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Suggestion
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Resolution: Unresolved
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730
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1
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NOTE: This suggestion is for JIRA Service Desk Cloud. Using JIRA Service Desk Server? See the corresponding suggestion.
Thanks to Marc for raising this issue and for everyone who has provided input. We aren't considering this at this point in time as we currently support linking tickets as the recommended solution.
We recommend you use the link issue functionality in the short- to medium-term but will review whether or not we want to provide an enhanced solution during our next prioritisation sessions.
Best regards,
Jehan Gonsalkorale
Product manager, Jira Service Management
Problem: We often get multiple requests for the same thing. Sometimes it is because of human error and other times because of a customer replying to a notification via a different email address.
We MUST have the ability to be able to merge issues. This is standard in all the leading service and support desk systems. Our customers (internal) all log in via single sign on. However half the users use an alias as their primary email and this means we get duplicate issues for 50% of requests as soon as the customer replies to a question.
Currently we have to delete the new "duplicate" as the SLA would be inaccurate and the user would get very confused.
[JSDCLOUD-4685] Merge issue feature needed
Internally, we were discussing this lately since somebody came with the idea that it might be possible via REST API. Which is not the case.
However, I wanted to share how we thought that it would be good:
- Trigger: In context menü of to be merged issue click on "merge this issue into..." and select the target issue. (maybe with forced input of reason)
- create a comment in target issue with date and time of source issue creation with hint to merge and original issue and the content of the description
- move all comments from source to target issue
- change description of source issue to "@person merged ticket XYZ-123 into XYZ-2342 because reason"
- set source issue to done with resolution merged (this may be configurable or selectable but preselected in 1)
- create issue link XYZ-123 merged into XYZ-2342
Replys to source isssue must automatically be rerouted to target issue.
Jira would need the internal possibility to create comments with different timestamp and on behalf of others (which also would be great for migration scenarios ^^) and to move comments from one issue to another.
Many years later in a new company, I return to Jira Cloud, actively drive its use and again encounter this problem... So many years have passed and Atlassian still ignores it... Just great! 
If Jira wants to be a serious competitor to other customer or user support platforms, they need to implement features such as these that exist in competitor's products.
This ticket isn't even 10 years old yet. By Atlassian standards, we still have many years to wait.
But honestly, at this point, I have no one to blame but myself.
After the custom url ticket disaster, I don't know why I still expect them to do basic ticket requests.
The number of duplicates we are getting is now growing and the team and our customers are complaining about it.
This is a frustrating omission, especially given how often the email handler gets confused and creates duplicate tickets. Linking tickets and then having to update both (or all 3 or 4) is inefficient and it's confusing for the customer and the Helpdesk team.
I agree that issue merge is needed. If JSM is used as a main IT ticketing system, this needs to be added. It is a very basic function of a good ticketing system.
+1 do add this feature.
This is such a basic feature for any service desk, I have customers who are getting frustrated that this is not a feature we can provide.
This could lead to us choosing another service desk provider as our customer base grows.
How can Atlassian say JSM is a service desk when we are not even allowed to merge two tickets? What happens when a customer opens the same ticket for the same request 2 or 3 times? Are we just supposed to have links to every ticket? That is stupid!! Other true ticketing systems allow you to merge tickets. Come on Atlassian. Get your act together.
Rachel Crossman, Could you give the community feedback when Atlassian decides to implement this feature?
The function to merge cases it essential, not only for situations when different users raise a ticket for the same issue.
It also helps to keep the queues clean when, for example, there is a communication with external partners with other ticket systems which cannot answer correctly. A native merges feature can ensure that the answer will be attached to the origin case.
You see on the votes that some of your customers are waiting for this and the add-ons in the marketplace do not give the features what we need.
Giving up hope & building your own plugin seems more worth than putting any trust in Atlassian on this. Unfollowing after years.
Why is this still opened with 1k+ votes while https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/JRACLOUD-3592 is closed for a full year saying you'll never do that?
No comment here whatsoever about that.
Is there a real chance that you will do it for JSM while you refuse to do it for the simple Jira CORE? I'd be naive to believe you'll.
Another Great job Atlassian!
I don't understood why still missing....
The Atlassian service desk system is over decades of all the competitors.
Atlassian, please add this. It's available in Codebase, Sirportly, Zendesk and many others that are mentioned. It's basic functionality IMO.
Joining the others, totally disappointed (but not surprised!!!) that Atlassian doesn't care for his highest voted requests and find "MUST BE AVAILABLE" features to be "in consideration".
Merging is available on every other platform we've been through.
Atlassian had us with the On Premise where everything we needed was, now that they have moved to Cloud only - its votes after votes for features that should be available on day 1 and that were there on server edition.
Very frustrating and as all the comments go the same way, pretty much inappropriate for such company.
We still think you should add this feature. Your competitors have this feature. We want to move to Zendesk for this and many other missing features and complexity that makes Jira too hard to use for service desk ticketing.
I asked a JSM support rep about whether they dogfood JSM, and, if so, what they use for merging tickets. No answer on that. Sounds to me like you're not dogfooding... if so, why not?
I also mentioned to him that it seemed like JSM was getting confused by things like the Re: that gets added to the subject in a reply, and resulting in duplicate tickets. He had no comment about that either.
Anyway, another customer vote for this being a pretty important feature, especially with how easy it seems to be for JSM to spawn duplicate or more tickets for a single incident.
just as the original poster stated:
We MUST have the ability to be able to merge issues. This is standard in all the leading service and support desk systems. Our customers (internal) all log in via single sign-on. However, half the users use an alias as their primary email and this means we get duplicate issues for 50% of requests as soon as the customer replies to a question.
the fact that Jira has STILL not implemented this feature after YEARS is absurd! I will be forced to switch out of Jira just as quickly as I onboarded our team into it due to this one simple thing that changes the efficiency of ticket handling massively. Conversational case handling is always more effective than individual case handling. Cases should be merged per conversation so that each customer has its own thread of cases, or at the VERY LEAST include a function to merge one case with an existing one to create a thread! But Jira cannot support either one of these concepts.
When your support team has to handle every new case as a new individual case even though they are for the same customer, and they have no way to merge cases together into a thread, or simply display them 'by customer' in threads to begin with, this leaves the agents with no continuity or connection from one case to the next. Highly inefficient and disorganized.
as Gareth Jones said: "Not having the ability to merge tickets is like not having the ability to reply to tickets. It's such basic functionality that I'm honestly gobsmacked that it isn't already a feature. It almost pains me to call it a 'feature'."
I would make a push for my team to keep using JSD if it had merging capabilities, completely takes JSD off as a competitor in ITSM products.
My IT staff would like me to change to a different platform because of this issue.
Please prioritize this feature in support desk. It's extremely cumbersome using your linking solution. We should be able to merge tickets from the Queues dashboard.
Seriously? just moved over from Spiceworks to Jira Service Desk. Spiceworks was free and had merge YEARS ago.... now we pay for it and don't get merge?
This is the most common and needed function. Why so impossible to solve it. All of the ticketing system has a resolution for it.
Jira would definitely benefit from this feature.
Echoing some other comments here; I've seen many inferior features added recently (the right-hand side panel in Release Views to name one), yet this feature still doesn't exist.
I've even considered some of the limiting factors that might make this feature difficult to implement, but I can also think of solutions for every single one, why can't Atlassian?
I've subscribed to answers in this ticket at leat a year ago (I think 2) to be updated when Jira would finally accept to develop this basic feature that any free open source ticketing system has. Now all I have is comments from people discovering Jira is ignoring those complaints and focusing on features that I don't even care about. I think I'll reconsider working with Jira next time I'll have the occasion.
It's baffling that this isn't a core feature and that Atlassian continues to devalue merge functionality.
Not having the ability to merge tickets is like not having the ability to reply to tickets. It's such basic functionality that I'm honestly gobsmacked that it isn't already a feature. It almost pains me to call it a 'feature'.
How is this not a feature yet? Please prioritize this request, as it is standard procedure in EVERY ticket system!!
Please prioritize merging issues, this is standard in all support system...
We migrated to Jira from Freshservice and there merging tickets is super easy and retains all comments, etc.
Quite the letdown that something like this is not supported...
I understand linking with 'is duplicated by' for duplicates, but when the same customer creates multiple tickets discussing the same issue (but providing different information), merging is the only logical solution. We need to see all of their communications in the same place.
Just came over to Jira from ManageEngine. Where is the ticket merge functionality? I get multiple users inputting the same ticket - let's merge them!
Ticket duplication has ramped significantly at my workplace since my earlier comments (27-28 Oct 2022). I'm spending a crazy amount of time linking tickets together. I like the ticket linking function, but the inability to merge duplicate tickets means more time searching for a ticket when unmerged duplicates of it exist. This has pinched me and my manager several times since my earlier comments.
We'll be migrating to another ticketing system this year. Like all other ticketing systems that I've used in the last decade, it isn't nearly as robust as Jira Service Management, but at least it has ticket merging!
Would love to have this feature. We used this daily in our old ticketing system. We have tickets coming in from our monitoring tool and these tickets are the same issue that are cleared, but then triggered again. These issues really need to be merged into 1 ticket versus being linked, leaving each individual ticket left in the queue view. It makes the queue very cluttered where a merged ticket would just leave the parent ticket.
Another issue I have, is that I have closure criteria set on incidents that make it a little more difficult to close out the linked tickets via automation. These linked tickets aren't worked individually, but we want to keep track of them.
We started using AD auth in March, after having Jira accts with 2FA and we are still cleaning up the fall out. This was a gut punch to our customer adoption with our most tenured users feeling less confident in our service levels.
Hi,
As for many commenting above, this feature is a MUST for us if we want to build any kind of automation integrations.
Data management should be flexible. Linking issues is doing nothing to the Roadmap and Dashboards. Duplicated tickets mess up things.
Man, once I saw the usefulness and ease of merge in other, better, tools I am astonished its not higher on the road-map.
We'd love to see the option to merge multiple of the same related tickets into one.
We migrated from Zendesk to JSM. Can't wait for JSM to have same merging feature as in ZD.
Thanks!
I'd like to add my $0.02 on this issue that linking is just not a sufficient functionality for ticketing. It's not super uncommon to have multiple alerting systems fire alerts for the same thing, or having a major company incident where 10 people put in tickets for the same thing at the same time. In both of those use cases, linking doesn't really make sense because they are true duplicates and need to be merged. A merge feature that allowed consolidation of them would serve to both reduce clutter and have all the relevant information on a single issue in one place instead of scattered across 10 "linked" tickets.
@isalawudeen
Our Issue Merger for Jira is free: https://bit.ly/IssueMerger_C. We also have a version with more advanced features called Issue Merger PRO for Jira: https://bit.ly/IssueMergerPro_C. It's free for up to 10 users.
1c96672eaa97 I would add that the reporter and all request participants from the source ticket be added as request participants on the target, unless they are already present, or if one is the reporter on the target ticket. Coming from Spiceworks, the way they handle merging is similar, but they also merge comments in-line to the target ticket, which can be confusing if ticket comments are conversational, and overlap in time between the two tickets.