Bulk editing SGG values in Zendesk

How to find your assigned tickets that aren’t in your group and move them

Introduction

The procedure described here was originally used during the global rollout of Support Global Groups to bring each Support Engineer’s tickets into their new group. It remains useful now for any situation in which there is a need to find and move any identifiable collection of tickets. For example, a Support Engineer changing to a new group would find this useful.

Finding your tickets that aren’t in your group

To get a listing in Zendesk of all of your tickets that are not assigned to your group, the best way is to search in Zendesk.

Click on the appropriate link for your current/new group to run a query that finds all of your tickets not in your new group:

Query format

The actual query string looks like this:

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assignee:me -custom_field_4414446722578:GROUP_TAG status<closed -form:"Support Ops" -form:"GitLab Incidents" -form:"L&R" -form:"Emergencies"

where GROUP_TAG is your current group’s tag. See Zendesk group tasks for the actual values.

As an example, the search query for those in the Maple group is:

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assignee:me -custom_field_4414446722578:ticket_group_maple status<closed -form:"Support Ops" -form:"GitLab Incidents" -form:"L&R" -form:"Emergencies"

Understanding the parts of the query

  • assignee:me = specifies you are looking for items assigned to you
  • -custom_field_4414446722578:ticket_group_NAME = specifies you are looking for items not assigned to your group
  • status<closed = specifies you are looking for items that have a status lower than closed (new, open, pending, on-hold, solved)
  • -form:"Support Ops" = specifies you are looking for items where the form is not Support Ops
  • -form:"GitLab Incidents" = specifies you are looking for items where the form is not GitLab Incidents
  • -form:"L&R" = specifies you are looking for items where the form is not L&R
  • -form:"Emergencies" = specifies you are looking for items where the form is not Emergencies
Zendesk Group Tags
Group Name Tag to use
Baobab ticket_group_baobab
Ginkgo ticket_group_ginkgo
Kapok ticket_group_kapok
Maple ticket_group_maple
Pine ticket_group_pine

Bulk editing the SGG value

Once you have the list of tickets, you can use Zendesk’s bulk edit feature. To do this, click the checkbox on the top left side of the search results. It can be a bit hard to see; look to the left of the ID column. Then, click the blue Edit button on the bottom of the page. Next to the edit button you should see the number of tickets selected. On the popup modal that appears, locate the SGG ticket field on the left side (should be towards the top of the list). Click in the dropdown for it and select your group’s name. Next, click the black Submit button. This starts a background job to update the tickets. When the job finishes, Zendesk displays a notification popup in the top right part of the page.

If there are any issues with the bulk edit, Zendesk will let you know which tickets were not edited. You should be able to find the problem by editing each listed file, one at a time. If you are unsure what to do to resolve the problem, please ask in the #support_operations Slack channel for assistance.

To see this process in action, please watch this video:

Last modified October 31, 2023: Update links for all migrated sections (5f71f5a9)