Departments are an important concept within Deskpro. They are a way to divide up the helpdesk and control access. You can check out this article as an introduction to organizing your helpdesk into departments.

Departments are often used to reflect different parts of an Organization: for example, you might have “Support”, “Delivery” and “Sales” Departments, or “US”, “France” and “UK” Departments.

There are Ticket Departments and  Chat Departments. The two types of Department are not linked; you configure Departments separately for Tickets and Chats.

The focus of this section is on Ticket Departments, since they are more frequently used and more powerful. These are some important properties of Ticket Departments:

• A Ticket must always have a Department.

• Tickets from each email account can go into a different Department, based on your  Triggers for Automation - e.g. emails to help@ can go to the Support Department.

• Tickets submitted on the web Help Center or embeds can be linked to a different email account based on the  Triggers - e.g. a ticket submitted to Support can get notifications sent from your help@ address.

• Each Department can have different  Ticket Form Layouts with different fields. Each Department can have different layouts separately for Users and Agents.

• Access to Departments can be limited by Agent and User permissions.

• You can give each Department a User facing name; e.g. a Department that your Agents see as “Terms of Service Violations” could be shown to Users as “Moderation”.

Here are some common ways to use Departments:

• You want to have separate contact forms on your website for support requests and media requests, with different custom fields. You would create Support and Media Departments, create custom  Ticket form layouts for each Department, then  Embedding a ticket form.

• You want to configure your helpdesk so that your manufacturing staff only see manufacturing Tickets, and your retail staff only see retail Tickets, while your research staff can see everything. You would create Manufacturing, Retail and Research Departments, then control access with  Agent Permissions.

• You want anyone to be able to contact your Sales Department, but for only your subscribers to be allowed to create Support Tickets. You would use the  Usergroup Permissions to remove access to the Support Department from all Users, then create a Usergroup with full access to Support and make sure subscribers are added to it.

• You want to be able to analyse the difference in response time for Sales Tickets and Support Tickets. Using separate Sales and Report Departments makes it easy to analyse this with a custom report in the  Reports interface.

• You run an IT Department and want to divide your helpdesk into Hardware and Software.