The Scenario
Forty duplicate ticket pairs. The CX lead identified them over the weekend and sent the Excel workbook Monday morning: source ticket IDs in column A, target ticket IDs in column B. She needs them all merged before the agents start their shift at 9 AM because duplicate tickets inflate the open count, confuse routing, and occasionally result in two agents working the same customer problem simultaneously.
It's 7:30 AM. The admin has the workbook open.
The bad version:
- Open Zendesk.
- Navigate to the first source ticket.
- Find the Merge option in the ticket actions.
- Search for the target ticket by ID.
- Confirm the merge.
- Navigate to the second source ticket.
At four minutes per merge — navigation, action menu, search, confirm — 40 merges take nearly three hours. The agents start at 9 AM. It's 7:30 AM.
The CX lead did the hard work. She found the duplicates. The mechanical part is supposed to be the easy part.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook. It reads the duplicate pairs and uses the Zendesk integration to execute every merge in one operation.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar in the duplicate resolution workbook and paste:
Merge all ticket pairs in this Excel sheet — use the ticket ID in column A as the source and column B as the target, recording the resulting job status in column C
What You Get
- Every pair processed through the Zendesk merge API.
- Column C receives the merge status — 'merged' or the Zendesk error for each pair.
- Failed merges (already closed, already merged) are flagged with the reason rather than silently skipping.
40 merges executed. Done before 9 AM.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Some source tickets may already be closed
For each row, attempt to merge the source ticket in column A into the target ticket in column B. If the source is already closed, write 'skipped - source closed' to column C. Otherwise write 'merged' or the error
Pre-merge status check prevents errors on already-resolved tickets.
You want to add an internal note to the surviving ticket
For each row, merge source ticket in column A into target ticket in column B. After each successful merge, post an internal note to the target: 'Merged with duplicate ticket [source ID] on 2026-05-15.' Write merge status to column C
Post-merge documentation in the same pass.
Some rows have blank source or target IDs
For each non-blank row, merge source ticket in column A into target ticket in column B. Skip rows where either column is blank and write 'skipped - incomplete row' to column C
Blank-row safety without pre-filtering the workbook.
Full duplicate resolution with summary
For each row from row 2 to row 41 — merge source ticket in column A into target ticket in column B. Write status to column C. Write total merged count to cell E2 and total failed count to cell E3
40 merges, complete status log, summary count — one prompt, done before the 9 AM shift starts.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open your duplicate resolution workbook with ticket pairs in columns A and B. Related: bulk-update ticket fields for follow-up changes on surviving tickets, or return to the Zendesk integration guide.