For Admins

Departments

Departments group operators by area of work, and tickets are tied to a department. The department decides who sees a ticket and who gets notified. Departments don't hand tickets out to their operators by themselves — that's what auto-assignment is for (see below).

Creating a department

Open Settings → Departments (under Team & routing) and click Create Department. Owners and admins create, edit and delete departments. Fields:

Name — e.g. “Technical support”, “Sales”, “Billing”. The slug is filled in from the name.
Description — what the department does.
Color — the department's label colour in the interface.

Membership is set on the operator, not on the department: Operators → Invite or Edit → Departments. An operator can be in several departments. The order of departments in pickers is changed with Move up and Move down.

Who sees what

An operator works with tickets of their departments and tickets with no department. They can't open a ticket from another department — even one assigned to them: it shows up in their list but opens with a “not found” error. Owners and admins see and open everything.
An operator with no departments can only open tickets with no department. Their list also shows the default department's tickets (or every ticket if there's no default department), but a ticket that has a department won't open for them. So in a project with departments, put every operator in at least one department.
Anyone can narrow their notifications in Profile → Department notifications.

How a ticket gets a department

Default Department — the Options block on the departments page. A new ticket goes to its channel's department or, if the channel has none, to the default department. In the interface only an email channel lets you pick one: the channel card → Routing → Department.
Automation rules — Settings → Automation rules, the Assign department action. Conditions: Channel (the channel type), Subject contains (a substring of the ticket subject), Priority. Rules run every 2 minutes, once per new ticket; if several match, the department from the lowest rule wins.
BILLmanager — the channel card's Departments tab maps BILLmanager departments to SupportHub ones. See the BILLmanager integration.
Manually — transferring a ticket to another department removes the assignee; by default the customer gets a message about the transfer (you can turn it off in the bot or widget builder). A macro with the Transfer to Department action does the same.

Handing tickets to operators

Auto-assignment is a separate setting — Settings → Auto-assignment, off by default. The Round-robin and Least busy strategies work across the whole project: every active operator is a candidate, and the ticket's department isn't taken into account.

Deleting a department leaves its tickets and operators without a department — every operator then sees those tickets. They aren't moved to another department automatically.

Departments pair well with macros: a “Transfer to billing” macro can move a ticket to the billing department and add a tag. In a macro the department is given by its UUID.

The same page has the Contact conversation history switch: it shows the customer's past tickets above the live chat. It's on by default. The platform admin can switch Departments off for the whole platform.

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