Departments are the various business divisions within your organization. They can be categorized based on your products, geographical locations or teams. Zoho Desk enables you to create departments and manage customer support individually for each of your divisions within your organization. Each department can have its own agents, mail boxes, live chat agents, community forums, web forms and social media channels. Besides these, you can set automation, service agreements, business hours, etc., specific to the departments. This allows you to customize a support process independent of your other departments.
You can also create departments for private purposes that can be used for internal ticket management. Your customers cannot access such private departments in their Help Center.
Availability
Permission
By default, users with the Administrator profile can add and manage departments in Zoho Desk. Admins can enable the Departments permission for other user profiles if required.
Check Feature Availability and Limits
Adding Departments
You can add multiple departments according to your business requirements. The Professional plan allows you to add a maximum of 10 departments (inc. private departments). However, you can override this limit when you subscribe to Enterprise.
To add a department
- Go to Setup ( ) > Organization > Departments.
- In Department Lists page, click New Department in the upper right corner.
- In the Add Department page, enter the following details:
- Department Name: Provide a name for this department
- Display Name in Help Center: Enter the name as it should appear for your customers in the Help Center
- Logo: Browse and select a logo for the department. The logo is used to identify the department in the Help Center
- Display in Help Center: Uncheck this option to add a private department
- Associate Agents: Add agents to handle the tickets received in this department
- Description: Enter the description for the department
- Click Configure Channels.
Now that you've added a new department, you must configure the support channels for it. You can continue to configure the channels in the following screen or come back to it later.
Editing Departments
You can edit the departments you have added in the Zoho Desk portal. For example, you can choose to mark a public department as private if needed.
To edit a department
- Go to Setup ( ) > Organization > Departments.
- In the Department Lists page, click the Edit icon ( ) displayed alongside the name of a department.
- Perform the necessary changes. You can click Change logo to browse and select a new logo for the department.
- Click Save.
Disabling Departments
If required, the Administrator can disable the departments based on the business needs. When you disable a department, all the Tickets, Articles, Contracts, Products, Activities, Workflows and SLAs associated with it cannot be accessed. Also, web forms that were created for the department need be re-generated.
Note:
- When you disable a department, you must transfer the agents and the support mail boxes associated with it to an active department.
- Tickets cannot be transferred to a department; only agents and emails can be transferred.
- You can only disable the departments and cannot delete them.
- Enabling a disabled department will retain the previous tickets associated with it. However, the transfer of agents and emails is irreversible.
- Go to Setup ( ) > Organization > Departments.
- In the Department Lists page, hover the mouse pointer over a department you want to disable.
- Click on the toggle to disable the department.
- Specify an active department from the drop menu to transfer the agents and the support mail box.
- Click Transfer and Disable.
Enabling Departments
You can enable a previously disabled department in Zoho Desk. To enable a department:
- Go to Setup ( ) > Organization > Departments.
- In the Department Lists page, click the Inactive tab at the top to list the inactive departments.
- Hover the mouse pointer on a department and click on the toggle to enable it.
The department is enabled. You must associate agents with this department since those who were a part of it were transferred when you disabled it.
Department add-on
To create an additional department in your Zoho Desk account, users have the option to purchase the Department Add-On through our store.
For the Enterprise edition, 50 departments are initially provided by default. Through the Department Add-On, users can acquire up to 450 more departments via the store, allowing a total of 500 departments per Desk account.
Points to remember
- The Department Add-On is available for Enterprise edition and it's equivalent plans, including ZohoOne, CrmPlus, and ServicePlus.
- For the Desk Enterprise plan, you can directly purchase the add-on from the store, referring to the steps given below. However, for bundled plans like ZohoOne, ServicePlus, and CrmPlus, customers will need to submit a request to the respective services. The payments team will then process the addition of the add-on through an offline method.
- The pricing for purchasing extra departments is as follows:
- Monthly: $7 per department
- Annual: $6 per department
- If an existing enterprise user chooses to downgrade from the Enterprise plan to a Standard or Professional plan, the number of departments will be adjusted according to the downgraded plan. In such cases, if the customer wishes to retain and buy extra departments, they should upgrade back to the Enterprise edition and purchase the Department Add-On.
To purchase the Department Add-On
- Go to your Zoho Desk account.
- Click on your profile picture.
- Select the Subscription button adjacent to your edition.
A separate window will open, displaying the Zoho Stores page.
- Click on Upgrade Agent/Add-ons.
- On the Manage your Zoho Desk Subscription page, choose the desired number of department add-ons (up to a maximum of 450).
- Click Proceed, and place and buy your order.
Note: The After Addition column on the Upgrade Add-Ons page will display the total number of departments in your account, including the existing departments (only active departments) and the additional departments purchased through the add-on.