Ability to merge organizations

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?

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!

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.

THIS: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/203427996/comments/115005061047

 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!  

Dan Ross couldn't have summed it up any better. Seems Kiran can't even be bothered to read the thread. Pretty pathetic..

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.

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?

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.

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.