Hello,
- What is your original issue/pain point you want to solve?
The current duplicate detection feature has two combined limitations:
It only displays a warning to the agent when creating a ticket, with no automatic action (no merging, no linking to the existing ticket).
When several attributes are selected for comparison (e.g. customer + order number), the system always applies an AND logic (all attributes must match simultaneously), with no way to build more flexible combinations (e.g. match on order number OR on customer, or combinations mixing AND and OR across groups of attributes).
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Which are one or two concrete situations where this problem hurts the most?**
A customer opens a first ticket about a given request, then, without replying to the existing thread, sends a separate new message (e.g. a new email) about the same request. These two tickets sometimes only share a single common attribute (e.g. same order number, but different email/customer). With the imposed AND logic, this single common point isn’t enough to trigger the warning, so the two tickets stay separate, with the request’s history split across both, potentially handled by two different agents. -
Why is it not solvable with the Zammad standard?
The standard duplicate detection only shows an informational warning, with no automatic merging or reassignment. In addition, as soon as several attributes are selected, the comparison always applies a global AND logic, with no way to define one or several combinations of conditions (a single attribute, or several attributes combined with AND, or several condition groups combined with OR). -
What is your expectation/what do you want to achieve?
Two complementary improvements:
Being able to freely define one or several matching conditions, with the ability to combine AND and OR between them (e.g. “customer AND order number” OR simply “order number” OR simply “customer”), instead of a single AND logic imposed across all selected attributes.
Being able to configure automatic merging of tickets detected as duplicates based on these conditions, with automatic reassignment to the same agent who was already handling the original ticket, instead of a simple warning left to the agent’s judgment.
Without these two combined improvements, partially detectable duplicates remain separate, causing loss of context, wasted time, and redundant handling of the same subject by two different agents.
Your Zammad environment:
- Average concurrent agent count: 3 agents
- Average tickets a day: about 25 tickets/day/agent in a normal period
- What roles/people are involved: support agents
Anything else which you think is useful to understand your use case:
A customer may recontact support about the same request without replying to the existing ticket, sometimes sharing only a single identifiable attribute with the previous ticket (customer or order number). Without combinable AND/OR logic or automatic merging, this causes redundant handling and loss of context for both the customer and the support team.
Thanks
Dan