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Feature Request: Ability to merge an end user into an agent

Not Planned


Posted Feb 20, 2024

 

We would like the ability to consolidate duplicate accounts for internal staff by allowing end user profiles to be be merged into agent profiles. We (as admins) have a large number of duplicate accounts and the default functionality of not being able to merge end users into agents is slowing down our process of consolidation. 

At our Organisation, we have two email domains for each internal member of staff and some of these staff members have an end user and agent profile as a result.  By having the functionality to merge an end user profile into an agent, we can consolidate our profiles much quicker. This will result in the following improvements for us:

  • By having email addresses for a user all on one profile, we can be sure that we're contacting the right profile.
  • We can minimise user error when someone is trying to log into Zendesk from an email domain different to their primary one, because all email addresses for a user are tied to one profile.
  • We can manage data duplication much more efficiently

This problem is a frequent occurrence for us, as we have a significant number of duplicate profiles. Our internal staff also experience issues logging in and contacting the right people. More recently, one of our agents responded to a ticket which came from their end user profile instead of their agent one, causing confusion surrounding our first-reply SLA targets. 

We're in the process of consolidating these duplicate profiles by deleting the end user profile and adding the associated data to the agent profile, but this is a tedious process and isn't very efficient.

An ideal solution could build on the existing user merge functionality on an end user's profile (via "Merge into another user"), but expanding on this by allowing an end user to be merged into a user profile. 


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11 comments

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Shawna James

Community Product Feedback Specialist

Hey Kyle,
 
Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your feedback. This has been logged for our PM team to review. For others who may be interested in this feature request, please add your support by upvoting this post and/or adding your use case to the comments below. Thank you again!

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

+1 We have Agent profiles but they may contact with a different email. There are a lot of times we need to merge profiles but we can't as one is an Agent and by the time we need to combine, they can have 10+ tickets. So we have to reassign the tickets to their Agent profile then delete their old profile then add the email to their Agent profile. So many steps just to merge profiles if one is an Agent.

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James Hanley

Zendesk Product Manager

Hey folks, James here from the Zendesk product team.

At the moment this feature is not on our roadmap, but you have definitely alerted our attention to it. 

A possibly "workaround" would be do downgrade the agent then do the user merge, then re-upgrade them. However, downgrading the agent would result in temporary loss of access to Zendesk, and could affect ticket assignment and reporting. 

I would like to confirm the root cause is agents creating tickets using a secondary email address not connected to their profile, resulting in a second user profile, and no simply way to merge, is this correct? Are you using Zendesk to provide support to your employees?

In the meantime, I'm going to leave this thread open so other members of the community can comment and upvote the request.

James

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Thank you for the feedback!

All of our employees have at least two email addresses; one for SSO and the other is for external emails. Not all external email addresses are attached to an agent profile, which uses the SSO email address, resulting in a duplicate account. We can't consolidate these acccounts because Zendesk doesn't allow end users to be merged into agents.

This problem is a result of one of the following:

  • A staff member might forward a customer email to Zendesk, which comes from their external email address and not their SSO email address.
  • A customer might copy in the external email address (such as an Account Manager).
  • Our integrations bring in data from third-party systems, which include external email addresses.

For all of the above, an end user account is being created for the external email address where it isn't associated with an existing agent profile which uses their SSO email address. 

The workaround isn't a safe option for us because agents lose their ticket assignments and access to shared dashboards when downgraded. Agents also lose their groups when downgraded and re-upgraded. 

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Sydney Neubauer

Zendesk Luminary

James Hanley Ya the "workaround" of downgrading wouldn't work for us. Our agents are in many groups and some are even the sole agent in those groups with many tickets - a temporary reassign just to assign back after the merge is so many extra steps. It just isn't feasible to downgrade just to upgrade again.

Our instances are multi-brand so agents will work in their brands but then any IT issues are submitted to another brand for another team to work on. We went through a rebranding and as such everyone had their old email on their profile but their new email was what was sending in tickets. In a matter of a week, every one of the 1500 agents had 2 (some even 3) profiles with 10+ tickets.

We had to create an app that would change the requester/ccs on the tickets, delete the old profile and add the email to their other profile. This ended up causing its own bundle of issues (unverified addresses, the wrong email showing on profiles, broken communications, etc). 

Ideally, this should be something that Zendesk can do out of box with no workarounds. When you need to merge, it should be 2 clicks and not 15

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+1 it would be useful and certainly less cumbersome to be able to merge any errant user accounts into an agent account as this does happen from time to time if an agent happens to send in tickets from a personal account unknowingly therefore generating that user account.  If would could easily merge this user account into their agent account it would save significant hassle.

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In our case, we have users who are both employees and customers of our product (we are in healthcare). Occasionally an employee might sign up for their customer account using their work email address, causing their account to upgrade due to our SSO. Eventually we figure that out, but it is possible the user might have hundreds+ tickets assigned to them by then. It would be easier for us to preserve that information at an agent-level merge than downgrade, merge, then re-upgrade.

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+1 for this addition as well. Our team was just assigned new email addresses and some agents already have end user accounts with the new email address and we have no way to merge them 

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Similar example, though likely of our own doing… SSO sync created some duplicates based on UPN which isn't the same as primary email.  Other “duplicates” were agent accounts being retained (whew!) but now with a new End User account.  

 

I can remove the unused end user accounts and merge the duplicates as we are a small shop, but wanted to pile on how I could see this being a pain for a live environment that has any volume.

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Hi, 

I see this is Not Planned, but I will add to the list of people in here - this has been a persistent issue in the organisations I have been part of that use Zendesk. 

Typically, we have cases where either via SSO syncing or certain Agents having multiple email addresses, duplicate accounts get created for users who have a full Agent license and ultimately there is little that can be done with duplicate End-User accounts (except to delete them - but this can result in the loss of a link between the User and any tickets they may have been cc'ed on). 

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Also, adding to the request for this feature. Downgrading an agent to End User to merge will also not work for us. All our agents are affected, and we clearly cannot afford to lose any tickets or history. Our company has recently been acquired - and new email addresses assigned to employees. Now every agent also has an End User account due to use of their new email address by customers. 

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