Forum Discussion

Rock Creek Solu's avatar
Rock Creek Solu
Active Contributor
12 years ago

Allow Merging Incidents into a Single Incident

Many of the Incidents I receive are actually duplicates of identical incidents (although they may involve different Customers in the same Company).

For example, I received several tickets on a wireless issue at a company from several Customers. Resolving the wireless issue resolved all of the tickets. Instead of having to respond and enter resolutions for all of the tickets, I would have preferred to merge the tickets into one, and make one response.

I could see this being implemented several ways, perhaps the easiest of which would be to have the system create a "master" incident to which all of the "merged" tickets point. When anything is done on the "master" ticket, the action is communicated to all of the original incident tickets. When the "master" incident is closed, the child incidents would be closed as well.

Optionally, the merged tickets could be replaced by a newly created single ticket (although there may be some database issues in this regard).

Combined with the suggestion I made in a separate "idea," that of allowing multiple Customers to be assigned to a single incident, this would be a very powerful feature.
idea
  • VinceMHAW's avatar
    VinceMHAW
    Active Contributor
    5 years ago

    Is there an efficient way to merge duplicate customers?  A staff was in the habit of creating a new customer for each incident with the same customer, so we have many duplicates.  Is there a way to quickly merge them or quickly replace one for the other on incidents?  Or do I need to simply clean them up one by one?

    • VinceMHAW's avatar
      VinceMHAW
      Active Contributor
      5 years ago

      Just to elaborate, my concern is that if I simply delete the extras, the incidents will no longer have customers attached to them, and will be less useful for tracking a customer's history.

      • AshC's avatar
        AshC
        Retired GoTo Contributor
        5 years ago

        I'm sorry there is no way currenlty to merge separate incidents, however you can link them together as well as close multiple incidents simultaneously if needed. 

    • webber's avatar
      webber
      New Contributor
      5 years ago
      VinceMHAW wrote:

      Is there an efficient way to merge duplicate customers?  A staff was in the habit of creating a new customer for each incident with the same customer, so we have many duplicates.  Is there a way to quickly merge them or quickly replace one for the other on incidents?  Or do I need to simply clean them up one by one? usps tracking

      I also want lean to  quickly merge them . also looking forward on Vince's Question to be replied with solution...

  • Mike Nemer's avatar
    Mike Nemer
    Active Contributor
    9 years ago
    It would be nice if we could merge incidents together when we get duplicate incidents. 

    Specifically, occasionally multiple customers will raise separate incidents about the same issue, but will often do so with varying information.

    Or, instead of responding to our questions in the main incident, they'll raise another incident to respond. Obviously, we need to address that by training the customer, but it still leaves us with multiple incidents on the same issue, with varying information.

    For the time being, we've been manually copying additional info from duplicate incidents into a main incident, and then deleting the duplicate.

    Would love a simple "merge" feature - merges all comments in order by date/timestamp, links all customers or puts them on the External Watchlist, etc. 

    Service Desk is great, but this is the one and only feature I still miss from Spiceworks.

    Thanks for considering,
    Mike
    • Vladimirov's avatar
      Vladimirov
      New Member
      8 years ago
      Hello,

      Having this implemented to remove all those RE: RE: RE: automatically opened tickets when people reply to a message is mandatory in any decent and self respecting ticketing system in my humble opinion... I am wondering when we could expect this ... 

      Regards,
      Vlad T.
    • Lester1's avatar
      Lester1
      New Member
      8 years ago
      I'm also curious about this functionality or any current work around to this problem.
  • Luke Grimstrup's avatar
    Luke Grimstrup
    Retired GoTo Contributor
    11 years ago
    Thanks for the feedback Rick. I do this all the time on our account as well, but I've just come to terms with the fact it's going to spam a few people. You are right though, it is something we should look at adding at some point.
  • Rick Derks's avatar
    Rick Derks
    New Member
    11 years ago
    Following up on the MASS Updates.
    It would be nice to add a check box option to Notify Assignee.
    There is an option for Watch List and Customer. But, in most cases we are 'fixing' closed tickets and the assignee doesn't need to be notified all the time.
  • Chip1's avatar
    Chip1
    New Member
    12 years ago
    I would like to see this feature as well. I get new incidents for the same issue all the time. Then when I delete one the customer asks why its closed because it wasnt fixed. Then I have to explain that there were duplicate incidents and only closed one. Another issue with this is if the deleted incident had additional info and I forgot to paste it to the incident Im keeping........

    The helpdesk system I was using prior to this one had that feature. Just saying.
  • Rock Creek Solu's avatar
    Rock Creek Solu
    Active Contributor
    12 years ago
    I will have to test this. It looks good. But I still would like the ability for my techs to merge incidents and retain the customers associated with each one.
  • Luke Grimstrup's avatar
    Luke Grimstrup
    Retired GoTo Contributor
    12 years ago
    While merging incidents is a good idea, if you want to resolve a lot of incidents at once, you can do this by creating a report and using mass-actions.

    Go to:
    Incidents > Reports & Queues > select a report > select the incidents on the left-hand-side > add mass actions to perform.



    From here you can set the status to "Resolved", close the incident and add a comment all from this screen. Notifying the watchlist, and the customer if you want.

    You can also report on all incidents linked to another service desk record by using the "Linked To" condition. Allowing you to report on all incidents linked to Problem or Release, this may come in handy if you find a workaround for a Problem and want to update all the associated incidents, or if a Release addresses a number of incidents.