Plan requirement
| Subscription | Any plan |
| Access | Agent |
Merging exists; splitting does not, and Zendesk has acknowledged it as a feature request rather than shipped it. But there are two supported routes before you start copying text by hand, and which one fits depends on what the second piece of work is.
Is the second piece subordinate, or is it a separate problem?
Subordinate work is what a side conversation child ticket is for: a separate ticket that hangs off the original, assigned to an agent or group, with public comments on the child appearing as events on the parent. It needs Professional or above with the Collaboration add-on, switched on by an admin, and you can copy tags, followers, the ticket form with its values and the requester at creation time only.
Know the cost before you rely on it: with child tickets, notification emails and triggers fire twice, and a child assigned to a private group is visible to people outside that group.
A genuinely separate customer problem is not subordinate to anything, and making it a child ticket ties two independent pieces of work together for no reason. That is the case for the manual route below, or for the Linked Ticket app from the Marketplace if you do this often.
Splitting by hand
- Decide which problem stays on the original ticket, usually the one the customer wrote about first.
- Create a new ticket with the same requester.
- Give it a subject that names the second problem clearly, not "part 2".
- Copy across the relevant part of the conversation as the description, so the new ticket reads on its own.
- Add an internal note on both tickets pointing at the other.
- Tell the customer, in one reply, that you have opened a second ticket and what each one covers.
Why bother at all
Two problems on one ticket means one status, one assignee and one resolution time for two pieces of work. The faster one waits for the slower one, your figures describe neither accurately, and whoever picks it up next has to work out which half is still open.
And tell the customer either way. People find a second ticket number confusing unless you explain it, and one sentence saying which number covers which problem stops them replying to the wrong one, which puts you back where you started.
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