Departments

What is a department?

A department is where a ticket lives: Returns, B2B, Spare parts. Make one for each part of your business. Once departments are on, every ticket belongs to exactly one, so nothing falls between two teams and no ticket is left without an owner.

Departments are not the same as squads. A squad says who is good at what, and a ticket can match several. A department says where a ticket belongs, and it is always one.

Setting up departments

Go to Settings → Advanced → Departments and click Create department.

• Name, with an optional emoji, for example "Returns".
• What goes here: the description the AI reads to decide which tickets belong in this department. Name the products, topics or kinds of question, in plain words.
• Members: the agents who work this department's tickets.
• Default for this brand: tickets live in the default department until the AI places them somewhere else.

Setting a default turns department routing on. Before that, departments change nothing. Once it is on, every ticket of the brand, including the ones already open, lives in the default until it is placed or moved.

In a workspace, a new department is created across every brand by default, with one member list. Choose which brands it is the default for, or make it the default department for the workspace, the catch-all for every brand without a default of its own.

How the AI places a ticket

When a new ticket arrives, the AI reads it together with every department's What goes here, and places it in exactly one.

• Once per ticket. The first decision stands. Later replies do not move the ticket again.
• Not sure? The ticket stays in the default department.
• People first. The AI never moves a ticket a person has already taken: claimed, answered or moved by hand.
• Two or more. With a single department there is nothing to choose, so the AI only places tickets once you have at least two.

Every placement shows on the ticket's timeline, with the department and where the ticket came from.

Moving a ticket

A person can always move a ticket. Open it and pick another department in the Department row of the details pane. The row also shows how the ticket got there: Placed by the AI, Moved by a colleague, or the brand or workspace default. Undo move hands the ticket back.

What your agents see

Agents are served their own department's work: flow mode and automatic routing hand each agent tickets from the departments they belong to. Departments hide nothing, so agents can still look into the rest of the board. What an agent may see is still decided by their access rules.

Removing a department

Delete a department and its tickets go back to the default. A department that is a default, or that an access rule uses, cannot be deleted: make another department the default, or remove it from the rule, first.

Department or squad?

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

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.