Zendesk Organizations
Zendesk organizations group your customers. Groups organise your agents. Brands split your front door. Mixing those up produces some very odd routing.
Zendesk organizations, groups and brands
Three words that all mean "a collection of something", and they operate on completely different sides of the desk.
A ticket has a requester, whose organization comes along for the ride, and an assignee, who sits in a group. Those are different fields answering different questions. If you find yourself trying to assign a ticket to an organization, you want a group. See groups for that side of the picture.
Getting users into the right organization
There are three routes and they suit different setups.
Domain mapping is the automatic one. Attach one or more email domains to an organization, and new users signing up with an address at that domain get added automatically. For B2B desks where every customer has a corporate domain, this does almost all the work for free.
It has an obvious failure mode. Anyone using a personal address isn't mapped, and free-mail domains must never be mapped to anything, because mapping gmail.com to a customer would add every consumer who ever writes in to that account. Zendesk guards against the obvious cases, but the principle is worth holding.
Manual assignment covers the exceptions, and there will be exceptions.
Bulk import or API sync is the answer at scale. If your CRM already knows which contact belongs to which account, that's the source of truth and Zendesk should follow it rather than being maintained by hand. See importing users and organizations by CSV for the manual route.
What organizations let you actually do
This is where the setup pays off, and it is more than a label on a sidebar.
Shared organization tickets
You can let members of an organization see each other's tickets, either read-only or with the ability to comment. It's a per-organization setting, and it is genuinely useful for B2B support where a customer has an internal IT team who should see what their colleagues have raised.
Think before you switch it on. Everything anyone at that company writes to you becomes visible to their colleagues. A ticket raised by an employee complaining about their own admin, a billing dispute, an offer you extended to one contact: all of it. Confidential is not the default assumption people make when they email support.
The practical rule: enable sharing where the organization is a team collaborating with you, keep it off where the members are individuals who happen to share an employer. And when it's on, agents need to know, because "reply to all" now has a wider audience than they think.
A useful side effect of sharing is that a customer can see a colleague already raised the same issue, which cuts a small slice of repeat contacts before they happen.
When not to use organizations
Organizations model companies. If your customers are individuals, an organization per person is administrative overhead pretending to be structure. Use user tags or user segments instead.
They are also the wrong tool for internal categorisation. "VIP" isn't an organization, it is a tag or a field. Keep organizations as a real-world mapping of who your customers work for, and the routing built on top stays comprehensible a year from now.
Frequently asked questions
What does a shared organization do?
A Zendesk shared organization lets every member see each other's tickets, which is exactly what B2B customers ask for and exactly what leaks if you enable it on a consumer organization.
What is the difference between an organization and a group in Zendesk?
An organization groups end users, your customers. A group groups agents, your staff. Tickets are assigned to groups, and they inherit an organization from their requester.
Can a user belong to more than one organization?
Multiple organizations per user is supported on some plans, with one set as the default for new tickets. Check what your current plan includes before designing around it.
How does Zendesk domain mapping work?
Attach email domains to an organization and new users with matching addresses join it automatically. Never map a free consumer mail domain, and expect to handle personal addresses manually.
Should I turn on shared organization tickets?
Yes where the customer is a team that collaborates with you, no where members merely share an employer. Everything one member writes becomes visible to the others.
Can I route tickets by organization?
Yes. A trigger can check the requester's organization or an organization tag and assign the ticket to a group, set priority, or apply a specific SLA policy.
One account, three people, one problem
Colleagues at the same company report the same outage separately. Ticket Merger spots those and merges them.
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