Ability to merge organizations

Hey everyone!

I know that you're frustrated. I know that you feel like we're not listening to your needs. I can't make you believe that this isn't true, or that we're paying attention, or that we care about your experience with our product; all I can do is reiterate it:

We're listening. We care.

Ultimately, we only have so many resources to devote to various work, and we have to prioritize that work. The length of time that a thread has been active, or the number of comments it has, isn't the only criteria we take into consideration when we're making these priorities, and these priorities can change at any time.

I completely understand why you're frustrated. However, I am going to request that you keep your comments in this thread civil and on topic. "On topic" means sharing use cases and problem statements. It does not include slinging insults, employing sarcasm, or stating your intention to move to a different product. That type of content is not helpful to our Product Managers nor does it foster the kind of environment we want to provide in our Community and I reserve the right, as Community Manager, to remove such comments, or even close this thread for comments if things get out of hand. You can find our complete Community Guidelines document here.

Understand that I do not want to prevent you from communicating your needs to us; on the contrary, I want to help ensure that you feel heard. In an act of good faith I'm going to connect with Kiran when he's back in the office next week and ask him to come here to answer some of your questions, if he is able to do so.

In the meantime, keep it helpful and keep it civil. 

Wow.  Just ... wow.   The customer service equivalent of "I'm taking my ball and going home!".

IMHO a huge factor in what features get acted on is "complexity". They tend toward the easy ones and this one will require thought and planning and managing potential problems and challenges. This one just seems "too hard" to them.

As a customer support agent I know that the business affect / customer service impact of a feature is one of the major factors that decide how or if things get changed. By requesting your customers to not share their customer service experiences and the affect this has for them, you are attempting to delete an entire, very important aspect of this improvement request.

You ask for "use cases" and "problem statements." The business affect and customer service experience of how this feature works (or doesn't) for us right now are the "problem statements" you request.

Hi Amelia!

You're absolutely right. Those pain points are very important to understanding the problem you all want to solve with this functionality suggestion, and should absolutely be shared in this thread. I'm just asking that they be shared in a constructive way. :)

One of the main sources of frustration on this has been the lack of responses from Zendesk - a basic communication problem if you will - until yesterday anyway. So it is gratifying to hear that someone reviews these conversations occasionally. We are, after all, the customers that pay the bills and for the most part are probably loyal and generally satisfied with the product. But these forums seem to be the only way to request sorely-needed functionality. Maybe there should be an official channel for these kinds of things that goes straight to Product, rather than through an ad hoc discussion group off in a dark corner of Zenland somewhere.

As it turns out, the company I work for produces a web based application, developed in-house by a great group of coders and product people, supported by some awesome customer relationship managers, and my Tier 2 team. So we are pretty much a mirror image of Zendesk but on a much smaller scale. I know and understand exactly what it takes to build a successful application, fix bugs, keep the servers up and running and improve functionality and the user experience. We work closely with our customers to be sure that our product serves their needs, although frequently ideas for improvements come from internal sources. We have to eat our own home cooking.

We too are always juggling priorities and resources. This request for the ability to merge organizations is what we call tech debt, good ideas or small fixes that have been in backlog for a while, but we know we need to get to them eventually. These things do not always make us more money, but they can certainly make our customer's lives easier and sometimes thrill our staff too. The catch is to get them assigned to an upcoming development sprint. As the ability to merge USERS is already in Zendesk, it's likely that at least some of the base code has already been written and can be applied to Accounts. It might not be quite that simple, but it's not starting from scratch either.

Good ideas need champions, and that's all we can do here, ask and ask (beg?) and hope someone hears our voices from the wilderness. And hopefully Zen hasn't gotten so big that it has forgotten how to listen to the little voices. I don't care about freshening the interface, cute new plugin apps, or the Relate event. I just want to be able to merge organizations. Seems like a rather small ask.

@Charlie Fellenbaum - I couldn't have put it better myself.

Hey Charlie!

I'm going to go a little off-topic for a minute. :)

You've landed on something really important here, which is the fact that there is a LOT of room for improvement in the way that Product Feedback is handled in the Community. This is this official channel for ideas and suggestions for product improvement, but we are truly, keenly aware that it needs to be better. This forum is something that started back in 2009 when we were still teeny-tiny, and as we've grown (really quickly!) the processes we had in place for it have not aged well.

It's actually a really frustrating experience on our end as well. In December of last year I flew out to HQ in San Francisco (there and back in one day - it was intense) to attend a summit with Product Managers from all our global offices and specifically speak with them about what they'd like to see improved about the Product Feedback Community. I got so much great input from them! You'll probably find it hard to believe, but they'd really like to be able to spend more time here trying to understand what y'all need from Zendesk. They care very much about what you need. It's a really high-friction experience for them, though, which makes it difficult to wedge it in to the zillion other things they have on their plates.

All of that is to say that the Community Team wants and intends to make this a better experience all the way across the Product Feedback Community, for everyone involved. It's hard to know where to start but Nicole (Sr. Community Manager) and I are actively working on some ideas and will be starting to implement them sooner rather than later.

If any of you have experience in managing Product Feedback in a forum environment and have any suggestions or pro-tips that you'd like to share, I would love to chat about it. Just let me know and I'll ping you privately to set something up.

In the meantime, we appreciate you sticking with us and being patient. I know it sucks when you feel like nobody is paying attention. I promise that we'll do our best to fix it. :)

Hi Jessie,

Thanks so much for the insights and I really appreciate that you responded as you have. Hopefully others here feel the same. I'm glad ZD recognizes the value of the input and is working on improving the process. I am personally surprised to hear how much your Product teams rely on the forums as the primary feedback mechanism, but it sounds like you may be considering alternatives - good! If you want to talk about any of this offline, you probably know how to find me outside of this community.

Cheers,
Charlie

Hi Jessie, 

Thanks for responding!

I have another long post drafted on the subject, but instead of subjecting everyone to a second novel from me in as many days I figure I'd take you up on the offer to chat first:) I'd be happy to chat anytime if you had interest.

-Dan