Ability to merge organizations

Hey everyone, James here from the Zendesk Product Team.

I wanted to provide an update an official update this highly requested feature.

We're in the process of hiring a Product Manager who will be responsible for the development of our Organizations capability and this request will be very high on the list of items to evaluate.

I can't offer a commitment yet, as was documented there are considerable technical challenges and security risks to overcome before anything can ship, but this is a commitment that we are seriously evaluating.

With that in mind, I wish to put out an open call, if you currently have a workaround for merging organizations, we'd love to hear from you;

• How do you do it?
• What considerations do you make?
• What works and what doesn't?
• What other things should we consider?

Thanks,
James

After 10 years, you're finally thinking about this.
Great. Thank you.
There is no workaround but to delete one organization and loose the link to its existing tickets.
We would still appreciate if you finally add this basic option.
Thanks.
Yakov.
Support manager at Pyramid Analytics.

Hey Yakov, thanks for your candid feedback, I very much appreciate this has been a long time coming.

When you delete the one organization, besides losing the linkage of tickets, are there any other actions you also need to take? Do you also have to manually reassign the users to the new organization?

If you have any thoughts about the behaviour of merging orgs that we need to consider, it's very appreciated.

Thanks,
James

Hi James

What we have done for a workaround is to not delete the organization.  Instead, I go in and add the end-users to the new account, make the new organization the primary organization, and note in the organization Notes/Details field to use the correct account.  Then I change the name on the old organization to *DO NOT USE.USE ORG XXXX" It is very cumbersome. 

We need a way to merge organizations as we can for tickets. What I would like to see is to have all contacts transfer to the new organization, the system to crossref end-users to ensure there are no duplicate entries and if there are duplicate entries, the tickets will be merged to the one end user as well as events included to have an audit trail on what happened to the tickets.  I know this is all a big ask. However, to ensure we can have historic information, I would like this to be incorporated.  At the very least, we need to be able to merge all tickets under one organization and have an audit trail on the organization tab stating when and what account was merged.

I hope that helps.

Hi!

Was this feature implemented or it is still a matter of the future?

Hi Folks,

My name’s Matt, I’m the new Product Manager for the Organizations team here at Zendesk. Thank you for all your feedback, I understand that this feature request has been outstanding for quite some time. While there are still some unknowns and complexity we need to work through, I’m pleased to confirm this item is now planned in our 2022 roadmap. 

I have reviewed previous comments made on this thread and this will certainly help shape our direction, but I am also keen to hear any additional feedback and needs you may have in relation to merging organisations. Please feel free to continue to add your comments to this thread.

I will be keeping you all updated on our progress as often as possible.

Cheers,
Matt

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Addendum from the Community Management team: We want to make sure you're all aware that product manager  Matt Bagnara is asking for feedback in a dedicated thread. Would love to hear what leads to you needing to trigger org merge, how often, and who should have access.

Hey @kirill12, my colleague Matt Bagnara actually just updated this thread to mark this item as Planned.

His comment is pinned to the top of this thread for reference.

Cheers,
James

This is so needed, the current work around is super time consuming!! If it could work similar to merge user, then all the associated endusers could be associated with the organization you are merging into.

Darn it, came to this thread in need and was hoping this was live at this point. 

Definitely something that would be helpful for my team!

Hey @tres, I'm sorry it's not there yet, but we're definitely working towards it.

My colleague @matt23 is asking for feedback in a dedicated thread. Would love to hear what leads to you needing to trigger org merge, how often, and who should have access.

James

This feature would be very beneficial for my team as I have two teams using the same instance of Zendesk because in many cases, they have like customers.  One team, we charge for the number of complex questions we need to charge our customer over 50 questions and if we don't have the organizations correct, this could cause incorrect number of questions and give the customer a break on their expense.  If I can combine duplicate organizations, this would allow me to move the associated tickets assigned to them for reporting purposes and get a correct count and also reduce the number or organizations I have. 

Hi @matt23

What is the current status of this? The last update was January 20, 2022.

Thanks,

Phil

Hi @phil18, we can't commit to a release date at this time, but the team is currently working on this. You can find a more recent post about org merge from me here. We're actively seeking customer feedback on this feature. Thank you!

Do we know WHEN in 2022? It's nearly August and we'd sure like to use this feature. :)

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.

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 also leave this community thread open for further upvotes and comments.

Thanks,
James

Extremely disappointing that this feature is being pushed back 

This is basic functionality. There's no reason this should be pushed back.

The first comment was created 10 years ago. Today, there isn't any update about the situation, we still cannot merge organisations on Zendesk. I think, this functionnality could be important for a lot of people using Zendesk, but i don't have the impression that Zendesk listen to us. I hope Zendesk will finally address this issue, with over 200 comments on this post, it's that the community really needs it!

I too would love to have it.

Raised in 2011 ! more than 10 years ago and still not released?

@james75 wrote last year on August 18, 2022 “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.” As far as I can see there was no new update here. Can you please bring an update.

What's the status on this, this is a feature that's more important than agent workspace

Hey Zendesk community, James here from the product team.

I’m writing today to update this thread that Org Merge development is underway!

We'd committed to building this capability in 2022, but unfortunately I announced a delay in August, however we’re now well and truly underway with a goal to launch a beta before the end of the year.

The beta itself will have some limitations, for instance; only the Domain field will copy from the losing org to the winning org, and for performance and reliability, we may disable merging orgs above a certain number of org members and / or tickets. But these limitations will be removed as the capability matures to general availability.

To help with our development, I’m calling on the community - what is the largest sized org (in terms of tickets and / or members) you’d need to merge? What is the oldest org you'd need to merge? What data does the winner need so that context is retained? Do your agents need to know of the merge?

I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts, and I’ll post in this thread when I have another development update.

Thanks,
James

Hello James,

Regarding your comment:

I’m writing today to update this thread that Org Merge development is underway!

We'd committed to building this capability in 2022, but unfortunately I announced a delay in August, however we’re now well and truly underway with a goal to launch a beta before the end of the year.

Can you let us know the latest status on this?

Absolutely @anthony34. 

Development is underway. We have a prototype, but still quite a few gaps to address such as updating all tickets and org memberships from a losing org to a winning org as result of a merge.  We're also evaluating how an org merge impacts other parts of Zendesk. While there is still a bit of work to go, we're currently targeting an open beta in Q4'23.

Hope this helps,
James