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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.
196
211 comments
Greg Fickel
This thread has been open for 6 years there are about 119 comments all seem to be positive and a few comments from ZenDesk. All typically non-committal and of course no action. Thanks ZenDesk for giving us the ability to voice our opinions and thanks again for showing us again and again that your either not listening or dont care what we want or need. Epic fail!
2
Dan Rodriguez
Not sure what else needs to be said about this. It seems fairly obvious. Surprising and disappointing that it has been ignored despite so many requests and the seemingly obvious need for this functionality.
1
Matt
+1
0
Jim Saunders
I was surprised when I searched for instructions on how to merge the tickets of two organizations that I found this thread, rather than instructions.
In my case (I don't know how) I have the same organization in Zendesk twice.
And, of course, they are very active clients and tickets are randomly spread across the two orgs.
This is making life kind of difficult.
Our local Zendesk "guru" is out of the office this week.
Hopefully he can figure a work-around of some sort.
Thanks,
Jim
1
Markus O'Neill
+1
1
Daniel Blanco
+1!
1
Charles Bastian
+1
This is very basic functionality in every other system I've used.
1
Mike Kennedy
We would like this feature as well. Orgs get created by accident, or incorrectly, and without the ability to merge them to the correct org, it looks like the only work around is to re-assign every ticket in the erroneous org to the proper one. This becomes very time consuming but the alternative is to live with unreliable data. Would love to see this on a (near) future release.
2
Dan Ross
To add to the above comment - if the erroneous org already has closed tickets, they'll never be made visible in the account, they can't be moved over. Fragmenting customer ticket history is really a problem - please build this feature!
1
Maggie St.Clair
We only have one person setting up organizations so we have not had any issues with them being setup in error. We do, however, have an issue with our customers acquiring another one of our customers. This has happened on a handful of occasions and we suspect will happen again. The customers that acquires now has no insight into the issues that their new company has had. This has made us look bad on a number of occasions with our customers. This seems so basic so I am really confused as to why after 6 years of asking for this, there is no traction on this.
2
Melanie Hobman
We definitely need this functionality - I find it very strange that it does not exist, we can merge users but not Organisations.
We have customers that change name/domain or are known by different names and we continually have issues with duplicate Organisations being created in the system. As customers acquiring other customers.
2
Chan Graham
Six years ago this was asked for. Over a hundred comments and likes later, Zendesk has yet to address the issue. Does Zendesk even care?
3
Jessie Schutz
Hi everyone! Apologies that it's been so long since we've weighed in on this.
I spoke to our product team and was able to find out that we don't have any plans around this at the moment.
I know that's not what you want to hear, but I'd encourage you to keep sharing your detailed use cases on this. We're definitely aware of this thread, and any information you can share on the problem this would solve for you is helpful as we continue to review the ways in which we can make Zendesk better.
Thanks again for your feedback!
0
Dan Ross
Hi Jessie (and Kiran, if you're reading this),
What more do you need from us to start seriously considering this feature request? There's been years of requests for this feature, it's obviously something your customers want.
There's been many use cases offered by a range of your users. Here's a few of the common ones:
1. Customers acquire other customers, meaning all contacts and tickets should be absorbed into one 'parent' organization. Not being able to do this fragments a customer's ticket history and has consequences in the following areas:
1a) Reporting - Splitting ticket histories affects many reports involving ticket counts and Organizations (ex: We have a 'Frequent Flier' report that allows us to see which clients make the heaviest use of our support services.)
1b) Customer health visibility. eg: One customer Org only has two tickets, but acquires another Org with 20 tickets. Looking up this client today would only show they have 2 tickets and not 22 tickets. This can represent the difference between happy and unhappy clients. For all the fuss Zendesk's marketing makes about the value of relationships, the product is not making it easy to manage ours.
2. Fixing and cleaning up agent errors - It happens, agents, admins (and even integrations) make mistakes. New orgs are created incorrectly, or a user is added to an incorrect org and a ticket created for them. That ticket closes out before the error is spotted and is now forever unable to be seen where it needs to be seen(under the correct account!).
Workarounds that have been offered by Zendesk Support such as adding 'DO NOT USE' to the end of an org name aren't effective, as they conflict with using the {{ticket.organization.name}} placeholder in any email templates or macros. Sending the customer an email with the wrong name, with 'DO NOT USE' stapled onto the end looks unprofessional. This doesn't actually fix the underlying problem either, it's just a bandaid to attempt to prevent it from getting worse.
In the meanwhile, when someone does catch a situation where orgs should be merged, it requires valuable admin time to reassign the users manually from the old org to the new one (we don't let agents edit orgs, as they're updated by external integrations and because we don't want 'DO NOT USE' added to account names when this comes up). Even after this is done, the tickets don't get changed to the new org and are left behind. A well thought out merge feature can resolve this pain point.
Here's a history of the responses from Zendesk in this thread.
Dec. 19, 2013: Kiran, your predecessor, Jake Holman, indicated 4 years ago (Dec 2013) that "There's no immediate plans to build functionality for merging of Organizations. It's a feature that makes a lot of sense, though."
August 10, 2015: Jake - "We have plans to address this, which would include merging of organizations, but do not currently have resources working on this. There are currently a few priorities above this. I am unfortunately unable to provide a closer estimate on when we can start working on this area, other than "soon"."
What happened to the plans to address this?
Please revisit this request. Your users need it and have been patiently waiting for a very long time. I'm sure many people here in the Community would love to help flesh out the requirements to help make a top-notch feature, if only someone at Zendesk would listen.
Thanks for reading.
11
Chan Graham
THIS: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203427996/comments/115005061047
3
Greg Fickel
Repeat:
This thread has been open for 6 years there are about 119 comments all seem to be positive and a few comments from ZenDesk. All typically non-committal and of course no action. Thanks ZenDesk for giving us the ability to voice our opinions and thanks again for showing us again and again that you're either not listening or don't care what we want or need. Epic fail!
4
Kyle Jackson
Dan Ross couldn't have summed it up any better. Seems Kiran can't even be bothered to read the thread. Pretty pathetic..
1
Chandra Mullineaux
Dan Ross summed up our use cases as well. In the overall scheme of things, we have probably spent weeks or even months manually cleaning up things that could have been resolved by the ability to merge organizations.
5
Charlie Fellenbaum
Jessie Schutz:
On the off chance that you ever read this, I can only echo Dan Ross today, as above. And you are right "we don't have any plans around this at the moment" is NOT what we want to hear.
And although you say ZD is "aware of this thread" frankly I don't believe you, or think the company cares one whit. There is a lot of genuine frustration over this sorely needed functionality.
You mention someone named Kiran, a project manager who manages "this area of the product." What does the company call "this area"?
Why not provide this little community Kiran's last name and email address so we can write directly with our requests and concerns? Discussing this request in this forum is clearly futile.
Is there some other channel we can use to get through to product managers? What do we have to do to get through to you people to prioritize this?
1
Ben Bos
This is, as one of the first Zendesk customers, reason to go to a different solution than Zendesk next year. I have already seen so many requests where nothing or insufficient is done. In addition, Zendesk's development and product improvement seems to be completely or close to 0 (primary Zendesk functionality). Also, for all the new things they develop you will get charged. The focus seems to be on the new products. A lot of success in the future everyone.
1
Devenie Corliss
Charlie, etal,
I created the request ages ago and have completely given up hope that Zendesk will ever do anything. I feel like that with most request now though. But to your question Kiran Max Weber. You could hit him up on LinkedIn I suppose if they won't put you in touch.
1
Jessie Schutz
Hey everyone!
I know that you're frustrated. I know that you feel like we're not listening to your needs. I can't make you believe that this isn't true, or that we're paying attention, or that we care about your experience with our product; all I can do is reiterate it:
We're listening. We care.
Ultimately, we only have so many resources to devote to various work, and we have to prioritize that work. The length of time that a thread has been active, or the number of comments it has, isn't the only criteria we take into consideration when we're making these priorities, and these priorities can change at any time.
I completely understand why you're frustrated. However, I am going to request that you keep your comments in this thread civil and on topic. "On topic" means sharing use cases and problem statements. It does not include slinging insults, employing sarcasm, or stating your intention to move to a different product. That type of content is not helpful to our Product Managers nor does it foster the kind of environment we want to provide in our Community and I reserve the right, as Community Manager, to remove such comments, or even close this thread for comments if things get out of hand. You can find our complete Community Guidelines document here.
Understand that I do not want to prevent you from communicating your needs to us; on the contrary, I want to help ensure that you feel heard. In an act of good faith I'm going to connect with Kiran when he's back in the office next week and ask him to come here to answer some of your questions, if he is able to do so.
In the meantime, keep it helpful and keep it civil.
2
Brian Pavlovich
Wow. Just ... wow. The customer service equivalent of "I'm taking my ball and going home!".
-5
Devenie Corliss
IMHO a huge factor in what features get acted on is "complexity". They tend toward the easy ones and this one will require thought and planning and managing potential problems and challenges. This one just seems "too hard" to them.
-1
Amelia Gratta
As a customer support agent I know that the business affect / customer service impact of a feature is one of the major factors that decide how or if things get changed. By requesting your customers to not share their customer service experiences and the affect this has for them, you are attempting to delete an entire, very important aspect of this improvement request.
You ask for "use cases" and "problem statements." The business affect and customer service experience of how this feature works (or doesn't) for us right now are the "problem statements" you request.
0
Jessie Schutz
Hi Amelia!
You're absolutely right. Those pain points are very important to understanding the problem you all want to solve with this functionality suggestion, and should absolutely be shared in this thread. I'm just asking that they be shared in a constructive way. :)
1
Charlie Fellenbaum
One of the main sources of frustration on this has been the lack of responses from Zendesk - a basic communication problem if you will - until yesterday anyway. So it is gratifying to hear that someone reviews these conversations occasionally. We are, after all, the customers that pay the bills and for the most part are probably loyal and generally satisfied with the product. But these forums seem to be the only way to request sorely-needed functionality. Maybe there should be an official channel for these kinds of things that goes straight to Product, rather than through an ad hoc discussion group off in a dark corner of Zenland somewhere.
As it turns out, the company I work for produces a web based application, developed in-house by a great group of coders and product people, supported by some awesome customer relationship managers, and my Tier 2 team. So we are pretty much a mirror image of Zendesk but on a much smaller scale. I know and understand exactly what it takes to build a successful application, fix bugs, keep the servers up and running and improve functionality and the user experience. We work closely with our customers to be sure that our product serves their needs, although frequently ideas for improvements come from internal sources. We have to eat our own home cooking.
We too are always juggling priorities and resources. This request for the ability to merge organizations is what we call tech debt, good ideas or small fixes that have been in backlog for a while, but we know we need to get to them eventually. These things do not always make us more money, but they can certainly make our customer's lives easier and sometimes thrill our staff too. The catch is to get them assigned to an upcoming development sprint. As the ability to merge USERS is already in Zendesk, it's likely that at least some of the base code has already been written and can be applied to Accounts. It might not be quite that simple, but it's not starting from scratch either.
Good ideas need champions, and that's all we can do here, ask and ask (beg?) and hope someone hears our voices from the wilderness. And hopefully Zen hasn't gotten so big that it has forgotten how to listen to the little voices. I don't care about freshening the interface, cute new plugin apps, or the Relate event. I just want to be able to merge organizations. Seems like a rather small ask.
2
David Rose
@Charlie Fellenbaum - I couldn't have put it better myself.
0
Jessie Schutz
Hey Charlie!
I'm going to go a little off-topic for a minute. :)
You've landed on something really important here, which is the fact that there is a LOT of room for improvement in the way that Product Feedback is handled in the Community. This is this official channel for ideas and suggestions for product improvement, but we are truly, keenly aware that it needs to be better. This forum is something that started back in 2009 when we were still teeny-tiny, and as we've grown (really quickly!) the processes we had in place for it have not aged well.
It's actually a really frustrating experience on our end as well. In December of last year I flew out to HQ in San Francisco (there and back in one day - it was intense) to attend a summit with Product Managers from all our global offices and specifically speak with them about what they'd like to see improved about the Product Feedback Community. I got so much great input from them! You'll probably find it hard to believe, but they'd really like to be able to spend more time here trying to understand what y'all need from Zendesk. They care very much about what you need. It's a really high-friction experience for them, though, which makes it difficult to wedge it in to the zillion other things they have on their plates.
All of that is to say that the Community Team wants and intends to make this a better experience all the way across the Product Feedback Community, for everyone involved. It's hard to know where to start but Nicole (Sr. Community Manager) and I are actively working on some ideas and will be starting to implement them sooner rather than later.
If any of you have experience in managing Product Feedback in a forum environment and have any suggestions or pro-tips that you'd like to share, I would love to chat about it. Just let me know and I'll ping you privately to set something up.
In the meantime, we appreciate you sticking with us and being patient. I know it sucks when you feel like nobody is paying attention. I promise that we'll do our best to fix it. :)
2
Charlie Fellenbaum
Hi Jessie,
Thanks so much for the insights and I really appreciate that you responded as you have. Hopefully others here feel the same. I'm glad ZD recognizes the value of the input and is working on improving the process. I am personally surprised to hear how much your Product teams rely on the forums as the primary feedback mechanism, but it sounds like you may be considering alternatives - good! If you want to talk about any of this offline, you probably know how to find me outside of this community.
Cheers,
Charlie
0