How to Import Conversations & Contacts Into Front (2026)

The two things you're actually importing

Before you touch a settings page, separate the two imports in your head, because Front does.

Contacts are people and companies — names, email addresses, phone numbers, the account a customer belongs to. This is a lightweight, structured import you can do yourself in minutes.

Conversation history is the archive of past tickets, emails, and their messages, attachments, assignees, and statuses. This is heavier, sometimes lossy, and depending on volume runs through either a free-but-unmaintained connector or a paid partner tool. Treat it as a project, not a click.

If you only need Front working for new mail going forward, you may not need a history import at all — connect your channel (for example, connect Gmail to Front) and start fresh. The history import matters when auditability, context, or continuity of past threads is non-negotiable.

Importing contacts natively

Front ships a built-in contact importer, and for most teams it's all they need on the people side. Open the Contacts view, then use the Import menu. Front lets you bring contacts in from a CSV file, Salesforce, HubSpot, or an Outlook Directory — so whether your customer records live in a spreadsheet or a CRM, there's a native path in.

For a CSV import, prep the file first. Give it a header row and one contact per row, with a separate column for each field — name, email, company, phone. Front matches your columns to its contact fields during the wizard, and you can adjust the mapping by hand before you commit. Clean the data before you upload: deduplicate email addresses, standardise company names, and strip empty rows. A messy CSV becomes a messy contact list, and untangling it after the fact is slower than fixing the spreadsheet.

For Salesforce or HubSpot, the importer pulls records directly from the connected CRM rather than a file, which keeps field structure intact and avoids an export-then-reimport round trip. Outlook Directory covers teams whose contact book lives in Microsoft's ecosystem. Whichever source you pick, the wizard is the same shape: choose the source, map the fields, review, import.

For very large contact sets, or ongoing sync rather than a one-time load, the Front API exposes contact endpoints you can script against — the right tool when you're importing tens of thousands of records or keeping Front continuously in step with an external system of record.

Importing conversation history

Contacts are the easy half. Conversation history is where you plan carefully.

If you're coming from Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Help Scout, Front has native importers. These live under Company settings → Imports, separate from the contact menu above. For Zendesk specifically, Front imports inboxes, contacts, conversations, messages, attachments, comments, and conversation assignments — with assignee, status, and attachments respected when ported over, per Front's Zendesk import documentation. Front creates new teammates from the source agents' email and name, and lets you map Zendesk Groups to Front inboxes (map to an existing inbox, skip the group, or create a new shared inbox).

There's an honest catch worth stating plainly: Front's built-in importer is available at no cost but, in Front's own words, is "not actively maintained." For that reason Front recommends two migration partners — Help Desk Migration and ClonePartner — for anything beyond a simple move.

For volume, complexity, or a low-risk migration, use a partner tool. Help Desk Migration transfers teammates, contacts, accounts, conversations (with tags, channel, state, assignments, and comments), notes, attachments, and even knowledge-base articles into Front. It runs in the background so your team keeps working during the migration, offers a Delta migration to sync records created or updated after the initial pass, and lets you test with a free demo of 20 sample tickets before committing. That last point matters: run the demo, open the imported tickets in Front, and confirm the mapping looks right before you pay for the full run.

What moves vs what you rebuild

This table is the part to screenshot before you migrate. It's drawn from Front's own import docs and Help Desk Migration's Front page, and it's the difference between a smooth cutover and a week of surprises.

The pattern is consistent: content moves, configuration doesn't. Anything that is your data — conversations, contacts, attachments — ports over. Anything that is how the old tool was set up — rules, macros, views, reporting — you rebuild inside Front. Budget time for that rebuild; it's usually the underestimated line item.

Downtime and the historic-conversation gotchas

A few things reliably trip teams up. Knowing them in advance turns them from incidents into checklist items.

Ticket status mapping is not one-to-one. Per Front's docs, Zendesk tickets in Pending, Hold, Solved, or Closed states come in as archived conversations in Front, while New and Open tickets keep an open status. If your team suddenly can't find migrated threads, they're probably archived, not missing — search rather than scroll.

Deactivated agents' tickets import unassigned. If someone has left and their Zendesk account is deactivated, their historic tickets land in Front without an owner. Partner tools let you remap those to an active teammate; the native importer doesn't.

Don't delete the related inboxes mid-import. Front warns that deleting an inbox involved in an in-progress import will stop the process. Leave everything in place until the import fully completes.

Downtime is mostly avoidable — but plan the cutover anyway. Partner tools run in the background so daily work continues, and Delta migration catches anything that changed during the run. The real risk isn't the tool being down; it's the ambiguity window where a customer emails and nobody's sure whether the reply should go from the old system or the new one. Pick a cutover moment, redirect your channels, and communicate it to the team.

And know the reverse, too: leaving Front later is not symmetric. Front's self-serve export covers contacts as CSV only, and full conversation-history export is Support-gated rather than one-click — we cover that fully in how to export data from Front. Rules, shared drafts, and analytics don't travel out of Front to another platform either. Import is the easy direction; plan your data ownership with the harder one in mind.

Where an AI layer fits after you land

Importing your history is worth far more than an audit trail. Once those conversations live in Front, they become training-grade context — a record of how your team actually answers real questions.

That's the seam an AI agent layer fills. The category of AI agents for customer service exists to do the reasoning a shared inbox can't do on its own. Macha is one such layer: it runs on top of the Front you just migrated into through the live Macha–Front connector — it does not replace Front, your inboxes, or your imported data. The agent reads your migrated conversations as grounding, understands what a new customer is actually asking, and drafts or sends a reply — pulling a live order or account status through a custom tool that turns your REST API into something the agent can call. Macha's credits are consumed per AI action, never per resolution, so the pricing follows the work the agent does. The migration gives Front its memory; the agent puts that memory to work.

FAQ

How do I import contacts into Front? Open the Contacts view and use the Import menu. Front supports importing from a CSV file, Salesforce, HubSpot, or an Outlook Directory. For a CSV, use a header row with one contact per row and a column per field; Front maps your columns to its contact fields in the wizard. For very large or ongoing imports, use the Front API's contact endpoints.

Does Front import my old conversation history? Yes, through separate importers under Company settings → Imports for Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Help Scout. The native importer is free but "not actively maintained," so Front recommends partners Help Desk Migration or ClonePartner for larger or more complex migrations.

What does NOT transfer when I import into Front? Front's native importer does not bring across tags, teammates as-is, or rules. Rules, macros/templates, views, and analytics history are rebuilt inside Front regardless of tool. Partner tools like Help Desk Migration recover more (tags, knowledge base) but rules and reporting still start fresh.

Why are my imported tickets showing as archived? Front maps source ticket statuses on import: Zendesk Pending, Hold, Solved, and Closed tickets become archived conversations, while New and Open tickets stay open. They're not lost — search for them rather than scrolling your open inbox.

Can I test a migration before committing? Yes. Help Desk Migration offers a free demo of 20 sample tickets so you can verify the mapping in Front before running — and paying for — the full migration.

Ready to turn your freshly imported Front archive into an answer engine? Start a free trial of Macha and connect it to your Front in minutes.