Organizations and groups are used to manage your Zendesk Support users and the ticket handling workflow.
This article discusses the following topics:
Organizations and groups, defined
Each collection of users is defined as follows:
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Organizations
Organizations are collections of your users (both end-users and agents). On the Team plan, users can belong to only one organization. On Professional and Enterprise plans, users can belong to multiple organizations, up to 300. The use of organizations is optional, but by arranging your end-users into organizations you can keep track of what those organizations are requesting. You can also enable users within an organization to see each other’s tickets. This expands visibility of the organization's support issues and should reduce the number of duplicate tickets.
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Groups
Groups collect agents together based on criteria those agents have in common. Groups can only contain agents; no end-users can be included. All agents must be assigned to at least one group, but they can be members of more than one. Groups can be used to support organizations. You can designate one group as the default group. All new agents you create will be added to the default group.
End-users and organizations
Although you don't have to add your end-users to organizations, it can be extremely helpful in managing the workflow. First, let's define that we mean by end-user. These are the people that generate support requests. They are your customers in a retail setting and the employees that are supported by an internal help desk in a corporate setting (to name two common types of end-users). How you organize your end-users is entirely up to you; however, here are a few examples of how organizations can be used:
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To support service level agreements
You can create organizations that mirror the service level agreements that you've established with your customers. For example, your paying customers are guaranteed a faster response than those who use your free services and you want to distinguish between the two. Or, perhaps you've set up levels of support based on which version of your products and service levels your customers have purchased (for example: basic, professional, enterprise or silver, gold, platinum). You can create organizations for each set of customers and route them through the support workflow accordingly. You can then create business rules and reports to escalate tickets as needed and to track performance against your service level agreements.
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To track and manage tickets by company
Perhaps you sell your products to other businesses. You can create organizations for each of those companies to manage and track their ticket activity.
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To manage requests based on email domains
You can automatically add end-users to organizations based on their email domain. For example, you might have both internal and external end-users. You can create an organization for your internal end-users and automatically add them to the organization, based on their email domain, the first time they submit a request. The new request is then picked up in the workflow rules you've set up for that organization.
Note: When you add a domain to an organization, that domain is handled as if it has been added to your allowlist, and overrides the blocklist. For more information, see Using the allowlist and blocklist to control access to Zendesk Support. -
To support customers by location and language
If you support organizations or individual customers across the globe, you can create organizations for locations and languages and then route those requests to agents that are co-located and speak the same languages.
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To define access to
Help
Center
You can use organizations to create user segments to define who can see what in your Help Center. You might want most of your Help Center to be viewable by all your end-users but also create several just for certain groups of users (customers with premium service plans, perhaps). Organizations enable you to do this. For information see Creating users segments for Guide user permissions.
You can create organizations and add end-users to them manually, one at a time, or automate the process by adding users and their organizations in a bulk import operation.
Agents can also be added to an organization. You might do this as part of organizing the users in Zendesk Support or to restrict an agent's access to only the organization they belong to (this is an option when setting the agent's privileges).
Once you've gotten organizations set up, they can be used in many ways in Zendesk Support to manage your workflow. See How to use your organizations and groups below.
Agents and groups
Groups are only for agents and every agent must belong to at least one group. Like organizations, how you set up groups depends on your business needs and the support workflow you prefer. Here are some of the common ways that groups are used:
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To escalate tickets based on complexity
You can manage escalation by setting up a tiered support group structure. For example, you can create groups for levels of support based on factors such as urgency and complexity. By default, you could assign all tickets to the Level 1 group and then escalate them to Level 2 manually based on the technical complexity of the issue. The Level 2 agents (who may also be members of the Level 1 group) have the advanced technical skills needed to resolve the issue. For an example of this, see Managing your escalation queue.
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To support service level agreements
As in the example for organizations above, you can set up corresponding groups to support organizations defined by service levels.
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To provide support by expertise
You can create groups based on expertise. For example, a company that develops both software and hardware might place the agents who support the software into one group and those agents who support the hardware in another. A custom field could be added to the support request form prompting end-users to specify the product they're seeking support for and this could be used to route the ticket to the appropriate group.
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To support customers by location and language
As noted above, you can set up organizations by location and language and then assign agents (or groups) to their tickets. Even if you didn't set up organizations for this, you can route to tickets to these groups based on the end-user's email domain (somecompany.fr, for example) or their language preference.
When you create groups, you can add existing agents to them. You can add new agents to one or more groups when you're adding them to Zendesk Support. You can also bulk import new users and define their role as agent; you then manually add them to groups.
How groups support organizations
So how do groups support organizations? In the broadest sense, simply by becoming hubs of support for the tickets that are received from the end-users in your organizations. What group is assigned to an organization's tickets can be based on the many considerations outlined above (support escalation processes, security, co-location and language, and so on).
You can take a loose approach to this and just allow agents to triage and assign requests to groups based on their reading of the support request or you can create business rules to handle that automatically. See How to use your organizations and groups below.
You can also more tightly manage the workflow and create security boundaries by funneling tickets directly to agents who have restricted access. This means that they can only see the tickets that they are allowed to see. You can do this in two ways. The first is to add the agents to groups and then restrict their access to only those groups. You can also add an agent to an organization, which restricts their access to only those tickets that are submitted by end-users in that organization.
How to use your organizations and groups
Once you've got an organization and group structure in place, you can use it to manage the ticket workflow and monitor your Zendesk Support activity.
- Automatically assign tickets received from users in an organization to a specific group, referred to as group mapping (see Mapping a group to an organization).
- Map incoming new users to an organization based on their email domain, referred to as user mapping.
- Allow users within an organization to see all the tickets in their organization, referred to as a shared organization (see Setting up a shared organization for end-users).
- Assign agents to support a specific organization (see Manually adding users to organizations).
- Use organization as a condition in a trigger to automatically assign requests to a group or agent (see Building trigger condition statements).
- Use a trigger condition to test for tags and then automatically assign requests to a group or agent based on those tags (see Creating triggers for ticket updates and notifications).
- Create macros that assign new requests to a group or agent (see Using macros to update tickets).
- Create automations that escalate tickets to a group or agent (see Creating and managing automations for time-based events).
- Create views by organizations or groups (see Creating views by organization).
- Create reports by organizations or groups (see Insights resources or Explore resources).
Administrator and agent roles for users, groups, and organizations
Here's a quick overview of who can do what in Zendesk to manage users, groups, and organizations.
- Add end-users manually (one at a time) or add many end-users at a time in a bulk import
- Create and edit organizations and groups
- Add end-users to organizations
- Create new agents and add them to one or more groups and one organization
- Limit an agent's access to one or more groups
- Limit an agent's access to requests received from the organization that an agent belongs to
- Set up email mapping (automatically map end-users from specific email domains to an organization)
- Set up group mapping (assigning incoming requests from users in an organization to a specific agent group)
- Set up a shared organization (allow all end-users in an organization to view tickets from all users in the same organization)
- Create both shared and personal views by users, groups, and organizations
- Create business rules (automations, macros, and triggers) that include groups
- Create business rules (automations and triggers) that include organizations
- Create reports that include groups and organizations
- Add end-users
- Add end-users to organizations
- Allow end-users to view all the tickets in their organization (if the user belongs to a shared organization, then the user always has access to tickets in the organization)
- Add themselves to an organization (Enterprise only)
- Create personal views by users, groups, and organizations
- Create macros to assign tickets to a group
56 Comments
Hello! Quick question, up to how many users can be added to an Organisation?
@Mario, I am fairly certain there is no limit. Some customers have their Organizations representing support levels and they could have hundreds of customers in each.
How many do you need?
I was just wondering. Thanks :)
I'd like to get some clarification on Organizations. For my purposes, the setup is for a retail setting. We have client companies. Am I correct that I would create an organization per client/ customer company? Then end users (the client employees that are level 1 support) would be setup under an organization.
Don. Yes that would be typical.
I have a question about assigning an agent to an organization. I can create a group and assign to an Org and an agent, i.e.
Agent 1, assigned to Group Company A that is linked to Organization Company A
This would require me to set up a group for each ORG. Can I do it this way:
Agent 1 assigned to Group Agent 1. This Group assigned to many Organizations?
The goal is for a ticket to come in for ORG Company A and Agent 1 gets the notice and assignment.
Hey Don!
Groups aren't added to Organizations in the way that users would be. You set up your groups to support various organizations by using your triggers and macros to route those tickets to the appropriate group, but you don't need to set up an agent group to match each organization (unless you want to).
So you set up Agent Group 1, and then set up triggers to assign tickets from Orgs A, B, and C to Group 1 when they come in.
Hope that helps!
Hi,
I have a question about groups and light agents. Is it possible to assign light agents to different groups? Example:
Light Agent A to Group 1
Ligth Agent B to Group 1
Light Agent C to Group 2
Ligth Agent D to Group 3
We're considering on getting 8 full agents that had most knowledge on which answer needs to be given to the end user, but eventually they need support from other departments (approximately 20) on our company.
We thought on a possible solution for this cases:
1) we can create a light agent per department (can it be a group?)
2) all full agents belong to all groups
3) the agent chooses On Hold status assigns the ticket to himself and add CC to Light Agent
4) Then create an automatism that once a light agent adds an internal comment the status of the ticket changes automatically to Pending Status letting the full agents know that they have enough information to answer to the end-user. That would allow us to track the change of status and time spend on each one.
Are my suppositions right? Or am I not taking in consideration something?
In a B2B setup, how are you handling gmail.com and outlook.com users? As more and more organizations go this route, we are finding we have to manually go back and assign users to the proper orgs, and they are not auto assigned to the org via the organization mapping using domain. We currently have over 10k users and 1100 organizations, and the prevalence of gmail and outlook are becoming unmanageable, yet we can't blacklist those domains either.
Hey Joan!
Light agents can definitely be added to groups. Otherwise, I think your workflow looks okay!
Is it possible for me to have some Organizations have access to create/view/edit tickets while others Organizations can only view community content (receive email-only support)?
I am using an Organization Field called "Support Level" to define if a customer is receiving free or paid-for Support. Only those flagged as paid-for would be able to manage tickets online.
If we decide to go with single sign in, can we assign organizations on our own or will we have to accept what comes from the active directory?
Hey Jean!
When setting up SSO, the user organization parameter is optional. So if you aren't setting it with SSO you will have the ability to change it after the user is created in Zendesk.
Hi, I have created a new group in my Zendesk and trying to report on this group in Gooddata, but it seems the dataset for the attribute "Ticket Group" is not updated so cannot see this new group in Gooddata, anyone know why and can help me out? Need to report on this urgently! Thanks.
Hi Benjamin!
There are two things that might be happening here. The first is that there aren't any tickets in that new group, in which case there wouldn't be anything to report on. The second is that Insights hasn't synced since the new group was created. Insights will sync daily if you're on the Professional plan, or hourly if your on Enterprise.
If neither of those conditions exist and the info still isn't showing up in your reports, let me know and we'll dive a little deeper!
Hi!
Hi Aira -
It sounds like what you might be looking for is our Multibrand solution. Check out Multibrand Resources and see if this would solve your problem.
Hello,
So a user can be part of multiple organization and members of the same organization can see ticket open by each other. (If we enable the functionality, of course).
Then, when a ticket is created by a user who is part of many organization, is the ticket assigned to one of this organization ? It could be harmful if users from organization A can see tickets from Organization B because user C is part of both.
How do we handle this situation ?
Thank you !
Is there a way to create "Organization" as a choice in the drop down menu of "Perform these action" when adding a trigger as a way to sending an email alert to our client that a ticket has been created based on an event from our monitoring tool.
Or, if I create an end-user, assign it to its organization, can I include said organization with a Group and will the end-user/organization receive the email alert from the trigger based on me choosing that perticular group when I create the alert?
Thank you
@Zlahjouji - When a ticket is created by a user who is part of many organizations, it will assign the ticket to their default organization. Users can only see tickets for organizations that they are members of.
@ Frank - I'm not sure with regard to the workflows you're proposing, but I'll see if I can get someone who knows more about that stuff to jump in and help you out!
@Frank - I just saw that you already reached out to support and got the official Zendesk word; hopefully some community members will have some additional suggestions for you.
We are using Zendesk and have allowed a customer to view their organization's tickets. But they would like to be able to leave a comment, or add themselves to that ticket. Is this coming, or where can I make this feature request?
Hey Alex -
Those are things that your customers should be able to do. There are a couple of settings you'll want to check to enable this:
First, go to admin --> people --> organizations and click on the organization you want to edit. Then in the left-hand column under "users," make sure "can view all org tickets" is selected - which it sounds like you've already done. Next, in the drop down below that select "...and add comments." This should enable those folks to add comments to the tickets that they can view, and should enable them to add themselves to the ticket as a cc as well. They just need to click on the text box as though they're going to make a comment and the cc field will appear.
In your admin settings you'll also want to click "tickets," and scroll down to the cc's section. Make sure that the "only agents can add cc's" box is UN-checked. This could be overriding the first setting if it is checked.
Try that out and let us know if it works or if you have more questions.
Thank you Nicole. We tried to do that, but it appears if we do that, all users in the organization would be able to see each other's tickets. We only want those admins who have capability to view organizational tickets to be able to leave notes or cc themselves. Is there a way to accomplish this?
Hi Alex -
I'm not sure, but I'm looking into it for you. Standby!
Update for you Alex - if the folks you're dealing with are full admins, you may not be able to restrict that. But, to determine for certain, we'll need to talk more specifically about your settings, and this would best be accomplished in a support ticket. Let me know if this is still something you're trying to solve and, if so, I'll get you set up to talk to someone who can dig into your account a little deeper than I can.
How do I delete an organization? This org. has no users or tickets.
Hey Christine -
To delete an organization:
1) Click on the admin icon in the sidebar, then select "people"
2) Click "Organizations"
3) Find the organization you want to edit and then click "edit"
4) Click the organization options arrow in the upper right, then select "delete"
For more information, see the article Creating, managing, and using organizations and let us know if you have any further questions.
We are a parent company of many subsidiaries. We have created organizations for each subsidiary.
There are many occasions where we create tickets and assign ourselves as the requester on a ticket to perform "background work" for the subsidiaries. Since we (the agents) are associated with the parent company organization, how can we accurately account for the time we spend working on things for the other organizations in situations where we have ourselves assigned as the requester and agent? A lot of these tasks do not require an end-user from the subsidiary company to be assigned as the requester as it would only generate useless email notifications to their inbox.
When running reports against tickets tied to specific organizations we want to be able to account for the "background work" that we have performed for them.
What is the best method for doing this?
Thank you.
I think I may have answered my own question. It looks like if I associate my agents to all organizations then the organization can be selected after the ticket is created. Is there anyway to select this during initial ticket creation or is the only way to go back into the ticket and select it?
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