4 Zendesk Cleanup Workflows Every Admin Should Know

As your Zendesk workspace grows, so does the amount of data that needs to be managed. While a comprehensive database of users, tickets, and organizations is essential for tracking customer interactions, keeping everything organized, compliant, and optimized can become increasingly difficult.

Data cleanup isn’t just about decluttering. It’s about managing your information responsibly to improve efficiency and stay compliant. Storing unnecessary data can slow down your system, increase storage costs, and expose your organization to risks, particularly under regulations such as GDPR.

Fortunately, the right tools can help make these challenges easier. The GDPR Compliance app, with its enhanced combined lists feature, offers a simple and effective solution for managing and optimizing your data.

How to find and remove hidden clutter in Zendesk?

Zendesk offers a great deal of flexibility, but this can also lead to a complex and tangled mess of users, tickets, tags, and organizations. Even if you know what data you need to remove, finding it can be time-consuming, requiring you to dig through spreadsheets or outdated fields.

One key issue is that Zendesk lacks a built-in feature to combine conditions across multiple objects, such as users with no requested tickets, suspended user tickets, or users within tagged organizations. Without this, data cleanup often gets pushed aside, leaving important tasks undone.

If this sounds familiar, don’t worry. Below, we’ve outlined practical ways to locate and clean up your data quickly and efficiently, helping you stay organized and compliant with ease.

1. Identify and delete inactive users with no requested tickets

One of the most common contributors to database clutter is users who never actually submit a support request. These could be the result of system migrations, synced email contacts, one-off API calls, or even customers who never followed through with their initial inquiry. While they may seem harmless, keeping these inactive users can add unnecessary volume to your Zendesk instance.

From a GDPR perspective, retaining personal information without a valid purpose is not only inefficient but also puts you at risk of non-compliance with the regulations. So why keep users who serve no operational purpose?

How to clean it up:

1. Open the GDPR Compliance app.
2. Go to the Combined List tab.
3. Select the automatic pre-built list for ‘Users with no requested tickets.’
4. Load the list and run the deletion process.

2. Remove users’ personal info based on requests

Customers have the right to request the removal or anonymization of their data at any time. But when you receive multiple requests from different users, especially if they’re buried in long email threads or misfiled tickets, responding to them efficiently becomes difficult.

Relying on agents to manually track these requests slows down your workflow and increases the chance of oversight.

How to clean it up:

1. Train agents to tag tickets with customer data requests (e.g., anonymize_request).
2. In the GDPR Compliance app, create a combined list ‘Users who have requested tickets with specific tags’ based on tickets with that tag.
3. Review and process all users linked to those tickets in one action.

3. Clean up users within tagged organizations

If your company works with enterprise clients or partners who have GDPR clauses in place, they may ask you to anonymize or delete all user data associated with their organization once your partnership ends. Tracking this down manually—especially if the organization has dozens or hundreds of related users—can be a logistical nightmare.

How to clean it up:

1. Tag the organization in Zendesk with a unique label (e.g., org_cleanup_gdpr).
2. Use the GDPR Compliance app to create a combined list of users associated with that organization.
3. Quickly load and process the user data for deletion or anonymization.

4. Delete suspended user data

Suspending users in Zendesk is a useful way to prevent spammers, bots, or abusive individuals from creating more tickets, but it doesn’t mean their data is gone. Suspended users still occupy space in your system, and their personal information remains searchable unless you take further action.

How to clean it up:

1. Go to the GDPR Compliance > Combined List tab.
2. Select the list template for ‘Tickets whose requester is suspended.’
3. Create an automation to remove tickets from suspended users on a regular basis (e.g., every month).

Make cleanup smarter with Combined Lists

All of these cleanup tasks have one thing in common: they rely on finding the right data. And that’s exactly where the combined lists feature in the GDPR Compliance app makes a real difference.

Instead of jumping between user views, ticket filters, and spreadsheets, you can build one dynamic list that pulls from multiple conditions across users, tickets, tags, and organizations.

Need to find users who haven’t submitted tickets and belong to a tagged organization? You can. Want to segment users with specific ticket tags or identify suspended requesters? It’s all possible—without manual guesswork.

And the best part is that you have two flexible options to work with:

• Automatic lists make cleanup fast and effortless. Simply choose from pre-built conditions designed for the most common use cases—no setup required.
• Advanced lists give you complete control. Combine filters to target specific user behaviors, ticket histories, or organizational attributes as needed.

Start with a free trial

Ready to take control of your Zendesk data? With combined lists and automated cleanup, staying compliant and clutter-free doesn’t have to be complicated. Try it out for free and see how much cleaner your support system can feel.