If you’re managing a support team and have multiple groups or departments within your organization that require access to a helpdesk, you might wonder how to segment it such that all groups are able to seamlessly access it.
Desk365 makes it easy to do this by creating separate groups, mapping agents to those groups, and setting up custom roles.
In this blog post, we’ll show you how to use Desk365 for managing multiple groups and ensuring that each team has access to the tickets that are pertinent to their operations.
Separating your groups can be beneficial in many ways, such as:
- Keeping the communication between groups/departments separate
- Reducing confusion and errors
- Enabling agents to focus on their specific tasks
- Providing a better experience for support team by routing their enquiries to the correct group
Using Groups and Roles
You can separate out multiple departments within Desk365 by using ‘Groups’ and ‘Roles’. You can have agents become part of groups (or departments). Once they’re part of a group, you can assign them custom roles that have ‘Group Only’ scope.
Any agent assigned to a role that has ‘Group Only Access’ as their ticket scope will only be able to view tickets belonging to their own group. They’ll not have visibility into any ticket outside of that group.
Now, we will explore how to implement these in detail below.
Adding Agents and Groups
Before you can start separating your groups/departments, you need to add all your support agents and create separate groups where you can organize agents into groups.
Adding Agents in Desk365
To add an agent in Desk365, follow these steps:
1. Go to Settings -> Admin -> Agents.
2. Click on the ‘Add Agent’ button at the top.
3. Fill in all the required fields such as Email, Name, and provide a suitable role for the agent.
If you have already created a group in Desk365, you can assign this agent to the appropriate group directly from here. However, if you haven’t created a group yet, you can do so later and then map the agent to the newly created group.
4. Click on ‘Add’, an agent named ‘Adam’ will be created in your helpdesk.
Creating Groups and Adding Agents to the Correct Group
Groups are a way of categorizing agents and tickets in Desk365. You can create separate groups for different teams, departments, or locations within your organization. This helps to keep things organized and ensure that agents only see the tickets that are relevant to their group.
You can organize agents into groups. An agent can be a member of multiple groups. Setting up an agent into groups helps assign the tickets to the respective groups without any confusion.
Assuming that the agent named ‘Adam’ is an HR Manager, you can add him to a newly created group called ‘HR’ in Desk365.
To create a new group in Desk365, these are the steps to follow.
1. Navigate to Settings > Admin > Groups tab and click on ‘Add Group’.
2. From there, you can add a new group called ‘HR’. Fill in all the details such as Name and Description.
You can also add agents to the group by selecting them from the dropdown choices in the Agents field. In the screenshot below Adam has been added as one of the agents in the HR group.
3. Click on the ‘Save’ button. ‘HR’ Group is now successfully created in your helpdesk, which includes one agent (Adam).
Adding Agents to multiple groups
Agents can be part of multiple groups, and ticket scope restrictions can be used to create specific roles that enable agents to access only the tickets associated with certain departments or groups they are part of, or to all tickets received by the helpdesk.
If the agent has ‘Group Only Access’ as the ticket scope, then he will be able to view only his group-related tickets.
This helps to ensure that agents are not overwhelmed with tickets that are not relevant to their group, and it also helps to streamline the ticket management process.
Currently, Agent ‘Andrew’ is only a member of the Marketing group. However, if you want him to handle tickets from the Sales department as well, you can add him to the Sales group.
To do this, you can create a custom role for Agent ‘Andrew’ with ‘Group Only Access’.
1. Navigate to Settings > Admin > Roles tab and click on ‘Add Role’.
2. To limit ‘Andrew’ to viewing only ‘Marketing’ and ‘Sales’ related tickets, you can select ‘Group Only Access’ as the ticket scope.
3. Decide on the feature access you want to provide for this role. Finally, click on the ‘Save’ button to create this custom role.
Now, to add ‘Andrew’ to both the Marketing and Sales groups, as well as modify his custom role, follow these steps:
4. Go to Settings > Admin > Agents tab.
5. Select Agent ‘Andrew’ and click on the ‘Edit’ button.
6. Choose the custom role that we created from the dropdown menu and then select ‘Sales’ in the ‘Groups field’ from the available options and click on the ‘Save’ button.
Now Agent ‘Andrew’ is part of both Marketing and Sales groups and he will be able to see both ‘Marketing’ and ‘Sales’ related tickets coming to the helpdesk.
Suppose Agent ‘Andrew’ wants to see only the tickets marked as ‘Urgent’ or ‘High’ priority.
Agent ‘Andrew’ can achieve this by applying filters on the right-hand side of the Agent Portal to display only the tickets marked as ‘Urgent’ and ‘High’ priority.
Agent ‘Andrew’ now has the ability to easily create a custom view, eliminating the need to apply filters every time he wants to view urgent and high priority tickets.
This is highly useful because it enables Agent ‘Andrew’ to focus on managing his group tickets without being interrupted by access to other departments.
Similarly, if Agent ‘Andrew’ wants a quick overview of the tickets on the home tab dashboard, he can view a summary of the tickets assigned to his group rather than all tickets.
Likewise, if Agent ‘Andrew’ needs to generate reports to assess the team’s performance, he can easily access the data for the tickets assigned to his group rather than all helpdesk tickets from various departments.
On the other hand, the helpdesk administrator, Andy, with global access as ticket scope, can see all helpdesk tickets submitted, including those from Sales and Marketing departments.
Setting up Custom Roles
Roles are used to determine the level of access an agent has within Desk365. By default, Desk365 comes with three roles: Admin, Manager, and Agent. However, you can create your own custom roles based on the specific requirements of your team.
There are three scope levels possible: Global, Group Only, and Agent Only.
Global Access: Users in this role can access all tickets across all groups and agents.
Group Only Access: Users in this role can only access the tickets assigned to their group and tickets assigned to them.
Agent Only Access: Users in the role can only access the tickets assigned to them.
Scope restrictions help you create roles that allow access only to tickets associated with specific departments/groups or only to tickets assigned to the agent.
For example, you may want agents in your HR group to have access only to HR-related tickets.
In that case, the ‘Group Only’ level access comes in handy. You can create a custom role and grant the agent ‘Group Only Access’.
You can then assign this role to all the agents of your HR group. After which, they’ll only see tickets belonging to their group.
This will help them avoid distractions from tickets belonging to other departments.
Currently, the agent ‘Adam’ has the manager role with global access to tickets, enabling him to view all helpdesk tickets.
Suppose you want the agent named ‘Adam’ to have access to view only the tickets related to the HR department. Let’s see how it can be done.
1. Go to Settings > Admin > Roles tab.
2. Click on ‘Add Role’.
3. In this example, you can provide ‘HR Manager’ a ‘Group Only Access’ instead of ‘Global Access’ as you don’t want to your HR Manager (Adam) to view all the tickets of different departments coming to the help desk which might affect his productivity.
Choosing ‘Group Only Access’ helps you create roles that allow access only to tickets associated with specific departments/groups.
This makes the HR team receive only HR-related tickets in their help desk which will help them focus better on the incoming tickets assigned to them.
3. Click on the ‘Save’ button to create this custom role ‘HR Manager’.
4. Now, go to Settings > Admin > Agents tab. Select the Agent ‘Adam’ and click on the ‘Edit’ button.
5. Change the role of ‘Adam’ from ‘Manager’ to ‘HR Manager’ and click on the ‘Save’ button.
From now on, when end-users submit a ticket to the HR department, Adam will only be able to view tickets related to HR in his helpdesk.
Conclusion
Using Desk365 to separate groups and agents can help improve your support team’s productivity and provide a better experience for your customers. By adding agents and organizing them into groups, and setting up custom roles, you can separate your different groups and enable them to focus on their specific tasks.