Squads

What is a Squad?

A squad is a named group of agents: Returns, Phone, Nordics, Tier 2. You give it members and, optionally, access rules that describe the slice of conversations the squad covers.

Two things follow from that. The helpdesk sidebar gets a Squads drill-down so anyone can jump to that slice of the board, and the squad becomes a target you can point routing, call transfers and alerts at instead of naming individual people.

Squads belong to one team. A user can be in as many squads as you like.

Creating a squad

Go to Settings → Squads and click Create Squad. The form has two tabs.

General

• Name (required), for example "Phone" or "Returns".
• Emoji, shown next to the name in the sidebar and in the call transfer picker.
• Color, used for UI chips.
• Description, a line for your own team.
• Members, picked from the users on this team.

Capabilities

The squad's access rules. See the next section.

Membership can also be edited from the other side: open a user under Settings → User Management and set their squads there.

Access rules on a squad

A squad can carry two kinds of rules:

• Preset capabilities from the shared library (Settings → Capabilities), reusable across users and squads.
• A custom rule that belongs to this squad only, created straight from the Capabilities tab.

Every rule describes a slice of conversations using markets, channels, tags, and excluded tags. Excluded tags are a veto: a conversation carrying one is out, whatever else matches.

A squad's effective coverage is all of its rules combined. They are ORed, so a squad with a "Danish market" rule and a "Chat" rule covers everything that matches either one.

Each rule also has an enforcement mode, which decides how hard it bites:

• Strict 🔒 Enforced everywhere. Conversations outside the rule are hidden from the board and never served.
• Routing 🎯 Limits automation only. The board stays fully visible and anything can still be claimed by hand, but flow mode and automatic routing only serve conversations inside the slice.
• Preference ⭐ Sets priority only. Nothing is hidden or blocked. Flow mode serves matching conversations first and falls back to the rest of the pool once the slice is empty.

What squads change

1. The Squads drill-down in the helpdesk 🧭

As soon as a team has at least one squad, a Squads group appears in the helpdesk sidebar, above Markets. Selecting a squad narrows the board to the slice that squad's rules cover.

• The squad filter is applied on top of your own access, never instead of it. A squad drill-down can never show you something you are not already allowed to see.
• It shows every matching ticket, not only the ones you have claimed.
• The badge counts open conversations in that squad's slice, inside your own scope, with AI-handled conversations left out.
• A squad with no rules (or one fully unrestricted rule) filters nothing, so its drill-down simply shows the whole board.

2. Membership does not narrow anyone's board 👀

This is the part people get wrong. Putting someone in a squad hides nothing from them.

The default helpdesk board is scoped by a user's own rules: the capabilities attached directly to them plus their personal rule. Rules that live on a squad reach the board only when that squad is explicitly selected in the sidebar.

So if you want to genuinely restrict what an agent can see, put a strict rule on the user. Use squads to describe coverage and to group people, not as a wall.

3. Routing and flow mode 🔀

Squad rules do count where it matters for automation. When the system decides whether an agent may be served or assigned a conversation, it evaluates the agent's own rules plus everything inherited from their squads (strict and routing modes; preference rules only reorder and never make anyone ineligible).

That makes a squad the clean way to say "these five people take Danish phone calls" without hiding anything from anyone.

Starting flow mode from a squad-scoped board carries the squad into the flow criteria. The squad name shows up as a chip on the flow pill, and flow keeps serving from that slice.

4. Phone call transfers ☎️

During a live call, the transfer picker lists squads next to individual agents, each with a live "N available" count of members who could take the call right now.

Transfer to a squad and the least busy available member gets it. A squad with nobody available is greyed out, and if no member can take the call once the transfer starts, the call comes back to you.

5. Alert audiences 🔔

An alert rule can address Squads as its audience instead of listing people. Membership is resolved when the alert fires, so anyone you add to the squad later is covered automatically and anyone you remove stops being notified.

Practical setups

• Phone squad: members who handle calls, plus a routing-mode rule on the phone channel. Calls route to them, transfers can target the squad by name, and nobody loses sight of the rest of the board.
• Market squad: "Nordics" with a rule covering the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian markets. Everyone gets a one-click drill-down to that slice, and flow mode started from it stays inside those markets.
• Escalation squad: "Tier 2" with no rules at all. It exists purely as an alert audience and a transfer target.

Note: a squad with no access rules is perfectly valid. It still groups people for transfers and alerts; it just does not filter anything.

Good to know

• A user can belong to several squads. For routing, their coverage is the union of all of them plus their own rules.
• Deleting a squad removes its memberships and its own custom rule. Preset capabilities are untouched, they live in the shared library.
• Squads are per team. Nothing is shared across teams.
• Sidebar badge counts are cached briefly, so a count can lag a moment behind the board.

Squad or department?

Squads and departments answer different questions. A squad is who is good at a ticket. A department is where a ticket lives.

An example. A furniture webshop has four departments: Customer service (the default), Returns, B2B and Spare parts. It also has three squads: Phone for the agents who take calls, Nordics for the Danish, Swedish and Norwegian markets, and Tier 2 for escalations.

A Danish customer emails about a missing table leg. The AI places the ticket in Spare parts, which is where it lives. Because it is Danish, it also matches the Nordics squad, so anyone can find it from the Nordics drill-down. The two work side by side: departments decide who owns a ticket, squads group the people who are good at it.