Article

How to export Freshdesk tickets and conversations

By TrustPast

Updated November 7, 2026

A service company of 30 or more that answers customers in Freshdesk has years of its work written down in tickets. A customer reports a fault, a dispatcher asks a few questions, a technician’s note says what was wrong and what fixed it. A buyer pays to license records like these to train AI models. You don’t export anything to apply. You count what you have, and an export comes later, if at all, after an agreement says what it covers. This guide settles what to count, which Freshdesk export gives which part of the record, and where the old tickets went, in Freshdesk’s own words.

Checked on 7 November 2026 against Freshdesk’s help pages, linked at each step. Freshdesk notes that on accounts which signed up before December 2025, the Freshdesk Omni experience may differ. Menus change. If a step here differs from Freshdesk’s page, Freshdesk’s page wins.

What a buyer wants from a help desk

micro1 is the buyer on this page. It names customer support among the operational data it looks for: “Support documentation, ticket workflows, QA processes, customer operations, and knowledge management.” A Freshdesk account holds most of that list.

Here is the point owners miss. The customer’s name is not what anyone is paying for. Neither is the invoice amount, the card on file or the address of the job. What is worth something is how the work was done. A furnace that short-cycles: what the first reply asked, what the technician checked, what the part was, and whether the customer called back. A question about a leaking valve that turned into a quoted job and a booked visit. Those are the steps a business learns over years, and they sit in the conversation under each ticket.

The records are de-identified before they are shared. micro1 lists “De-identified before sharing” among the points it confirms “Before any participation”. So the names come out, and the diagnosis and the fix stay in. Why buyers want the working record and not the customer list is covered in full on what data buyers actually want from a trade business.

Apply & License Your Data

You don’t export to apply

micro1’s published steps start with the company, not with files. First “Discovery & pricing”, where “We identify licensable datasets across your business and tailor an offer”. Then “Contracting”. Then “Delivery & acceptance”, where “You securely transfer your data through our APIs or other approved methods.” Then “Payment”. Files come third, after the contract.

Its estimator asks “How many employees does your company have?” and “How many years of data do you have?”, with the note “Typically the number of years you’ve been in business”. Neither question needs a file.

micro1 publishes this, word for word: “Before any participation, together we confirm:”

“U.S. and allied buyers only”
“Data segregation”
“De-identified before sharing”
“Defined retention periods”

Then, at contracting: “We establish clear licensing terms, including a commitment not to resell or distribute your data until personal and identifying information has been anonymized.”

micro1 publishes nothing more on how files are delivered. So this guide does not tell you to send a file anywhere. It shows what Freshdesk’s exports produce, so the scope you agree to is one Freshdesk can actually deliver.

How much you have, and where to find it

The numbers that matter are people, years and tickets. Freshdesk’s export pages don’t describe one screen with a lifetime ticket total, so here is our own method, with Freshdesk’s facts where they apply.

The years. Find the oldest ticket. Look in the Archive view as well as the open views, because Freshdesk archives a closed ticket after it “remains inactive for 120 consecutive days”. On an account that has run for years, most of the history is archived. Note whether another help desk, or a shared inbox, came before Freshdesk.
The tickets. Freshdesk’s reports and its ticket export can disagree on the count. Freshdesk says the export counts merged tickets separately, so “if three tickets are merged together, the reports will see that as one ticket; whereas the ticket export would see them as separate tickets.” Freshdesk also says reports count archived tickets as closed tickets. Write down which count you used.
The back-and-forth. Freshdesk’s list-view export has a field called “Customer interaction”. Freshdesk says that if it is more than one, the customer replied after creating the ticket. As a rough check of our own, the share of tickets with more than one interaction shows how much real conversation the account holds.
The knowledge. Count the solution articles, Freshdesk’s name for help articles, and any forums. Freshdesk’s account export includes “solutions” and “forums”. micro1 lists “knowledge management” among the support records it looks for. A solution article is a fix the team wrote down once so nobody has to work it out again.
The people. How many staff answer tickets, and how many work at the company in all. micro1’s published line is a company of 30 or more full-time employees.

That gives you five lines: years, a ticket count, how many tickets had a reply, the solution articles, people. That is what we would bring to the first call. Our estimate asks the same kind of question.

Two exports, two different records

Freshdesk has two exports that matter here, and they hold very different things.

The ticket export, from the list view. Freshdesk says admins can export tickets, contacts and companies, and “Exports can be downloaded in CSV or Excel format and customized to include only the fields you need.” Freshdesk’s page lists it on every plan, Free included. The file is a list of tickets with the fields you tick. A “Description” field can be added, but Freshdesk is plain about the limit: “This export will NOT give you the entire conversation from the ticket or historical data (archived tickets) - for that, you will have to perform an account export.”

The account export. Freshdesk says it gives “the entire data in your account which includes your tickets, solutions, forums and the list of customers in the form of XML.” It goes to the account administrator’s email. Only agents with the “Account Administrator” role can trigger it. Freshdesk’s page on exporting ticket content marks this route as not available on the Free and Growth plans, nor on Freshdesk Omni Growth. Freshdesk adds that the XML should be “converted into a readable script at your end with the assistance of developers.”

Here is our reading of what that means. The value of a support record is the conversation: the customer’s description, the questions back, the private notes, the fix and the follow-up. The CSV has the ticket’s fields, not the thread. If a scope ever asks for ticket content, it means the account export, or a developer working through Freshdesk’s API. Freshdesk points to its ticket notes endpoint, which lists “all the conversations of a ticket”, with a script to fetch them for every ticket.

The CSV still has a use. It sizes the record: created dates, status, type, group, agent and the interaction count. It can also carry contact and company fields if you tick them. If an agreement asks for something to size the record first, leave the contact and company fields out.

The steps, in Freshdesk’s words

These are Freshdesk’s steps, quoted or kept to Freshdesk’s menu names. Each ends with its page. Run them after an agreement, not before.

Check your role. Freshdesk says to “Ensure that you have an Admin or Supervisor role.” If the Export option is still missing, your Admin may have restricted it with a custom role, which an Admin can change under Admin > Roles. (source)
Go to the Tickets tab and choose the “All tickets” view. Set the Created time filter on the list page to “Any time”. Freshdesk warns that if a date range is set there, the export only includes tickets from that range. (source)
Click Export at the top right. In the slider, choose CSV or Excel and the ticket fields. To include the Description or another multiline field, expand “Show multiline text fields”. (source)
Enter the date range in the export window, under “Filter Tickets By”, and click Export. (source)
For the old tickets, go to the Tickets tab and select the Archive view. Apply the filters, click Next, choose the fields and click Export. Freshdesk says “You can run only one archived ticket export at a time for your account.” (source)
For the conversations, the Account Administrator goes to Admin > Account > Account Details and clicks Export. Freshdesk says “The data will be exported to the account administrator’s email in XML format.” (source)
Find the file under Admin > Accounts exports. Freshdesk says this page shows the export history and the progress of downloads, and the Details button shows the time period and the ticket, contact and company fields of each export. (source)
Open the account export. Freshdesk suggests extracting it with WinRAR or WinZip, then checking it in an XML editor. (source)

Freshdesk also mentions printing a single ticket and saving it as a PDF. That is fine for showing one example to your own counsel. It is not a way to hand over a record.

The personal data in it

A help desk is full of people. The requester is on every ticket. The conversation holds what customers wrote: addresses, model and serial numbers, sometimes a card number they should never have typed into an email. Freshdesk says the account export includes “the list of customers”. The agents who replied are named on every reply.

micro1 publishes how it treats that. “Personally identifiable information (PII) is removed when relevant, access is restricted to a limited number of authorized team members, and customer data is processed through isolated pipelines that prevent it from being commingled with other engagements.” It adds that “certain datasets may undergo synthetic rewrites that preserve workflow structure while reducing direct ties to original records.”

It also publishes the checks the company keeps. “Data is retained only for agreed periods, companies have the opportunity to review representative samples before use, and deletion requests are honored according to the terms of the engagement.” On ownership: “Companies retain ownership of their underlying data.”

What that means in practice, as our own advice:

Agree what is removed before any export. The workflow structure is what a scope is after; the names are not.
Use the sample review. Ask to see representative samples of your own tickets, after de-identification, before prepared data is used.
Read your own terms of service and privacy notice. What you told customers about their support messages is a question for your counsel before the scope is signed.
Don’t delete tickets to tidy up. Freshdesk says deleting an archived ticket with “Delete forever” is “permanent and irreversible”. The de-identification step exists so you don’t have to.

What this means for a service company

Take a heating and cooling company of 30 or more staff, with a dispatch desk and a Freshdesk account it has used for years. Customers email the service address, and every email becomes a ticket. The records it keeps there:

service requests, with the symptom in the customer’s own words;
the dispatcher’s questions back, and the answers that decided whether a technician went out;
private notes with the technician’s diagnosis and the part that fixed it;
warranty and callback tickets, linked to the original job;
quote requests that turned into booked work, and the ones that didn’t;
solution articles: the fixes the office sends out without a visit.

None of that needs the customer’s name to be useful. A record of how a no-heat call was diagnosed over the phone is the same record with the name taken out. The same goes for a plumbing company’s leak reports, an equipment dealer’s repair tickets or a property manager’s maintenance requests. Where those conversations sit in the mailbox instead, the email archives page covers them, and the CRM records page covers the customer history a help desk sits beside.

What is never included

micro1 does not publish one fixed list of what stays out, for support data or any other. It says a company’s data is kept separate from other companies’ data, and that personal and identifying information is removed or transformed before it’s shared with third parties.

Here is what we tell owners to keep out, as our own advice, not micro1’s:

customer names, emails, phone numbers and service addresses, which the de-identification removes;
payment-card numbers, bank details and Social Security numbers that customers typed into tickets;
invoice amounts and payment records, which are not the work;
health information, and tickets from a health or benefits line;
attorney-client threads and anything escalated to your lawyer;
tickets for a client whose contract says its support data stays its own;
internal HR tickets, if the same Freshdesk account handles staff requests.

Two Freshdesk points sit beside that list. Private notes are often the frankest part of the record, and the most useful; decide with micro1 whether they are in scope. And the list of customers in the account export is a list of people with no work in it. A scope about how the team works rarely needs it.

Check the export

If an agreement asks for an export, check it before it goes anywhere. Our own checklist:

The route. Confirm it is the export the agreement names. A list-view CSV where the scope says conversations is a different record.
The dates. Open the file and find the oldest and newest ticket. They should match the agreed range, and the list-page filter should have been “Any time”.
The archive. Confirm the archived tickets are in or out, as agreed. The list-view export leaves them out.
The counts. Compare the number of tickets with your own count, and remember that merged tickets count separately in an export.
The file. Keep it somewhere access-controlled, and note who downloaded it from Accounts exports.

Other help desks and office systems

If the support desk ran on Zendesk before Freshdesk, or still does for one team, the Zendesk export guide covers its plans and formats. If the customer history is in HubSpot, the HubSpot export guide covers contacts, deals and notes. A move from one system to another doesn’t wipe out the years before it; we switched tools: do the old records count? goes through what to keep.

Where we fit

We, TrustPast, explain the process and give you a range with our estimate. The estimate is ours, not an offer. You apply to micro1 yourself, through the button on this page, with counts, not files. micro1 pays us a referral fee. You pay us nothing. We never see your tickets or your exports.

What a company of 30 or more holds, and why that headcount is micro1’s published line, is on the page for companies with 30 or more staff. What to have ready is on what to prepare before you apply. How the records are protected is on how it’s safe.

Worth two minutes to see your range? Open the Archive view first.

TrustPast

Questions and answers

Do we have to export Freshdesk to apply to micro1?

No. micro1’s estimator asks how many employees and how many years of data. micro1’s steps put the data transfer after contracting, “through our APIs or other approved methods”. Count what you have first; run an export only after an agreement names it.

Does the ticket export from the list view include the conversation?

No. Freshdesk says the list-view export “will NOT give you the entire conversation from the ticket or historical data (archived tickets) - for that, you will have to perform an account export.” The list-view export gives the ticket fields you pick, in CSV or Excel.

Who can run the account export?

Freshdesk says only agents with the Account Administrator role can open Account Settings and trigger an account export. The file goes to the account administrator’s email in XML format. Freshdesk’s page on exporting ticket content marks it as not available on the Free and Growth plans.

Why does the export show more tickets than our reports?

Freshdesk says the ticket export counts merged tickets separately, while the reports count them as one. Three merged tickets are one ticket in a report and three in the export.

Where are our old tickets?

Freshdesk archives a closed ticket after it has been inactive for 120 consecutive days. Archived tickets stay readable, and you export them from the Archive view in the Tickets tab, one archived export at a time.

Should we clean out customer names before an export?

Our advice: don’t edit or delete tickets to apply. micro1 puts “De-identified before sharing” among the points it confirms before any participation. Agree in writing what is removed before anything is exported.