How to Bulk Update Tickets in Zendesk?

If you manage support in Zendesk, you probably know this pain:

• You need to update a lot of tickets at once.
• Zendesk lets you do bulk edit, but…
• You have to go page by page and repeat the same action over and over.

This is slow and frustrating when you work with hundreds or even thousands of tickets.

Swifteq’s app Advanced Search Plus adds a new feature that makes this much easier: you can search and bulk update tickets in just a few clicks, directly inside Zendesk.

Below, you’ll see how it works, step by step, with simple examples.

Why Bulk Updating Tickets in Zendesk Is Hard by Default

Normally, if you want to make the same change on many tickets, you need to:

• Search for the tickets
• Select them
• Click Edit
• Apply the change
• Go to the next page
• Repeat until you’re done

If you only have 20–30 tickets, that might be fine.
But if you have:

• 685 tickets with the wrong tag.
• 1,824 tickets that need a field cleared.
• All tickets from the last 6 months that need a new value.

…doing this page by page becomes very time consuming.

That’s why the new bulk update feature in Advanced Search Plus is useful.

What Advanced Search Plus Does for Tickets?

Swifteq’s Advanced Search Plus is a Zendesk app that helps you:

• Find tickets very fast using flexible filters.
• See all results in one place.
• Select all tickets or just some of them.
• Apply bulk changes in a few clicks.

With the new feature, you can:

• Add or remove tags from many tickets.
• Update standard or custom fields in bulk.
• Clear values (for example, empty a field across many tickets).

And you can do this even if you have hundreds or thousands of tickets to update.

Example: Bulk Remove a Tag from Many Tickets

Let’s take a common real-life situation.

You have a tag called “medium” on many tickets, and you no longer want to use it (maybe you changed your tagging system or you’re cleaning up your data). You want to remove this tag from all tickets where it appears.

Here’s how you do that with Advanced Search Plus.

Step 1 – Search for the tickets you want to update

1. Open Advanced Search Plus in Zendesk.
2. Add your filters. For example:
   • Tickets from the last 6 months, or
   • Tickets with tag medium, or
   • Tickets in a certain status (e.g. solved) plus tag medium.
3. Click Search.
4. You’ll see a list of tickets that match your filters.

You now have all the tickets that need the tag removed.

Step 2 – Select the tickets

By default:

• All tickets in the result list are automatically selected.

If you want to update all of them, you don’t need to do anything else here.

If you only want to change some of them:

• Manually select or deselect tickets in the list.
• For example, you might exclude a few tickets that should keep the medium tag.

This gives you full control over which tickets will be updated.

Step 3 – Open Bulk Changes

Once you’re happy with your selection:

1. Click Bulk changes.
2. A panel opens where you can choose what you want to change.
3. You can pick:
   • A Standard field (e.g. Priority, Type)
   • A Custom field
   • Tags

For this example, we’ll work with tags.

Step 4 – Set what you want to update

To remove the medium tag from all selected tickets:

1. Choose Tags as the field you want to change.
2. Select the tag you want to remove: medium.

You can also clear fields from here. For example:

• If you have a field called Case ID on your tickets and you want to remove its value on all selected tickets:
  • Select the Case ID field.
  • Set it to No value (leave the value empty).
  • This will clear the field from all selected tickets.

This is very useful when you need to clean up old or incorrect data.

Step 5 – Apply the bulk change

When everything is set:

1. Click Save.
2. Advanced Search Plus starts updating all selected tickets.
   • For example, it might say: “This will run for 385 tickets.”

After a short time, the update is done.

To verify:

• Run the same search again.
• Open a few tickets in the results.
• You’ll see that the medium tag is no longer there.
• Or, if you cleared a field like Case ID, you’ll see that field empty.

That’s it. You’ve updated hundreds of tickets in a few clicks, without going page by page.

More Examples of Bulk Ticket Updates

Here are a few other ways you might use this feature for tickets:

• Standardize tags after a process change
  • Old tag: “priority_medium”.
  • New tag: “prio-medium”.
  • Use Advanced Search Plus to remove the old tag and add the new one across all affected tickets.
    
• Clean up a deprecated field
  • You no longer use a custom field like Legacy System ID.
  • Search for all tickets where this field has a value.
  • Use Bulk changes to set the field to No value for all of them.
    
• Align tickets with a new reporting rule
  • You decide that all closed tickets from the last quarter must have a certain field updated (e.g. a checkbox or dropdown).
  • Filter tickets by date and status, then bulk update that field.

In all these situations, you avoid:

• Manual editing ticket by ticket.
• Time-consuming export → edit in spreadsheet → import flow.
• Risk of missing tickets across multiple pages.
  

Why This Is Helpful for Support Teams

For support teams and Zendesk admins, this bulk update feature in Advanced Search Plus means:

• Less repetitive work.
• Faster cleanups when your processes change.
• Cleaner data for reporting and automation.
• No need to export and re-import tickets just to fix a field or a tag.

You stay inside Zendesk, search with flexible filters, select the right tickets, and apply your changes in a controlled, predictable way.

If you regularly need to:

• Fix tags.
• Clean old fields.
• Standardize ticket data after changing workflows.

…this feature helps you keep your Zendesk tickets consistent and up to date with just a few clicks. What to see it at work? Ask for a quick demo.

Written by Sorin Alupoaie

 

Sorin Alupoaie is the founder of Swifteq, an experienced software technologist and entrepreneur, he loves shipping products that solve painful customer problems. Sorin strongly believes that any Customer Service interaction represents a huge opportunity for a business to listen and improve how they deliver value to customers.