You’ve decided to move from Gong to Zoom Revenue Accelerator (ZRA).
Great.
Now comes another question:
How should you actually migrate your historical conversations?
For some organizations, the migration is relatively straightforward. There may be a manageable number of recordings, clean user mappings, standard transcripts and metadata, and no unusual requirements.
For others, things get complicated quickly.
Multiple data sources. Thousands of users. Custom CRM relationships. Former employees. Unusual metadata. Large recording volumes. Special compliance requirements.
That’s why there isn’t necessarily one migration approach that fits every organization.
Generally, there are two ways to think about the project:
Self-service migration and managed migration.
Let’s look at how they differ and how to decide which approach makes sense for your environment.
First, What Does a Gong-to-ZRA Migration Actually Involve?
At first glance, migrating historical conversations sounds fairly simple:
Export from Gong → Import into ZRA.
Behind the scenes, however, there are several pieces involved.
Zoom provides APIs specifically for importing historical recordings from external platforms into Zoom Revenue Accelerator. Its migration workflow can handle recordings together with information such as transcripts, metadata, participants, hosts, and speaker information. Zoom also supports Gong-formatted transcript and metadata files.
That means a migration may involve:
- Retrieving historical recordings
- Retrieving available transcripts
- Collecting conversation metadata
- Mapping Gong users to Zoom users
- Preparing participant information
- Preserving speaker attribution where possible
- Uploading conversations into ZRA
- Validating the migrated data
The more predictable those elements are, the easier the migration is to automate.
And that’s where self-service migration becomes interesting.
What Is a Self-Service Migration?
A self-service migration uses an automated platform to guide you through the migration process rather than requiring engineers to manually manage every stage.
Instead of building scripts, coordinating individual API calls, maintaining migration infrastructure, and manually tracking thousands of conversations, the migration platform handles much of that workflow for you.
You provide the necessary access and configuration, review your environment, and follow a guided process to complete the migration.
For straightforward migrations, this can significantly reduce the amount of engineering involvement required.
When Does Self-Service Make Sense?
Self-service is usually best when your migration is relatively predictable.
For example:
- You’re migrating from Gong to ZRA
- Your migration contains up to approximately 5,000 recordings
- Your source environment is reasonably clean
- Users can be mapped between Gong and Zoom
- You’re migrating standard recordings, transcripts, and metadata
- You don’t require extensive custom transformation
- Your migration doesn’t involve several different source platforms
- Your team is comfortable following a guided workflow
In situations like these, building a completely custom migration process may be unnecessary.
You shouldn’t need an engineering project just to move a straightforward dataset from Point A to Point B.
What Is a Managed Migration?
A managed migration involves migration specialists working directly with your organization to plan, configure, execute, and validate the project.
Instead of fitting the project into a standardized migration workflow, the migration process can be adapted around your environment.
That becomes valuable when your requirements aren’t quite so standard.
Managed migrations can involve deeper discovery, custom engineering, specialized mapping rules, complex validation, and direct technical support throughout the project.
When Might a Managed Migration Be Better?
A managed approach may make more sense when you’re dealing with situations such as:
- Migration volumes above the supported self-service range
- Multiple source platforms
- Complex user-mapping requirements
- Custom CRM relationships
- Non-standard metadata
- Large numbers of inactive or former employees
- Special data transformations
- Unusual source-data structures
- Specific compliance or governance requirements
- Custom validation requirements
- Migration scenarios that don’t fit a standard workflow
At that point, you’re no longer dealing with just a transfer.
You’re dealing with a migration project that may require custom decisions along the way.
And that’s exactly where human migration expertise becomes useful.
Self-Service vs. Managed Migration
Here’s an easier way to compare them.
| Self-Service Migration | Managed Migration | |
|---|---|---|
| Best suited for | Straightforward migrations | Complex or custom migrations |
| Migration process | Guided and automated | Planned and managed with specialists |
| Engineering involvement | Minimal | May involve custom engineering |
| Data structure | Standard and predictable | Complex or non-standard |
| User mapping | Straightforward | May require custom mapping rules |
| Migration volume | Smaller, defined migrations | Larger or more complex datasets |
| Customization | Limited | High |
| Customer involvement | Customer follows guided steps | Migration team works closely with customer |
| Ideal outcome | Fast, repeatable migration | Customized migration around specific requirements |
Neither approach is inherently better.
The important question is:
How complicated is your environment?
Ask These Questions Before Choosing
You don’t need to be a migration engineer to get a pretty good idea of which path you’re heading toward.
Start with a few questions.
1. How Many Recordings Are You Migrating?
Volume is one of the easiest indicators.
A few thousand clean recordings are very different from tens or hundreds of thousands of historical conversations.
As volume increases, considerations around throughput, failures, validation, user mapping, and monitoring become more significant.
Zoom’s migration process itself includes API-based uploading and conversation creation, and Zoom recommends testing a limited number of recordings before proceeding with a wider rollout.
So before choosing your approach, understand your actual recording count.
Not:
“We think we have a few thousand.”
But:
“We have 4,263 conversations between these dates.”
That’s a much more useful starting point.
2. How Clean Is Your User Mapping?
Suppose every Gong user has the exact same email address in Zoom.
Lovely.
Your migration team will probably thank you.
Now suppose:
- 30% of your historical recordings belong to former employees
- Some employees changed email addresses
- Several accounts were renamed
- Some users don’t exist in Zoom
- Certain historical conversations need to belong to different users
That changes things.
Zoom’s migration workflow supports assigning conversations to provisioned users through host information, so getting those relationships right is an important part of the migration.
Simple mappings fit nicely into automated workflows.
Complex ownership rules may need more hands-on planning.
3. Are You Migrating Standard Conversation Data?
If your primary requirement is:
Recordings + Transcripts + Participants + Speakers + Metadata
then the migration aligns closely with the historical conversation migration capabilities supported by ZRA.
Zoom supports Gong-formatted transcript and metadata files, and source transcripts can be used in ZRA when uploaded as part of the migration workflow.
But suppose your project also requires:
- Custom data transformation
- Special CRM relationships
- Platform-specific Gong objects
- Custom analytics migration
- Additional external datasets
Now you’re stepping outside the boundaries of a standard conversation migration.
That’s usually a sign to investigate a managed approach.
4. Are Multiple Systems Involved?
A simple migration might look like:
Gong → ZRA
A more complicated migration might look like:
Gong + another conversation platform + custom storage + Salesforce relationships → ZRA
Those are very different projects.
Each additional source introduces another data structure, authentication model, API, mapping requirement, and set of exceptions.
If multiple systems need to come together before landing in ZRA, custom migration support may be the safer route.
5. Do You Have Custom Requirements?
This question usually reveals the answer pretty quickly.
If your migration discussion contains a lot of sentences beginning with:
“Normally yes, but in our environment…”
you may have a custom migration.
And that’s perfectly fine.
It just means forcing the project through a standardized migration workflow could create more work than it saves.
Where Does ZipZap Fit?
This is exactly why ZipZap was created.
ZipZap provides a self-service migration path for straightforward Gong-to-Zoom Revenue Accelerator migrations.
Instead of building your own migration solution, ZipZap guides you through the process—from understanding your Gong environment through migrating and validating your historical conversations.
For eligible migrations, the idea is simple:
Connect → Analyze → Prepare → Migrate → Validate
The platform handles the migration workflow while giving your team visibility into what’s happening along the way.
That makes ZipZap especially useful for organizations that know they need to move their Gong conversation history but don’t need a fully customized engineering engagement to do it.
And What If Your Migration Is More Complex?
That’s where a managed migration makes more sense.
If your environment contains larger volumes, unusual mappings, multiple sources, custom requirements, or other complexities, the project can move beyond the self-service path.
Rather than trying to squeeze a complicated migration into a standardized process, a managed approach allows the migration to be designed around the actual requirements.
In other words:
Straightforward migration? Automate it.
Complex migration? Engineer around it.
The important part is figuring out which one you’re dealing with before the project begins.
Start With the Environment, Not the Migration Method
You don’t necessarily need to decide between self-service and managed migration on day one.
First, understand your environment.
Find out:
- How many conversations you have
- How much history you’re migrating
- Which users are involved
- Whether recordings and transcripts are accessible
- How users map into Zoom
- What metadata needs to be retained
- Whether custom requirements exist
Once you have those answers, the migration path becomes much clearer.
That’s another reason pre-migration analysis matters.
Instead of choosing an approach based on assumptions, you can choose based on the actual structure of your Gong environment.
The Right Migration Doesn’t Have to Be the Most Complicated One
It’s easy to assume that an enterprise data migration automatically needs a large custom project.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it really doesn’t.
If your migration is predictable, an automated self-service approach can eliminate a lot of unnecessary complexity.
And when the requirements genuinely are complicated, a managed migration gives you the flexibility and expertise to address them properly.
The key is matching the migration approach to the environment.
Not making the environment fit the migration approach.
Not Sure Which Migration Path Fits Your Environment?
Start by understanding what you’re working with.
ZipZap’s pre-migration analysis helps you evaluate your Gong environment before migration so you can better understand your data volume and migration requirements.
For straightforward Gong-to-ZRA migrations, continue through ZipZap’s guided self-service experience.
For more complex requirements, a managed migration can provide the additional engineering and migration support your project needs.
Ready to Explore Your Gong-to-ZRA Migration?
Start with ZipZap and see what your migration looks like before deciding the path forward.