Departments Feature Overview

Table of Content

A department refers to an organization unit within a company that is assigned to handle certain tickets or customer inquiries. It may represent different functional areas within a company, e.g. customer service, technical support, billing, or sales, or it may represent different language proficiencies or team expertise, such as sales - English, sales - German, or 2nd-level technical support. This ensures that tickets are quickly routed to the appropriate agents, allowing for quicker and more efficient issue resolution. Departments are established to keep the help desk organized and manage workflows effectively for different agent groups.

Departments may serve multiple purposes, such as controlling ticket access to specific teams, defining the email communication templates used, and regulating the availability of messaging (To solve), chatting, & calling services.

Departments are manageable from the Configuration > Departments section.

Creating a New Department

To create a new department, click on the "+ Create department" button and enter the name of your new department in the provided field. After clicking "Create", the new department is created and its configuration window will open.

Department Configuration Window Overview

The department configuration window has several sections that allow you to manage the department and its members, set up its email templates, and assign email accounts to be used by the department.

Department Name Section

In this section, you can edit the current name of the department. You can either rename it or save a clone of it under a new name by clicking "Save as new department".

General Configuration Section

This section allows you to specify the outgoing email account from which email notifications related to this department will be sent, and set up email templates used by the department. This enables you to use different email templates when e.g. creating or replying to tickets in this department compared to other departments. To edit the email account from which notifications are sent and adjust the department-specific email templates, click on the "Edit notifications" button in the selected department's configuration window.

There is also a setting that allows you to enable or disable the inclusion of tickets from the selected department in the "To solve" queue. To enable/disable the inclusion tickets from the department in the queue, click on the "Change" button in the selected department's configuration window.

If enabled, all tickets from the department will be available in the "To solve" queue, and agents with active messaging service who are added to the department will be able to answer tickets via the "To solve" button. If disabled, tickets from this department won't be added to the To solve queue and can only be answered from the tickets list. This option is automatically disabled if there are more than 30 000 New and Open tickets in the department.

Members and Roles Section

For agents to see, interact with, and solve tickets in the selected department, they should be assigned to it. To manage the agents assigned to the selected department, click the "Change" button in the "Members and roles" section. Each user with the default Agent or Custom agent role can also have a special department role that modifies their permissions for that department.

Once users are added to the department, you can manage their allocation to messaging (to solve), chatting, and calling services. To manage the service availability of selected department members, click the "Manage work allocators" button in the "Members and roles" section.

For more information about the management of department members, their roles, and responsibilities, please refer to this article.

Emails Configuration Section

Admins or Owners can designate specific outgoing email accounts for each department. This allows agents to reply to tickets using only selected email addresses, or force replying to tickets in the department from one particular outgoing email account. You can access these settings by clicking the "Change" buttons in the "Emails configuration" section in the selected department configuration window.

Due to the various options and scenarios that can affect the selected and available outgoing email accounts for ticket replies, for more detailed information about these settings please refer to this article.

Removing a Department

To remove a department, click on the desired department in Configuration > Departments to open its configuration window, and click "Delete department" in the "Danger zone". In the confirmation pop-up window, select the substitute department to replace it and confirm your action. The substitute department will automatically replace the deleted one in all tickets, incoming email accounts, and rules.

There always has to be at least one department, hence the default department that's available since account creation cannot be deleted.