Sometimes, a customer might try to get your attention regarding a particular issue by contacting you through separate channels. Sometimes, the same issue might be reported by different people in the team or someone might accidentally open a new ticket instead of following up on an existing one. To avoid conflicts, you can merge all related tickets together and keep the communication streamlined.
The merge action is irreversible, and causes the following things to happen:
- One of the tickets becomes the primary ticket (you get to choose). The others become secondary.
- All conversations from the secondary tickets are moved into the primary ticket. You can also choose to keep the requesters and CC emails from the secondary tickets in the loop.
- All the secondary tickets are closed.
- All messages are sorted chronologically.
- A note is added to each of the tickets with a link to the primary ticket.
- If the note is public, an email notification (the Agent Adds Comment to ticket notifications under Admin > Workflows > Email notifications) might be sent to the requesters about the merged tickets.
Who can merge tickets?
Anyone in your helpdesk with one of the default roles (Account admin, Admin, Supervisor, Agent) will be able to merge tickets. If you have created custom roles, the merge/split ticket option should be checked under Admin > Team > Roles > (Custom role name) for the agent to be able to merge tickets.
How do you merge two or more tickets?
- Go to the Tickets tab, and select the tickets you want to merge from the list using checkboxes.
- Click Merge.
- In the dialog box that pops up, select which one you want to be the primary ticket - a tick will appear indicating that it's been marked.
- If you'd like to remove any tickets from the merge, you can do so by clicking on the - icon next to them in the list. You cannot remove a ticket from the merge if it's been marked as a primary.
- Similarly, you can use the search box on the right side to look up tickets by either ID, Subject or Contact and add them to the list.
- By default, the requester email and CC email in the secondary tickets will be dropped after the tickets are merged. If you want to make sure that they are in the loop too, you can add them as CC to the primary ticket by clicking on the Add secondary recipients to CC checkbox.
- When you're ready to proceed, click on the Continue button.
- When tickets are merged together, a note is added to the primary and the secondary ticket. You can edit the content in each of them, if necessary, by selecting Edit note. By default, the note will be added as a Private note and the requester won't be notified regarding the merge. However, you can choose to add it as a Public note (visible to the customers) and notify the requester using the Who should see this? dropdown.
- The merge action cannot be undone. Please make sure that the tickets you have chosen are the right tickets to merge before clicking on the Merge button.
- The secondary ticket will disappear from the ticket list view. When you open the primary ticket, you will be able to see a private note with all conversations from the secondary ticket and the private note added from the step above to indicate that the tickets have merged.
Similarly, you can also open each ticket from your helpdesk and use the Merge function. Since only one ticket is selected in that case, the other ticket(s) that need to be merged can be found using the search option.
You can also merge tickets with Association types like Parent, Child, or Related.
Automation scenarios on ticket merge:
When you merge two tickets, the secondary ticket will be closed automatically. Let us say you have set up an automation rule where an email is sent to the requester when a ticket is closed. So when an agent merges two similar tickets, the end user will receive a mail stating that the ticket they raised has been closed.
To avoid this, you can do the following:
- Go to Settings --> Automations --> Tickets --> Ticket Updates
- Create a new rule
- Under Involves any of these events, set the condition as 'Status is changed from any status to closed'
- Under 'On Tickets with these properties,' set the condition as 'In tickets - if ticket is merged - is false'
- Under 'Perform these actions', set the condition as 'Send email to requester'
- Now, an email will be sent to end users only when an agent closes the ticket manually and not when two tickets are merged.
Sometimes, a customer might try to get your attention to a particular issue by contacting you through separate channels. Sometimes, the same issue might be reported by different people in the team, or someone might accidentally open a new ticket instead of following up with an existing one. To avoid conflicts, you can merge all the tickets together and keep the communication streamlined.
Merge action is irreversible and the following things happen when you merge two or more tickets together:
- One of the tickets becomes the primary ticket (you get to choose). The others become secondary.
- All conversations from the secondary tickets are moved into the primary ticket. You can also choose to keep the requestors and CC emails from the secondary tickets in the loop.
- All the secondary tickets are closed.
- All messages are sorted chronologically.
- A note is added to each of the tickets with a link to the primary ticket.
- If the note is public, an email notification (the Agent Adds Comment to ticket notifications under Admin > Workflows > Email notification) might be sent to the requesters about the merged tickets.
How to merge two or more tickets?
- Open the Tickets tab
- Select the tickets you want to merge from the ticket list using the checkboxes
- Click on the Merge button on the navigation pane
- In the dialog box that pops up, choose which ticket you want to be the primary ticket by clicking on it. A tick mark appears next to it confirming that it has been done.
- If you'd like to remove any tickets from the merge, you can do so by clicking on the red minus icon next to them from the list. You cannot remove a ticket from the merge when it has been marked as primary.
- Similarly, you can use the search box on the right side to look up tickets by either Requester name, ID or Subject, and add them to the list.
- By default, the requester email and CC email in the secondary ticket will be dropped off after the tickets are merged. If you want to make sure that they are in the loop too, you can add them as CC to the primary ticket by clicking on the checkbox available in the bottom left.
- When you are ready to proceed, click on the Continue button.
- When tickets are merged together, a note is added to the primary and secondary tickets. You can edit the content in each of them if necessary. By default, the note will be added as a Private note and the requester would not be notified regarding the merge. However, you can uncheck the option to add it as a Public note (visible to the customers) and notify the requester.
- Merge action cannot be undone. Please make sure that the tickets you have chosen are the right tickets to merge before clicking on the Confirm and Merge button.
- The secondary ticket will disappear from the ticket list view. When you open the primary ticket, you will be able to see a private note with all conversations from the secondary ticket and the private note added from the step above to indicate that the tickets have merged.
Similar to this, you could also open up each ticket from your helpdesk and use the Merge function from the navigation bar. Since only one ticket is selected in that case, the other ticket(s) that need to be merged can be found using the search option on the right.
