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.
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 merge an unsolved ticket into a Solved
ticket. Doing this will not reopen the Solved ticket.
If an admin has activated custom ticket statuses, then the tickets must have a status that belongs to a status category that is less than Solved.
- 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.
Note: A message appears when you merge tickets with different requesters. Make sure that you're not unintentionally sharing sensitive information when merging tickets across requesters before you continue.
- If anyone was CC'd on an original ticket, they are also added as a CC on the merged ticket.
- 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 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 merge window. You can choose to remove or edit the comment. Otherwise, the most recent public comment is included in the new ticket's comment with a link to the closed ticket. You can review previous comments in the closed ticket. 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?
- Merged tickets lose any HTML formatting.
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.
If you’re attempting to merge a ticket into a ticket with a different organization, brand, or requester, a message appears.
- Make sure that you aren’t unintentionally sharing sensitive information
by merging the tickets, then click Continue Merge.
- When you select a ticket to merge into, you'll be prompted to confirm
the merge.
Note: There is a known issue where Markdown might inappropriately render in merged ticket comments, even if Markdown is not enabled. - Decide if you want the requester to see the merge comments.
You can edit the merge comments that are added to each ticket and choose whether you want the requester can see the comments.
To hide merge comments from requesters, deselect Requester can see this comment for both merge comments. Admins can also set the default privacy for all ticket comments to make merge comments deselected by default.
If you remove all text from the comment box, the most-recent comment from the merged ticket will appear as the updated ticket comment.
- 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.
69 Comments
Au Finh - All to often Zendesk's solution is "There's an app for that!" (at additional charge).
I'm surprised there are not comments about the annoying bug in the "Merge ticket" window. The name and date of the Last Commenter is not populated in the lower comment box. This makes the comment appear to have been made by the Agent that merges the tickets. This makes many of our Agents not use the merge feature.
For example in the merge window below. The requester is Sara Briscoe and the merged ticket comment date is November 30, 2011. Let's say that I'm the Agent merging these and the comment in ticket #578 is "blah, blah, blah" (I can't see the comment).
When merged, the new comment in ticket #696 will read like this.
43 minutes ago
The workaround is to manually copy/paste the requester's name and time stamp into the comment window. But even if I train Agent's on this I'm guessing that 5% of them (maybe) would do this.
Any thoughts?
Is there an automation option to set resolution to [X] when a ticket is merged, so that my ticket resolutions are not [Blank] ? (Affecting my telemetry and dashboards)
Thanks!
hello, is there a reason why I'm not able to merge tickets? (refer to the screenshot attached). this just started occurring to all our tickets around Wednesday this week. prior to that, there weren't any issues when merging.
I have a parallel question Federico's... I see the option to use the Ticket Merge app, which looks awesome (Thanks Au Finh!) but if we're on a professional account, how do I disable the default merge option?
Our agents are merging tickets without required fields being completed, which is not ideal.
Thanks!
Hello,
I want to restrict merging to within the same brand only. Is this an option?
Use-case: We are a multi-brand organization. Customer A submits a separate request to each brand from the same email with the same text. The agent sees these requests and merges the tickets across brands.
Our goal is to prevent agents from having the ability to merge across brands. If this is not a global setting, please consider adding this feature. Thanks!
Au Finh It actually doesn't address it, it just underlines the same procedure as with the button (where I then have to do additional steps).
So again, I am in the list of tickets, I see 2 tickets (probably sent twice), I select both with the checkbox and I expect the merge button allow me to merge the two with no additional action.
Right now I need to de-select one ticket (as my first reaction is always to select both), click merge, find the one to merge to and then merge -> cumbersome.
Think of e.g. Microsoft Excel had this behavior: you want to merge two cells. So you select two cells, click Merge cells and Excel will ask you to provide a third cell to merge. And even better, not allow you to just merge the two.
So you will have to select one cell, click Merge, and then select the second cell to merge into.
If Zendesk wants to improve my workflow (and possibly others), the merge button should allow to select 2 tickets and merge them with no additional ticket to be added or de-selected.
Federico Angarita Benavides To my knowledge this is not possible natively in Zendesk. You can enforce required fields for the purpose of reporting through our Ticket Merge app. For more details, see Required fields for merging.
Hello folks,
One of our agents is unable to merge tickets. He gets the message below:
The tickets however do not meet any of the conditions listed, and in fact, I can merge them successfully, without being shown the above error message.
Is there a setting somewhere I need to change for him? He's an Admin just like all of our other agents, so I'm very confused indeed.
Appreciate any guidance!
Au Finh probably a screenshot helps explaining the issue
I have a list of tickets
I see the top 2 one's are the same
I select them
I choose Merge in the menu
I get presented this dialogue
I click Merge
All I get is the useless dialogue that I should add a ticket number to merge
I already selected 2 tickets to merge, I don't want a third to merge. Neither do I want to unselect one in order to select the second one here.
In conclusion, I don't need an "app", I can live with this frustration, and I should not waste more time on giving feedback.
Hello,
Is there a way to control that the tickets closed by a merge have the form fields filled out?
Once the merge is done, the ticket where the merge was initiated will be closed and can no longer be modified. That is an expected behavior of closed tickets. The only active ticket will be the one that that the other tickets merged into. If your reporting is being affected by those tickets, you can exclude them by using the tags closed_by_merge.
Hi Leif,
Unfortunately there is not an option to disable merge available on the Professional plan.
There is a feature on Enterprise plans called Custom Roles which allows you to assign Roles to your Agents and restrict them from merging tickets.
FQ Support Eventually I got a Zendesk rep to assume the agent's profile. Their rep wasn't having the same problems at his end somehow, and I was left with the impression that either he didn't believe that it was happening, or there wasn't sufficient willingness to investigate the problem more deeply.
So basically there isn't a fix, simply because it couldn't be replicated at their end - for months now, we have had to merge the agent's tickets for him. This is the stone-age workaround we have in place sadly.
Hi!
I hope that my idea will be implemented.
We need to change the text of notifications about merging tickets. Right now we can only use the default text or not send it at all, both options don't work for us. Changing the message manually in every ticket is not a good idea either. We would like to have this possibility at admin level.
I believe in a miracle that you can help us in the next updates. Thank you!
John Cariel Digdigan currently there isn't a way to require fields to be completed before merging.
What kind of information would you like be filled?
If these fields can be set based on a predefined set of rules, you can use our app to automatically merge tickets and set the values for these fields.
Check out the app at this page:
https://www.zendesk.com/marketplace/apps/support/572057/merge-duplicate-tickets/
Beto Matt Simpson One reason might be that closing out a live chat ticket while it’s still active will terminate the chat session. There are also some other quirks with voice messages and live phone calls. We do get requirements to exclude certain channels from time to time (for our Ticket Merge app).
Hi Customer Care,
This is possible using the following:
1. Creating a View that leverages the Tag "closed_by_merge" and reporting it via CSV (the downside is it will not get archived tickets).
2. Creating an Explore report and exporting it from there.
3. Using the List API to search for tickets with the tag.
Hope this helps.
Hi Team,
Is there a possibility to un-merge a ticket that was accidentally merged with another one?
Thanks
I'm afraid there isn't a way to restrict ticket merging this way. For better visibility to our product team, would you mind posting your use case to our Feedback - Ticketing System (Support) topic, using this template to format you feedback? Thanks!
@... thanks for suggesting our app! I just wanted to clarify that the free trial is 14-days but can always be extended if necessary. Also, matching tickets with regular expressions is something that we are considering. Barring any technical limitations, we hope to deliver this feature by the end of the year.
Hello Matt, thank you for your question!
There should be no reason not to Merge tickets depending on their channel. Once a ticket is merged, their original channel will stay the same, so it should not affect any possible reports or data you might be gathering. The only thing to keep in mind is which channel you wish to use to continue working with the end-user. There are some channels (like Messaging or SMS) that cannot be used unless that was the original Channel for the ticket. So for example, if you receive an SMS ticket, and an email ticket from the same user, and it's the same topic, if you wish to communicate via SMS, you will need to Merge the email ticket INTO the SMS one, in order to continue via the SMS one, because you would not be able to go from email to SMS on the other ticket.
But that would be the only reason that might affect merging tickets based on their Channel. I hope this was helpful!
The sequence of merging does not particularly affect what can be seen in the "merged into" ticket. When you merge a ticket into another, the now-closed ticket will appear as a new comment in the open ticket. That means that the now-closed tickets events and comment timestamps are not factored in at all when looking at the events/comments of the open ticket.
For the purpose of readability, it would be a generally good idea to merge tickets in a way that makes sense for those reading the open ticket. Also, when you merge tickets in bulk in Support, the several tickets are added to the new ticket in one single internal note. Ex. "Requests #76, #81, #88 were closed and merged into this request."
I hope this helps!
Scenario - Merge Ticket B into Ticket A.
We see the behavior that the email thread and recipients from Ticket B takes over. I would think that Ticket A, being the ticket I am merging into, should remain the master ticket.
Am I completely confused by this? Is there a reason behind this behavior?
Hi Sejla,
You can exclude merged tickets from getting surveyed by adding a condition to your trigger to exclude the tag "closed_by_merge".
Hope this helps.
Thank you for your answer!
However, in this case I am sorry to say that here from Zendesk there is nothing we can do from our side.
If you would like to still want to look for a solution through this (however a paid solution) as a corporate customer, I can offer you our professional services that can help you after an expertise on how to set this functionality in your account. "https://www.zendesk.com/customer-experience/professional-services/"
I am sorry there isn't to much left for me in this case to do related your query.
Kind regards,
Any field changes should be done before you merge a ticket. Automations or any updates will no longer work on a closed ticket.
Thank you for your question. Currently there are no rules that can be set for merging but only if it can be enabled for agents or not (applicable for Enterprise Plan). However, we understand your user-case as it can be risky and prone to agent error.
What I can suggest is posting this to our Product Feedback topic in the community so that our product managers can see this.
Best,
Hi Waleed Mohammed,
Unfortunately, there's no way we can un-merge tickets. Once a ticket is merged, there's no feature to undo changes. If two tickets were merged by mistake, create a follow-up ticket from the closed ticket that was merged by mistake and remove any unwanted CC's and ticket fields pulled over from the merge. See Can I un-merge tickets?
Is there a way to set rules for the merging? i.e. only merge tickets from the same user or same organization etc. ?
The ability for any agent to merge any combination of tickets sounds a bit risky to me
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