If needed, you can merge one or more tickets into another ticket. You might do this if you receive two support requests about the same issue from the same end-user, for example.
Note: If you are on the Enterprise plan, ticket merging is not automatically enabled for agents. You must check the Can merge tickets box for your agent roles. See Creating custom agent roles.
It's also possible to merge a group of tickets into a single ticket. See Bulk merging tickets.
Ticket merging rules:
- The tickets must be less than Solved. You can however merge an unsolved ticket into a Solved ticket. Doing this will not reopen the Solved ticket.
- The tickets can't be shared with another Zendesk Support instance via Ticket sharing. If you unshare a ticket, it can be merged.
- If you have ticket CCs enabled:
- You can merge two tickets with different requesters. The requester of the ticket you close with the merge is added as a CC to the new ticket.
- If anyone was CC'd on an original ticket, they are also added as a CC on the merged ticket.
- If you don't have ticket CCs enabled, you can only merge two tickets if they are from the same requester.
- The most recent public comment from the ticket being closed with the merge appears in the new ticket's comment thread with a link to the closed ticket, where you can review previous comments. No other comments appear directly in the new ticket.
- Ticket fields, including Tags, Type, Priority, and Status, aren't carried over from the ticket being closed with the merge. Only fields that are filled out in the new ticket are saved.
- Merges are permanent and can't be undone.
- The ticket that's closed with the merge has the tag closed_by_merge added.
- You can use this Explore report to exclude tags with the closed_by_merge tag. However, you can't produce reports based on the fields of the ticket that was closed by the merge. For more details, see What Explore reporting options are available for merged tickets?
To merge one ticket into another ticket
- Open the ticket that you want to merge into another ticket.
- Click the Ticket options menu in the upper right, then select Merge into another ticket.
- You can enter a ticket number, select one of the ticket requester's open tickets, or select one of your recently viewed tickets.
- When you select a ticket to merge into, you'll be prompted to confirm the merge.
You can also edit the merge comments that are added to each ticket and choose whether you want the requester can see the comments.
If you remove all text from the comment box, the most recent comment from the merged ticket will appear as the updated ticket comment.
Note: There is a known issue where Markdown might inappropriately render in merged ticket comments, even if Markdown is not enabled. - Select Confirm and Merge.
Be sure that you merge the correct tickets. Ticket merges are final; you cannot undo or revert a ticket merge.
The ticket that was merged into another ticket is closed.
92 Comments
hi there !
I would like to clear the air on the replies in the merged ticket.
Let's say there are 3 tickets merged in a ticket from the same customer the question is how the customer get replies to each of the 3 tickets separatly ? or it appears as a new message on his/her side let's say on his/her gmail account ?
Hi Lilith! Welcome to the Community!
The customer won't get replies to the merged tickets once the merge is complete. Depending on how you do the merge, they may get an email notification stating that the ticket has been closed and merge with a different ticket. But once that's done, they'll only get replies to the ticket into which the other were merged.
Let us know if you have any other questions!
Hello!
I have two questions.
1. When we are on the stage 4 we have Requester can see this comment box selected by default.
Is it possible to change default value of this box to 'not selected' ?
We never notify customers that some tickets have been merged to another, so it always wastes our time to click these boxes.
2. Is there any way to restrict forever or to restrict case by case cc'ing of requester from ticket which is merged to the ticket we merge into?
Thank you!
Hi! Right now it is not possible to change the default value of the box or restrict ccing the requester. These seems like great ideas that could be implemented in the future. You can leave our feedback below and with enough exposure this could be implemented in the future
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/200132066-Product-feedback
Hi there,
Can I restrict agents from merging tickets? or (turn the feature off). Just until Zendesk can create a "un-merge" option. We just and a case where tickets were merged for 2 different customers and some valuable information was passed.
Thanks, Lance
Hi Lance,
By default, there's no way to turn off the ticket merging feature, except in the event if you are on our Enterprise plan using Custom Roles. In custom roles you can restrict which roles can or can not merge tickets.
Using Custom Roles in Zendesk
Hope this helps to answer your query here. :)
Best,
Amie
Is it possible to automate merging of new tickets, created on the same day? We often find that customers will send the same request twice - we then divide the tickets and in some cases, end up duplicating efforts. If we could automate the merging of tickets for new tickets in our Service Inbox, we could save the duplication of efforts. Best, Nicole
Hi Nicole -
We have not built anything that enables auto-merging. Because once tickets are merged they cannot be un-merged, it has the potential to create more problems than it solves if there are false positives or if it's set up incorrectly.
You could potentially have something custom built for you, but that would require investing in someone to do the development for you.
Have you considered looking at ways to notify you when it looks like a duplicate ticket has been submitted? I would think there's something you could do with a trigger so that it would at least be easier to identify potential duplicates.
My new Quick Merge app might come handy for some of you.
It allows agents to review and merge tickets right within the ticket view:
https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/quick-merge/
Let me know if you have any questions. I wrote a small blog-post about the app here:
https://www.cedricfjacob.com/viewpost.php?post=merging-zendesk-tickets-the-fastest-method-using-the-new-quick-merge-app-free-trial
Hi!
In October 2016 in this feed, Claire and Jessie had a discussion about excluding merged tickets from the report for number of tickets and Jessie suggested "When you merge two tickets, the one that's closed get a closed_by_merge tag. You should be able to edit your report to exclude tickets with that tag. That should take care of the problem!"
I can't find any information on how to set that up. We often get duplicate tickets and I am trying to streamline our satisfaction survey data and case handling reporting. Any suggestions on how to make sure merged tickets are not counted in the new tickets total or any total, really? lol
Hey Susan,
I hope you are doing well.
Excluding certain tags can be challenging, but is definitely doable.
This is how I approach the problem for my reports:
All my reports are based on the metric #Tickets. So excluding a tag should make use of that metric in order to avoid having to change every single report.
So first I create a duplicate of the metric called #Tickets and call it #AllTickets
Next, I follow the tutorial: (Specifically under the header "Create a custom metric for each tag")
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/229244588-Reporting-on-ticket-tags
This will help you to create a metric that will return all the tickets with a specific tag like closed_by_merge for instance. You can call that metric Tickets_closed_by_merge
Once you have that metric, you can change your #Tickets as such:
SELECT #AllTickets WHERE (SELECT # Tickets_closed_by_merge BY Ticket Id)=0
Let me know if I can clarify something for you :)
Thanks for jumping in here, Cedric!
Following up on Nbabakov's comment above...any way to uncheck "requester can see this comment" by default yet?
We realized that customers were able to see a link to the recording of their calls if we merged Talk tickets with email tickets!
Hi,
It would be better if merging into a solved ticket reopened it or if its a closed ticket it created a new linked ticket as it is effectively an update on the ticket that an agent might not know about if they didnt merge it.
Thanks
Leah
Thanks for sharing your feedback, Leah!
Hi Nicholas!
At this time it's not possible to change that setting.
Hi! The ability to leave the "requester can see this comment" unchecked by default would be amazing. There's a large margin for human error with this box checked off all the time. Our customers are not happy when they receive emails that their request was merged. They typically get upset and think we're ignoring them unless we're able to answer their request immediately.
Do you have any plans to change this setting? If not, why?
Thanks,
Sabrina
Hey Sabrina,
You may want to check out the Quick Merge app. It never notifies customers about the merging of tickets.
https://www.zendesk.com/apps/support/quick-merge/
Cheers,
Cedric
+1 to setting the default to unchecked for merging tickets. I'll check out Quick Merge mentioned above, but really all I need is that checkbox not default to notifying folks. Rather not add heft, duplicate routes with different results for the same thing, etc via an app.
Hi,
When I try to merge a ticket, I click on "Merge into another Ticket" but nothing happens. The pop up doesn't open.
Is this a bug? It worked 2 days ago. What am I missing?
When we merge two tickets, emails are sent out to the requesters. Is it possible to suppress this? And even better, is it possible to suppress this for a single group?
I have one customer who fires in the same ticket over and over and is annoyed by the emails indicating they have been merged. They don't care that we merge them, they just don't want the email (gotta love customers!).
thanks!
Hi Nicole!
Hmm, that doesn't seem right. I'll go ahead and pull this into a support ticket so we can look into what might be happening here.
Thanks!
Hello!
Are there any plans to include the content of the closed tickets in the New ticket? I can see a benefit to not always including the content of all merged tickets, but when trying to consolidate a conversation, it seems like it would be helpful rather than clicking through the multiple tickets, some of which are closed.
Hey Maria -
There are no plans to include that content at the moment, but you're welcome to suggest that in the Support Product Feedback topic
When you merge a ticket their is a comment window you can update. Is there a way to change the comment default for a merged ticket? I want it to say the same thing every time and not have to worry about the agent saying the correct thing why we merged the ticket. Thanks.
Hi Brad,
At this time there's no way to customize the default comment that shows when an agent is merging tickets. The comment shown in the pop-up will always be the most recent public comment that was posted within the closed ticket. One possible workaround would be to create a macro your agents must apply to a ticket before merging. This macro could apply that default comment you'd like to show as a public comment to your ticket
Let us know if you have any other questions.
Cheers!
Are there plans on prohibiting or at least showing a warning popup/message when attempting to merge tickets where the organisations are different?
This feedback request was created on 2014 :
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203452636-Ability-to-prohibit-merging-of-tickets-across-organizations
Hi Yatmund -
I responded to you in more detail on that thread, but we have not heard anything around this request on the roadmap in the immediate future.
One rule is not explicitly mentioned - you cannot merge into a Closed ticket (only into a Solved one). It is an unfortunate limitation as customers sometimes send a "Thank you, please close this!" after a Solved issue has been closed by the system. When they do, it creates a follow-up ticket and it is not possible to merge it into the closed ticket, where it belongs.
Currently, to handle these cases, we simply solve the followup ticket immediately.
Instead, we would like to be able to merge tickets into closed tickets. It would be fine to limit this ability to follow-up tickets only.
Hi Atis,
While there's no way to change this functionality currently, you can extend the amount of time before a ticket is closed by disabling the Close ticket 4 days after status is set to solved automation. This will extend the amount of time before a ticket is closed to 28 days which will hopefully give the users enough time to say thank you.
I realize this may not be the solution you're looking for but I do hope it helps!
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