Departments may represent a specific division of your organization or a folder to separate tickets by product or service, field of knowledge, physical location, or responsibility. You can use them for reporting or even for access control where you don't want some agents to see tickets in a specific department.
Departments are manageable from the Configuration > Departments section.
To add a new department, click on the "+ Create department" button and enter the name of your new department into the given field. Click "Create" to create the new department and open its configuration window.
Department configuration window overview
General configuration
In this section you can manage the email templates of the selected department. This allows you to when you create a new ticket or reply to an existing one under department A, you can use a different template for the message than when replying to a ticket in department B.
- Chat transcript - Email template of a chat transcript send to customer
- Forward message - Used when agent forwards message to customer
- Ticket reply - Used when agent replies an existing ticket
- New Ticket - Used when agent creates a ticket using New > New Ticket option
- Ticket resolved - Email template send to customer when his ticket is resolved
This section contains the option to set up a Mail account. Mail account set up in Department Email templates section will be used for:
- all notification emails sent from this department, including notifications created by Rules for example using action send mail
- replying to offline tickets which were not created from email, such as tickets created from Contact forms, tickets fetched from connected emails are replied using the same email which was contacted by the customer.
To solve setting
There is also a specific setting regarding "To solve" algorithm under each department. You can enable/disable it under Departments > Edit department > To solve > Change.
Once enabled, it will display all tickets under a specific department in the "To solve" queue and your agents that are added into the department will be able to answer tickets via "To solve" button.
If you manually disable this option, tickets won't be added under "To solve" and can be answered only directly from the ticket list. We do recommend enabling this setting and force agents to solve tickets via "To solve" functionality and use the ticket grid only for ticket search. Please note that this option might be also automatically disabled in case there are more than 30 000 tickets in status Open or New in the department. In that scenario, tickets won't be added into "To solve" queue as well.
Members and roles section
For agents to see, interact with, and solve tickets, they should be assigned to the appropriate departments. To manage the agents assigned to a specific department, navigate to Configuration > Departments, click on the department of which members you want to manage, and click the "Change" button in the "Members and roles" section.
For more information about this section please refer to this article.
Emails configuration section
In LiveAgent, administrators have the option to allow chosen outgoing email accounts for each department separately, allowing agents to reply to tickets using only selected email addresses, or force replying to tickets in a specific department only from one particular outgoing email account. This ability to set up multiple outgoing email accounts can be accessed in Configuration > Departments, followed by clicking on the department name.
For more information about this section please refer to this article.
Removing a department
To remove a department, click on the chosen 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.