Please give a quick overview of your product feature request or feedback and note who in your organization is affected by this issue: I am requesting a feature to "lock" the Assignee field on Solved/Closed tickets so that the original agent's name is preserved even after a group change. This is critical for Admins and QA Managers who need to reorganize historical data without destroying performance metrics and audit trails.
What problem do you see this solving? Currently, Zendesk forces a "Ticket → Group → Agent" chain that makes it impossible to move a ticket to a new group if the original agent isn't a member there. This prevents us from organizing our archives by department or product line without losing the record of who actually did the work. It solves the "Unassigned" ticket crisis that occurs during any structural cleanup.
When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool? What happened? How often does this problem occur and how does this impact your business? We are affected every time we need to reassign historical tickets to new departmental groups (e.g., shifting archive data from one support tier to another). Most recently, when moving tickets to reflect a new organizational structure, thousands of tickets lost their assignee names, appearing as unassigned or reassigned to the Admin. This completely breaks our long-term KPIs and makes Zendesk QA (Klaus) unusable for historical reviews, as the agents literally disappear from the reports.
Are you currently using a workaround to solve this problem? Yes, we have spent significant time trying to build a workaround using Custom Fields, Triggers, and Webhooks to capture and re-write the Agent ID. However, even with the API, the system rejects the update because it enforces group membership even for tickets that are already closed. We also tried managing visibility via Brand access, but this caused a "blind spot" for our technical teams who lost access to the tickets they needed to see. None of these workarounds provide a clean, visual solution within the UI.
What would be your ideal solution to this problem? How would it work or function? The ideal solution is to allow Historical Attribution: a Solved/Closed ticket should be able to keep its Assignee regardless of current group membership or active status. Ideally, there should be a system setting to "Lock Assignee on Solved Tickets" so that moving them for organizational purposes doesn't trigger a reassignment. This would ensure that both Zendesk Explore and Zendesk QA (Klaus) always show the correct person who solved the ticket.