Organization Merge - We want your feedback!
Hello Zendesk Community! 👋🏻 I'm Matt, the Product Manager for the Organizations team. We’re working through the planning phase of the Organization Merge project and we’d love you to give us some feedback. Whilst we have gathered some initial insights, we are keen to develop a deeper understanding of your needs and expectations when merging orgs.
What we’re doing
Unlike users and tickets, there isn't currently a way to easily merge one organization into another in Support. We've heard from you that this is frustrating experience, so we plan to add the Org Merge feature to allow you to merge two organizations together.
What questions we have for you
- What will trigger the need for you to merge an org?
- How often do you encounter the need to merge organizations?
- How do you currently merge Organizations in the absence of the Organization Merge feature?
- What challenges do you face when trying to merge an org?
How you can help us
We would love to talk to several customers via Zoom about this feature. If you are interested, please fill out this Google form and we will be in touch.
Alternatively, please also provide your thoughts in the comments section of this post.
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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.
I want to thank every member of the community who contributed to this thread and use cases. Our understanding of this problem space is now deeply more developed - including an understanding of the impact its absence has on agents and admins using the product daily.
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 close this community thread for now, but I hope we can reopen it once development restarts.
Thanks,
James -
- What will trigger the need for you to merge an org?
Our orgs are created via API from our billing system when we get a new customer. On VERY rare occasions, an org will be created before the customer comes on board. This is the only time we have a need to merge orgs. I would imagine customers that create their orgs manually would benefit much more from this although this functionality would still be beneficial for us.
- How often do you encounter the need to merge organizations?
Almost never. If this pops up once a year, that's a lot.
- How do you currently merge Organizations in the absence of the Organization Merge feature?
We don't merge orgs. I wasn't aware it could be done.
- What challenges do you face when trying to merge an org?
I would think the biggest challenge would be with the requester(s). ZD is based on the requester, so I would imagine before merging an org, the requester would have to be associated to both orgs.
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What will trigger the need for you to merge an org?
When the client companies do not have a specific domain name because they use a general email client (gmail...) and and we only find out later that several organisations have been created for the same company (and moreover you cannot set a trigger or other to be alerted on the "Domain name" field so it is impossible to control).
Or when some client companies have several different domains.
Or when some client companies change their domain name (which happens).
How often do you encounter the need to merge organizations?Several times a year
How do you currently merge Organizations in the absence of the Organization Merge feature?We can't do anything. So we change the name of the organisation not to be kept with the words "NO LONGER USED" and cross our fingers.
What challenges do you face when trying to merge an org?The main problem is to have the tickets attached to the organisation not to be used anymore without being able to attach them to the right organisation (no manual processing because of too many tickets or tickets already closed)
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- What will trigger the need for you to merge an org?
Some of our sub-organizations changed email domains and some users have multiple email addresses. We can make sure new tickets are generated on the correct organization, but historical tickets that are closed will be listed incorrectly.
Our Zendesk instance was previously configured in a way that organization membership didn't matter as all agents worked all tickets. Now we need the additional granularity that orgs provide and would have to manually clean up almost a decade of tickets.
- How often do you encounter the need to merge organizations?
We don't anticipate needing to merge organizations often, this would be useful mostly for historical cleanup/consolidation and the occasional missed email domain.
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I actually need this functionality often!
Q: What will trigger the need for you to merge an org?
A: Could be a couple of reasons: 1) Bad data entry by a ZD user or a SFDC user (we integrate) OR 2) We have Parent/Child locations and we should log everything under the Parent location and not create separate records for the child locations.Q: How often do you encounter the need to merge organizations?
A: Several times a monthQ: How do you currently merge Organizations in the absence of the Organization Merge feature?
A: Manual cleanup of the contact records and then delete the duplicate Organization, but this isn't the cleanest way as now the Ticket Organization is incorrect.Q: What challenges do you face when trying to merge an org?
A: The biggest challenge is what's reflected as the Ticket Organization for Closed tickets since those can't be edited/updated, which unfortunately leads to "dirty data" as well. -
What will trigger the need for you to merge an org?
- It will be a manual process in recognizing we need to merge organizations. ie: an organization was created in error by an agent instead of via the API. Or, since we are a dynamic company and changing processes, we may realize there is a better way we want to organize our clients differently.
How often do you encounter the need to merge organizations?
- So far, this year, we have had a few projects where it would have been beneficial to be able to merge organizations
How do you currently merge Organizations in the absence of the Organization Merge feature?
- Change the "old" organization name to *DO NOT USE*Client name. Change the end-user to be attached to the old and new organization. If the ticket is less than Closed, we change the org to the new organization. If the ticket is closed, we create a follow-up, attach it to the new organization, remove any cc's. place a note into the internal notes "Creating a follow-up ticket as the original closed ticket was opened under the incorrect org." and solve the ticket.
What challenges do you face when trying to merge an org?
- Action to move the ticket when closed is very cumbersome. To review the history of tickets, it is ver dis-jointed.
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As noted above, When users submit a ticket without an org.
Example, apple.com
If Apple the Company does nto exist with the domain attributed to it, we get "apple.com" the organization. Meanwhile Apple the Company is still a valid org that has several tickets under it.
I need the ability to take the users and tickets from apple.com and merge them into Apple the Company.
We're about to go through a large cleanup of our Zendesk and with 14000 orgs to go through, mostly due to the above situation, that's going to be an impossible job. I've only just started and can't go forward due to the lack of the ability to merge.
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Please tell me you are all working on this.
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What will trigger the need for you to merge an org?
We imported tickets from a legacy system, in some cases the organization names were either incorrect or had changed over time and resulted in duplicated organizations.
How often do you encounter the need to merge organizations?
We only encountered this with the import and don't anticipate any future duplications.
How do you currently merge Organizations in the absence of the Organization Merge feature?
We can't merge so we assign the correct organization as the default for the user.
What challenges do you face when trying to merge an org?
The inability to list the closed/archived tickets under the correct organization.
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What will trigger the need for you to merge an org?
- When there are two orgs with slightly different names but each have ticket history associated to them. If they are in a closed status there is nothing you can do.
How often do you encounter the need to merge organizations?
- We encounter a need as we find issues. We have had Zendesk for a few years and onboarded a lot of customers. So initially there are going to be several but going forward, it would be a way to keep the database healthy.
How do you currently merge Organizations in the absence of the Organization Merge feature?
- If there is no history on one, we can manually update/combine information and keep one and delete the other. Otherwise, if both have history, we have to retain both and update the org name for one record to indicate 'Do Not Use'.
What challenges do you face when trying to merge an org?- Ticket history needs to be associated to 'keep' org record.
- Does information on each need to be merged or update? Which information should be retained vs. overwritten? Example - contact person for org.
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- What will trigger the need for you to merge an org? When there are two orgs with different names but each have ticket history associated to them. If they are in a closed status there is nothing you can do. I also am migrating tickets from other systems and this creates erroneous duplicates which cannot be corrected. We need a utility for admins to perform a merge function.
- How often do you encounter the need to merge organizations? Weekly
- How do you currently merge Organizations in the absence of the Organization Merge feature? We don't because we cannot, which is terrible for data hygiene.
- What challenges do you face when trying to merge an org? ???
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we need the ability to separate out users permissions to make organisations more secure.
we need to give agents the ability to update groups and user info. but block the ability to edit organisation data
right now in the role settings it is all or nothing.
the ability to edit a end user, should be a separate permission set to editing an org -
The reason why you can't merge accounts is because the tickets will be orphaned, as there is no way to update a closed ticket. You can move the contact to the new organization manually but the tickets don't come across, so you can't delete the old organization without losing the tickets.
I imagine I could export the ticket out and import it back with the correct value but that is very time consuming
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