Is there a way to merge two cases into one?

[AJ1]

If we find that there are duplicate cases, we are just copying / pasting notes as needed from one case to another and then cancelling one of the cases. However, if there is a way to merge cases, that would be ideal.

[michaelj_sherid · Accepted solution]

Hi AJ,

Currently this is not an out of the box feature. Any workflow being built would have to contain the logic to do some sort of reconciliation to be sure the correct data is merged if data was to be written over conditionally. 

What are the details of the use case where you would merge 2 cases into one?

Regards,

Mike

[Kaylen Dailey1]

I had this question as well. The use case was they have a lot of duplicate cases that are opened so they have multiple people essentially working on the same case without knowing. I showed them the related links where you could see other cases opened for the subject person. They thought that was great, but if there were duplicates, wanted to be able to bring them together to some capacity.

[michaelj_sherid]

This would have to use a reconciliation logic to determine  what case will be the master of the data for that field. Which case will be the authority and which case will be closed. This seems to be a lot of code to facilitate this. @Kaylen Dailey has a good point in using the related cases as part of the process instead of trying to customize to address these cases. 

[nfrengle]

Michael, 

Cry me a river. You are overthinking the problem: Just ask the user which ticket will be the master, and which ones you want merged into that one. This functionality is basic, and other ticketing systems have it right out of the box. The fact that ServiceNow would have to be customised to do this is not the fault of the original questioner, nor of Kaylen Daily1, whose description of the use case is spot on, and a regular occurrence. I am looking at a queue of cases where there are 11 cases that are essentially identical. In Zendesk that would be a one-minute operation to merge the tickets. Even Salesforce has that in their ticketing system.  One wonders whether ServiceNow engineers spend any time at all with users of their products. They should.