 200 AI replies a month and 5 knowledge sources, with no credit card.
• To run the test week on your own content, create a free workspace and point it at your staging domain.