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 obvious duplicates. Merging afterwards is possible but manual.

Import

1. Open Admin Center, then People, then Bulk actions.
2. Choose Import users, or Import organisations for the company list.
3. 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.

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