Best practices for deleting groups

As processes change, there may be instances where you will need to reassign agents, update groups according to business processes, or completely set up a new administration within your Zendesk. This article should help you avoid bigger conflicts that may come your way when deleting groups.

Note: Deleting the group will not affect your reporting. As long as there are Closed tickets associated with the said group, data will be displayed within your reports. 

You should take the following steps to delete groups cleanly:

• Reassigning agents to a new group
• Reassigning tickets to a new group
• Deleting the group

Reassigning agents to a new group

Before proceeding in deleting groups, make sure that the soon to be deleted group is not the default group for any agent. If a group is assigned as a default group to a specific agent, you will not be able to delete the group.

To assign an agent to a different default group, see the instructions in Changing the default group.

Reassigning tickets to a new group

Before deleting a group, tickets that are currently assigned to agents in that group should be reassigned to a new group. Admins are able to perform this task, as well as Agents whose roles permit them to reassign tickets to a new group. 

For closed tickets, deleting a group causes the Assignee field to show a dash (-) instead of the agent that belonged to the deleted group. However, when viewing a closed ticket via the API, you will still see the original assignee. 

To reassign tickets to a new group in bulk

1. In the advanced search feature, find all non-closed tickets assigned to the group you will be deleting by using the following search string: status<closed group:"Group Name"
2. Bulk select all the tickets retrieved through your search. 
3. Click the Edit Ticket(s) button at the top right of the screen.
4. In the Assignee field, type the name of the new group.
5. Click Submit.

Agents can also reassign their own tickets one-by-one (see Manually reassigning a ticket to yourself, another agent, or a group) or update their own tickets in bulk (see Bulk updating tickets). This method is preferable if you need to reassign tickets to more than one group.  

Deleting the group

You can now proceed in deleting a group, as described in Managing groups.

Warning: Deleting groups cannot be undone.