Moving from Gong to Zoom Revenue Accelerator (ZRA) can be a straightforward migration when the right preparation happens first.
But historical conversation data is more than a folder full of recordings.
There are users, transcripts, speakers, participants, meeting metadata, permissions, and years of conversation history sitting behind those files. A small oversight early in the project can turn into a much bigger problem once thousands of conversations are involved.
The good news?
Most migration problems are avoidable.
Here are seven common mistakes to watch out for when moving from Gong to ZRA and what to do instead.
1. Starting the Migration Without Understanding Your Gong Environment
One of the easiest mistakes to make is jumping straight into the migration.
You know you have Gong recordings. You know they need to end up in ZRA.
Simple enough, right?
Not quite.
Before moving anything, you should understand what actually exists in your Gong environment.
That includes questions such as:
- How many historical conversations are there?
- What date range needs to be migrated?
- Which users own those conversations?
- Are all recordings accessible?
- Which conversations have transcripts?
- Are there inactive or former users?
- What information needs to be preserved alongside each recording?
Gong’s APIs can expose information including calls, users, participants, transcripts, media, and other analyzed call data, making source-environment analysis an important first step.
What to do instead
Run a pre-migration analysis before starting the full migration.
Think of it as taking inventory.
Once you know what you’re dealing with, you can estimate the migration scope, identify potential issues, and decide what data actually needs to move.
A migration plan based on real data is much more useful than one based on assumptions.
2. Assuming Everything in Gong Will Transfer Exactly as It Is
This is probably one of the biggest misconceptions around platform migrations.
Gong contains much more than recordings.
Depending on how your organization uses the platform, your environment may contain transcripts, trackers, scorecards, comments, topics, interaction statistics, CRM context, and other platform-specific intelligence.
That doesn’t mean every Gong feature has a one-to-one equivalent that can automatically be recreated inside ZRA.
Zoom’s historical migration workflow supports the core conversation information needed to bring recordings into ZRA, including media, Gong-formatted transcripts and metadata, participants, hosts, and speaker information.
What to do instead
Separate your data into two categories:
Conversation data you need to preserve
Such as recordings, transcripts, participants, speakers, dates, and meeting information.
And:
Platform-specific intelligence
Such as certain Gong-specific analytics, coaching configurations, trackers, scorecards, or other features that may not have a direct migration equivalent.
Make that distinction before migration starts.
It prevents a dangerous sentence from appearing at the end of the project:
“Wait… we thought that was moving too.”
3. Ignoring User Mapping Until the Last Minute
Historical conversations belong to people.
And people are messy.
Employees leave.
Email addresses change.
Accounts get deactivated.
Someone who existed in Gong three years ago may not exist in your current Zoom environment at all.
If user mapping isn’t planned properly, recordings may reach ZRA without being associated with the people you expected.
Zoom recommends associating imported conversations with provisioned users and supports using host information to connect a migrated conversation with the appropriate user. Users receiving migrated recordings also need the appropriate ZRA provisioning.
What to do instead
Before migration, create a user-mapping strategy that accounts for:
- Active employees
- Former employees
- Inactive accounts
- Changed email addresses
- Users without a direct Zoom match
- Historical recordings that need alternative ownership
Don’t wait until you’re looking at thousands of migrated conversations to decide what should happen to recordings owned by someone who left the company two years ago.
Resolve those rules beforehand.
4. Treating the Recording as the Only Important Data
Getting the video into ZRA is important.
But imagine opening that video later and finding:
- No useful transcript
- Missing participants
- Incorrect speaker information
- No meaningful title
- Wrong meeting date
- Unclear ownership
You technically migrated the recording.
You just didn’t preserve much of the experience around it.
Zoom supports Gong-formatted transcript and metadata files as part of its migration workflow. If an original transcript is uploaded correctly, ZRA can use that source transcript rather than generate a new one from the recording.
What to do instead
Think about each historical conversation as a package:
Recording + Transcript + Speakers + Participants + Metadata + Ownership
Then determine which parts of that package matter to your organization.
The goal isn’t simply to preserve the media.
It’s to preserve enough context for that conversation to remain useful months or years after the migration.
5. Migrating Thousands of Conversations Without Testing First
This one is tempting.
If you have 10,000 conversations to migrate, why spend time testing 20?
Because fixing a problem in 20 conversations is considerably nicer than fixing it in 10,000.
Zoom explicitly recommends conducting a preliminary test with a limited number of recordings before proceeding with a broader migration.
A test migration can reveal issues with:
- User association
- Speaker attribution
- Transcript handling
- Participant information
- Meeting dates
- Metadata
- Recording playback
- Unexpected source data
What to do instead
Choose a small but varied test set.
Don’t select only the cleanest five calls you can find.
Include different scenarios:
- A standard customer conversation
- A meeting with several participants
- A conversation with an original transcript
- An older recording
- A recording belonging to a different user
- A conversation involving a former employee, if relevant
Then inspect the results inside ZRA.
If something looks wrong, adjust the migration process before scaling up.
That’s exactly what a proof of concept is supposed to do—find the weird stuff while the weird stuff is still small.
6. Overlooking Access, Permissions, and ZRA Readiness
You can design the perfect migration workflow and still hit a wall if the right access isn’t available.
Extracting historical information from Gong requires appropriate API access, and Gong’s transcript API, for example, requires the relevant transcript-reading authorization scope.
On the destination side, Zoom’s migration guidance also calls out required Marketplace/app access and appropriate ZRA licensing and provisioning for users associated with migrated recordings.
What to do instead
Before migration day, verify:
- Gong administrative/API access
- Required API permissions
- Access to the required recordings
- Zoom administrative access
- ZRA user provisioning
- Required licenses
- Destination configuration
Do this before starting your bulk migration.
Permissions are one of those things that feel incredibly boring right up until they’re the reason nothing works.
7. Calling the Migration “Done” as Soon as the Transfer Finishes
Your migration tool says:
Completed.
Nice.
You’re finished.
Well… not quite.
A successful transfer means data was moved.
A successful migration means the data arrived correctly and remains usable.
Zoom’s own migration success criteria include items such as correct host association, visible participants, speaker identification, and proper use of the source transcript.
Those are things you need to validate in the destination environment.
What to do instead
After migration, perform a structured validation.
Check things such as:
- Expected number of conversations
- Recording playback
- Conversation titles
- Meeting dates
- Hosts
- Participants
- Transcripts
- Speaker attribution
- Sample historical conversations across different periods
Don’t only check one perfect recording and assume the other 9,999 are feeling equally cooperative.
Use multiple samples and compare them against the original Gong data.
One More Thing: Don’t Leave Your Migration Until Gong Access Is About to End
There is another practical consideration worth mentioning.
If your organization is moving away from Gong, don’t assume you’ll always have unlimited time to retrieve historical information after the transition.
Zoom’s documentation specifically notes that media files, Gong transcript files, and metadata can be backed up to storage such as AWS S3 before the Gong license expires and migrated into ZRA afterward.
That makes migration planning especially important when contract or license dates are approaching.
Know what needs to be extracted, understand how long your migration may take, and make sure critical historical data is available before source-system access becomes an issue.
A Better Migration Starts Before the First Recording Moves
Most Gong-to-ZRA migration problems aren’t caused by the actual act of transferring a recording.
They’re caused by decisions that weren’t made beforehand.
What are we migrating?
Which users should own the data?
Which historical information matters?
What won’t transfer directly?
How are we testing it?
How will we know the migration actually worked?
Answer those questions early and the project becomes considerably easier to manage.
A simple approach is:
Analyze → Map → Prepare → Test → Migrate → Validate
It might add a little preparation at the beginning.
It can save a lot of cleanup at the end.
Find the Issues Before Your Migration Starts
ZipZap is designed to simplify straightforward Gong-to-Zoom Revenue Accelerator migrations.
Before moving your historical conversations, ZipZap’s pre-migration analysis helps you better understand your Gong environment, including the scope of the migration and potential considerations that should be addressed before the transfer begins.
Then, with a guided migration process, you can move your historical conversation data into ZRA without having to build the entire migration workflow yourself.
Because migration problems are much easier to solve when you find them before thousands of recordings are already on the move.
Preparing to Move from Gong to ZRA?
Start by understanding your environment.
Run your pre-migration analysis with ZipZap and identify potential migration issues before you begin.