Ability to merge organizations
Not plannedWe 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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Official comment
Hello Zendesk Community,
I'm writing to you today to bring you an update on the progress of Organization Merge.
After considerable effort, we have made the difficult decision to pause further development on this capability.We didn't reach this decision easily, Org Merge remains a capability that we want to enable, however at this point in time, we are prioritising improvements elsewhere in our product, such as in Agent Workspace, Messaging, and Sandbox to name just a few.
It's extremely difficult to choose not to build something, but ultimately we believe this decision will result in a better overall experience of using Zendesk.
Org Merge remains an item in our stack rank, and we will reassess early next year, and will bring you an update at that time.
We will also leave this community thread open for further upvotes and comments.
Thanks,
James -
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.
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I would like this too!
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I guess it's about time for my yearly update on this fabulously good idea. And hopefully this week I will also send a note to our ZD Account Manager to see if we can get traction and/or action there.
To spec it out further, stating our business needs, and why: We misspelled a customer's name and if I merely correct it, it creates a whole new organization. We have at least one other situation where a customer subaccount should Not have been given its own ZD Organization, so now it exists independently in the system. If I could merge them completely, their information would all be back together in one place where they should be. These may be self-caused issues, but the reason doesn't really matter. I saw others post that if one of their customers buys or otherwise merges with another, then they too are stuck in ZD separately. How annoying !
For us, this need is driven in large part by GoodData reporting, not just convenience. Once I pull a spreadsheet, I have to go in and manually merge data from two accounts and that is a drag and creates another opportunity for error, especially if someone else unfamiliar with the situation was asked to do this (new employee?).
Yes, even closed tickets should be brought along in a merge account action. If we cannot do it ourselves as Administrators, can ZenDesk do it for us?
I believe this topic is more important to more people than this conversation thread may indicate.
Charlie Fellenbaum
September 03, 2013 11:45
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Adding my 2 cents also for support for this 'merge' feature/ability. Sad to see the date of this original request, very well stated, was 2 years ago. My workaround for now is to rename an organization, but if the system would allow it cleanly, then reporting would not be split between two names and 'corrupted.'
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There's no immediate plans to build functionality for merging of Organizations. It's a feature that makes a lot of sense, though.
By merging, would one expect that all users and all tickets from the source Organization are moved ("merged") over to the target Organization?
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Me too.
One problem I see is that "closed" tickets can't be altered. I've just noticed this week that some tickets were submitted by users *before* they were properly associated with an organization. And now, those ticket are stuck in limbo, and not viewable with the rest of the organization's tickets....and they can't be changed. I would imagine this will be a problem when merging organizations as well.
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I have a few duplicate organizations in our system right now and would love to be able to easily merge the two together so that I have all of the ticket history and contacts tied to the right org.
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+1
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Right now we have closed tickets in two orgs which are for the same company.
This feature would allow us to give our subscribers a more unified view of their data.
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+100
This is an enterprise must have functionality. You cannot evaluate the effectiveness, performance, needs, etc. if issues are split over potentially multiple organizations especially if your source is outside of Zendesk like an CRM system like Salesforce or others where organizations change and merge continuously.
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Following up to see if this will be an action item! Definitely need this in our line of business a lot of companies are merging and we would like to merge them in our Zendesk. Thank you
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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.
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This would be helpful for us as well.
What about this as a solution: Lets say we have a "bad" org that was created on accident with junk data in it and a "good" on with all of the proper data. We want to see the tickets in the "bad" org in the "good" org when we look it up. Could ZD possibly make a way to automatically create "follow-up" tickets for all of the closed tickets from the bad org in the good org and mark all of those as closed (while circumventing triggers and automations). Then we would have a reference to all tickets in the good org. And I know I'm asking for a lot, but it would also be great if there could be a way to archive "bad" orgs and only have them show up in search results if we tick a box that says "include archived".
Pragmatically, since I have this issue right now, what I'm doing is just re-naming my bad orgs. I keep the Org name but tack on something like "DO NOT USE" in the name so our agents know which one is the accurate org for current use.
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+1 In our business our customers constantly reorganize and therefore this is needed
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We are waiting for a long time for this feature to come out and help us clean the organizations mess.
This is particularly important when Zendesk Salesforce integration is on and is creating plenty of duplicated organizations in Zendesk.
Generating tickets reports on organizations is useless because of that.
Please raise the priority on this request.
Thank you.
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+100
Just discovered this nice 'feature' - ie the tickets from one user can be spread over mulitple organizations if the tickets were closed before the organizations changed.
Makes reporting useless.
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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!
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Extremely disappointing that this feature is being pushed back
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Is this even on the roadmap?
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Jake, I would expect the requirements to match those of merging Users, yes. At least for me anyhow.
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You can already move all of the users by deleting the Domain from one and adding it to the other. Unfortunately this does not move the closed tickets.
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I need this functionality also
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I'd like to see this added too
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We would also highly appreciate this functionality as it would save a lot of headaches....
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This feature would be very helpful to us also.
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+1
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This would also be very useful for us
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Jake, yes, that's how it should work for us as well.
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+1
especially when working with external CRM systems and organizations get merged all the time like in Salesforce.
Once a ticket is closed it is stuck under the "old" organization. You will not get a comprehensive view of all issues for "one" organization.
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