Importing your existing users and organisations

Bringing your existing customers and companies into Zendesk with the data importer, and what to clean up before you start.

Bringing your existing customers and companies into Zendesk with the data importer, and what to clean up before you start.

Clean the file first

The import is the easy part. The list is where the work is, and fixing it afterwards is far more painful.

• One row per person, one email address per row. Two people sharing a mailbox cannot both be users on that address.
• Decide on organisations before you import. Getting people into the right company at import time is much easier than moving them later.
• Drop what you do not need. Fields you import become fields you maintain.
• Fix duplicates before you upload. The same person or organisation twice in one file can make the whole import fail, and merging afterwards is manual. Row order is not guaranteed either, so you cannot rely on a later row correcting an earlier one.

Check the welcome email before you press anything

With Guide switched on, a bulk import sends every imported user the welcome email, which asks them to verify their address and set a password. Import fifty thousand customers and you have sent fifty thousand of them, on a day nobody was expecting to hear from you.

To stop it: in Admin Center, click People, then Configuration > End users, and clear Also send a verification email when a new user is created by an agent or administrator. Decide deliberately whether you want it, and put it back afterwards if you turned it off.

Import

1. Open Admin Center, then Objects and rules, then Tools, then Data importer.
2. Import your organisations first. Where you are bringing in both, that order is required rather than preferred: users cannot be attached to companies that do not exist yet.
3. Then import the users. Upload your file and map each column to a Zendesk field.
4. Run a small batch first. Twenty rows will show you every mapping mistake.
5. Check the result, then run the rest.

Do not use the old bulk actions route

There is a second, legacy import on the bulk actions pages, and it caps at 2,000 rows: one header and 1,999 of data. The data importer takes up to 500,000. If your list is longer than a couple of thousand names, that difference is the whole exercise.

Its other ceilings are generous enough to ignore: 200 columns, and 128 KB per row.

Organisations by domain instead

If your customers are companies, you may not need to import organisation membership at all. Zendesk can add users to an organisation automatically based on their email domain, which keeps working for people who have not contacted you yet.

What you cannot bring

Historical tickets do not import through this route. That is a separate exercise and, for most organisations, not worth it.

See also

• Why you cannot simply import your old tickets
• Automatically adding users to an organisation by domain
• Merging duplicate users