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Ability to merge organizations
Posted Aug 17, 2011
We absolutely need the ability to merge organizations much like you would merge users or tickets. It is not uncommon for one of our customers to acquire another customer or for a company with two different business units that had separate purchases to ask us to merge their accounts and manage as one unit. Zendesk does not seem to offer the ability to merge at this level.
One possible (but ugly workaround) is to re-link all users from the disintegrating organization to the surviving organization and then either "delete" or somehow mark inactive the account that is being consumed. Zendesk should provide this capability with the full understanding that all activity and history is merged and only one account will survive at the end.
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211 comments
Dan Ross
Hi Jessie,
Thanks for responding!
I have another long post drafted on the subject, but instead of subjecting everyone to a second novel from me in as many days I figure I'd take you up on the offer to chat first:) I'd be happy to chat anytime if you had interest.
-Dan
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Jessie Schutz
Hey Dan and Charlie!
I'll reach out to y'all in tickets to follow up! Thanks so much for the positive response and helping to turn this thread around. :)
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Tony Vardiman
Jessie,
With so many upvotes, why in the world isn't this on the roadmap? The use case is painfully clear and simple - agents are humans, and thus make mistakes. When that happens, mulitple organizations are created in Zendesk for the same account (Account A and Accout B). When tickets are closed under Account B instead of Account A, we need a way to migrate those tickets from Account B to Account and, and be left with Account A only. Super simple to understand this need/case. Please do this.
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Heather Rommel
I realize I'm in the minority here in not wanting/needing this feature so I'll tread lightly... IF Zendesk does this, would you please, please, please (did I say please??) make it an **option in permissions to allow or disallow** this ability for agents by role? Similar to how merging tickets is handled.
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Jim Saunders
Now that you've opened that issue, Heather: What is going on with the ability to "UN-Merge" tickets?
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Heather Rommel
@Jim, I agree with the vote for UN merging! It doesn't exist (yet)
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Dan Ross
I agree with Heather that org merge should be a separate role based permission!
The last thing we want would be agents merging orgs. This should be for admins and trusted user roles only.
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Jessie Schutz
Hey Tony!
I can't speak to any specifics regarding why this isn't something we're planning at this time. As I mentioned previously, Feedback posts and comments are not the only things we take into consideration when we're deciding what we want to build and when.
I've spoken to Kiran and he said that he'll try to get in here to engage and answer some of these questions once he's had a chance to process all of your input. He's only taken over this part of the product fairly recently, and the folks who had previously worked on it are no longer at Zendesk. This makes it a lot harder for him to find the historical perspectives that would help him shed light on our thought processes on this, since he doesn't know what they were either.
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Chris Sindt
+1
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Scott McClannahan
Hey guys - does anyone actually READ the feedback shared in these forums? The reason I ask is that this is one of MANY features that have been repeatedly asked for in product forums yet Zendesk seems to continue to spend its time developing new (and mostly useless) features.
This is a VERY basic feature and it's not uncommon that the naive techs we all hire might create a user in a new organization. At the very least there should be some way to manually intervene and fix these 'orphaned' tickets and organizations
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Nicole Saunders
Hey Scott -
Yep! We read through all of the new posts in the Community daily.
We are aware that communication in the Product Feedback forum has been sub-par for some time, and have been creating and implementing a bunch of processes internally and in the Community to try to make it a better experience for our users.
I'm sorry that you feel that the features that have been rolled out are useless. The reality is that we have many, many different customers with different needs, and it's incredibly hard to make everyone happy - and we certainly can't do it all the time. When we make these decisions, we have to weigh any number of factors, including what impacts the greatest number of customers, what fits with the company's longer-term goals and vision for our business and products, and what's realistic with the current development resources.
Sometimes we have something we really want to build but there are too many constraints or competing needs. Sometimes, we have to wait for something else to be completed before we can tackle something new. Sometimes, we're in the process of building something that's a precursor to what we need to create to solve a problem but we're in a holding pattern until that happens.
Also remember that something that seems "basic" or "easy" to implement may not actually be an easy or basic thing to implement for millions of organizations/tickets/users across tens of thousands of accounts. It may seem simple from the outside looking in, but can, in fact, quite complicated.
We appreciate everyone's feedback and participation, and the Community conversations do have an impact on what gets developed. We encourage everyone to continue sharing detailed use cases and voting on threads they feel are important - more than once doing so has changed something that was not planned into a priority. Dozens of features and functions of our products have come out of Community conversations, and your posts continue to be an important part of the process.
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Scott McClannahan
Hi Nicole,
I appreciate the quick reply. I understand that there may be "internal" issues regarding communication and I can appreciate ZD taking steps to move forward in rectifying those issues.
I think the sentiment I see from many in these forums is that there are "basic" features (such as this one) that need to be implemented and are FAR MORE IMPORTANT to most of us who use ZD on a daily basis to manage our businesses than the new features you seem to implement.
I was in a user forum yesterday and we were discussing just this - it's like companies such as ZD say "yeah, we know that's broken but it doesn't generate additional $ if we fix it so look at this list of all these other features that you can pay more $ for instead." This attitude is akin to a contractor saying, "I understand that your front door is falling off the hinges and you wanted that fixed but instead I decided to upgrade all your countertops to granite - now pay me."
The POINT is that we need the BASIC flaws in the product (i.e. not being able to merge organizations, or not having templates for replies, or not having more than 4 'statuses') fixed before we worry about adding or paying for additional features. I can tell you that my company will not purchase new features because we are constantly being asked to look at other helpdesk products that fill these BASIC needs.
Again - just my two cents but if ZD starts losing customers maybe they will figure out that having a working "door" is more important that upgrading the countertops to granite.
Anyone else that feels the same way - PLEASE chime in so ZD knows I am not the only one that feels this way.
Scott McClannahan
Pure Technology Inc.
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Dan Rodriguez
I think if Zendesk can take a step back and really analyze the situation, they'll realize that Scott is pretty much on point with this. And I think it's almost understandable that this can happen to a software company without, but there comes a time that the reality is presented and then a conscious decision is made as to what type of company you want to be and what type of solution you want to offer. I hope that the new Zendesk team members that are interacting with the customer base have enough pull to ensure that a fair amount of resources are dedicated to these issues.
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Nicole Saunders
Hey Scott and Dan -
Thanks for your comments. Zendesk recognizes the importance of continuing to improve upon basic functions and not just focusing on bells and whistles; this value was highlighted in a meeting earlier today. As you say, balancing the introduction of new features with the need to build a product that is great at its core is something many companies wrestle with. But our goal is to offer the best possible products and service to our customers, and comments like yours are being escalated internally and heard loud and clear by our leadership.
We really appreciate the conversation happening here. I'll give an update on this particular functionality once I've been able to get hold of some folks. We're having a bunch of company off-sites this week and next for various teams, so people a little harder to track down. But hold tight, and I'll let you know what we hear.
Others are welcome to continue adding their feedback, though we do request is that we keep the conversation civil and in the realm of constructive criticism.
Thanks, as always, for your participation and feedback.
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Jim Uomini
Working for a SaaS company myself, I appreciate the need to balance usability enhancements with upsell potential. Your UI is clean and well thought out, and you guys are a pleasure to deal with, but I am routinely disappointed by the inflexibility and lack of depth in Zendesk's core service management functionality. And sometimes when you do develop additional functionality, it ends up in add-ons like the Productivity Pack and Customer Lists & NPS Surveys. We shouldn't have to pay more for basic "productivity features" like customizing ticket forms, making field display conditional, or filtering lists of customers. I am frequently asked by colleagues and customers for enhancements that I can't deliver.
Among the things I'd like to be able to do OOTB:
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Michael Mulligan
Due to a miscommunication we had two Admins create an org for a new client. Tickets were resolved and some, since closed as part of each org.The ability to merge organizations would be very helpful in straitening these types of situations.
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Mike Wiletzky
I also think merging organizations would be a good idea. Here are some specific instances where it would be helpful to us:
1. We are using an integration with InfusionSoft and it seems as if that is sometimes resulting in variations of existing organizations getting created.
2. We support clients that are often merged/sold/re-named, etc. This results in domain changes for a user that will often result in new Organizations. Would be great to be able to merge those.
3. We sometimes accidentally add an organization that already existed but spelled slightly differently. I realize that's user error, but I support a SaaS product as well. And sometimes you have to build in the flexibility in your product to allow the end users to correct their mistakes. Having flexible functionality that results in them being able to make a mistake but not fix the mistake can cause a lot of problems.
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Jim Saunders
It can be embarrassing, when reviewing a customer's history, to miss a large chunk of their tickets, simply because a duplicate organization may have been set up using a short name, or former name, etc.
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Jennifer Robichaux
We've recently identified nearly 300 Organizations that have Users/Tickets which should be assigned to a different Organization. It's going to take us 5 hours to reassign the Users to the correct Organization, but the Tickets cannot be reassigned with the current tools.
On a related topic, we have 63K Organizations (with no tickets, but that were uploaded wrong over the years) that we need to delete. There is no reasonable bulk delete option, so this would take us an estimated 210 hours to complete. Obviously, that's not something we can even consider doing.
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Nicole Saunders
Thanks for sharing the details of the scope of this problem for your company, Jennifer. That's useful info to have.
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Mary Thomasson
We need this because of the way Organizations are mapped with Accounts in Salesforce, by Account Name. If an Account Name is changed in Salesforce, a new Organization is created in ZD and all of the previous ticket history remains on the old Org. If I don't catch the change before a ticket closes on the new Org, we're stuck with it. I don't want to delete the unusable Org because it messes up reporting and makes tickets harder to find. My workaround is to re-name whichever Org has the fewest closed tickets to "DO NOT USE [Company Name]", add notes stating why the Org should not be used, move all users, tags, etc, to the correct Org, and make sure that the correct Org is hooked up with SF going forward. It's not a trivial process. If we are doing this wrong and it's possible to have the Organization name update concurrently with the Account instead of creating a new one, that will solve our problem going forward, but still leaves me with a healthy handful of "DO NOT USE" Organizations that need to be merged.
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Sachin Kotekar
Do you guys have an ETA? We really need this feature (ability to merge organizations) as soon as possible. Please advise.
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Nicole Saunders
Hey Sachin -
No ETA at this point in time. I've flagged this post for an official product update, but we have not heard anything about this being prioritized for development at this point in time.
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David Rose
Maybe I'm old and cynical, but I do find it frustrating that Zendesk are able to find time and money to fund and publicize a clinical facility at a local hospital but can't manage to develop such a basic, necessary and much requested feature.
I'm assuming that it was really profit from my fees that was ultimately used to pay for this philanthropic venture, whereas, really I'd rather this money was spent on making the product work for me.
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Nicole Saunders
David,
We do read everything in the Product Feedback topic, and when customer feedback here matches the customer feedback we're receiving via other channels in large numbers and is in alignment with the business goals and market signals, we prioritize those things for development.
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Nicole Saunders
Thank you all for your feedback. It has been escalated to our Product Teams and, while they are highly aware of this conversation, merging organizations is not something that is being considered for development.
We have found that, for most customers, enabling the ability to merge organizations would have greater risks than the problems it would solve. Should two organizations be merged erroneously it could create massive security problems with data being shared between organizations that should not be. Currently, the ability to un-merge doesn't exist, so this is also a problem that would not have a way to be corrected.
This is a rock and a hard place decision, as we recognize the challenge for users such that end up with duplicate organizations. But at this time what would be required to create a secure way to merge organizations (and potentially un-merge if done incorrectly) would be a massive project that would require a huge amount of development resources and would derail the development of many other functionalities that are higher impact for more customers.
We have closed this thread for comments at this time. You are still welcome to up-vote to express your interest or need for this functionality, and can subscribe in case there are ever further updates.
We made the decision to close the thread for two primary reasons:
1) We aren't seeking additional use cases at this time. We've got a ton of information on it at the moment, and additional use cases won't make a difference in the decision-making process. We will definitely reopen the conversation if at some point in the future we are considering it for prioritization.
2) There won't be any updates for the foreseeable future. There is not a Product Manager working on this to provide updates, and until a different decision is made, there's nothing more for us to say about it.
We'll continue to monitor the votes on this thread, and will let you know if anything changes. Thank you as always for your participation and for providing feedback to Zendesk.
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James Hanley
Hey everyone, James here from the Zendesk Product Team.
I wanted to provide an update an official update this highly requested feature.
We're in the process of hiring a Product Manager who will be responsible for the development of our Organizations capability and this request will be very high on the list of items to evaluate.
I can't offer a commitment yet, as was documented there are considerable technical challenges and security risks to overcome before anything can ship, but this is a commitment that we are seriously evaluating.
With that in mind, I wish to put out an open call, if you currently have a workaround for merging organizations, we'd love to hear from you;
Thanks,
James
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yakov shaul
After 10 years, you're finally thinking about this.
Great. Thank you.
There is no workaround but to delete one organization and loose the link to its existing tickets.
We would still appreciate if you finally add this basic option.
Thanks.
Yakov.
Support manager at Pyramid Analytics.
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James Hanley
Hey Yakov, thanks for your candid feedback, I very much appreciate this has been a long time coming.
When you delete the one organization, besides losing the linkage of tickets, are there any other actions you also need to take? Do you also have to manually reassign the users to the new organization?
If you have any thoughts about the behaviour of merging orgs that we need to consider, it's very appreciated.
Thanks,
James
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Dana B
Hi James
What we have done for a workaround is to not delete the organization. Instead, I go in and add the end-users to the new account, make the new organization the primary organization, and note in the organization Notes/Details field to use the correct account. Then I change the name on the old organization to *DO NOT USE.USE ORG XXXX" It is very cumbersome.
We need a way to merge organizations as we can for tickets. What I would like to see is to have all contacts transfer to the new organization, the system to crossref end-users to ensure there are no duplicate entries and if there are duplicate entries, the tickets will be merged to the one end user as well as events included to have an audit trail on what happened to the tickets. I know this is all a big ask. However, to ensure we can have historic information, I would like this to be incorporated. At the very least, we need to be able to merge all tickets under one organization and have an audit trail on the organization tab stating when and what account was merged.
I hope that helps.
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