Creating, managing, and using groups

Fastpath: Admin > Manage > People > Groups

As described in About organizations and groups, groups are used to create collections of agents based on criteria those agents have in common. All agents must belong to at least one group, and they can belong to multiple groups.

Administrators on Team, Professional, and Enterprise can add and edit groups; agents, and administrators on Essential, cannot.

Note: Groups are not available on the Essential plan.

This article covers the following topics:

• Creating groups
• Editing and deleting groups
• Adding agents to groups
• Assigning tickets to groups
• Using groups in business rules
• Creating views by group

You can also watch this short video.

What's Good: Groups in Zendesk Support (01:31)

Creating groups

How you set up your groups depends on how you want to define your workflow and organize your agents. You might create groups by skill (software vs hardware) or to reflect the organizations they serve (for example, a group might serve only customers in a certain region or time zone).

Administrators can create groups, agents cannot.

Community tip! Justin Graves shares his advice on what not to do with groups. Check out his tip in our community forums.

To create a group

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select People.
2. Click Add group.
3. Enter a group name.
4. Select the agents you want to add to the group.
5. If you want this group to be the default group that all new agents are added to, select Make default group.
6. Click Create group.

Administrators can view and manage all groups by selecting Groups on the People page.

You can also watch this short video.

Creating a Group (00:40)

Editing and deleting groups

In Edit groups, you can change a group's name and add or remove agents.

Note: Renaming a group has no effect on your business rules or reporting.

Groups can also be deleted (the delete command is available when editing a group). Deleting a group has implications of course. Any business rules you set up using the group you deleted will no longer function properly. The group will be removed from any tickets it was assigned to along with any agents in the group. The ticket will return to unassigned, and you can see these updates in the ticket audits.

To edit a group

1. Click the Admin icon () on the sidebar, then select People.
2. Select groups to view all of your current groups.
3. Select the edit link next to the group you want to edit.
4. In Edit you can:
   1. Add agents or remove agents from groups by checking or un-checking the box next to their name.
   2. Change the group name by typing directly into the Group name bar
   3. Click Make default group to make this group the one that all new agents are automatically added to.
5. Click the Update Group button to apply any changes.

To delete a group

1. Click the Admin icon () on the sidebar, then select People.
2. Select groups to view all of your current groups.
3. Click the edit link next to the group you want to delete.
4. Select Delete.
5. A message will appear asking if you are sure you want to delete the group, select delete again to delete the group.

Note: If the group is set as any agent's default group, you cannot delete it. You must change their default group first. See Changing the default group for more information.

Adding agents to groups

After you create an agent you can add them to either pre-existing groups or assign them to new groups. For information on how to create a new agent, see Adding end-users, agents, and administrators.

Agents are added or removed from groups via the groups editor, accessed from their profile page.

Adding agents to a group

1. On an agent's profile page, click the Groups field.
2. Select the group you want to add the agent to. A default group will automatically be assigned. See Changing the default group for information on how to change an agent's default group.
3. Click Close.

Adding agents to a new group

1. On an agent's profile page, click the Groups field.
2. Hover over Create a new group.
3. Type your new group name.

   

4. Click the add icon next to the new group name.
5. Your new group will be created with the agent added.

Changing an agents default group

All of your agents will automatically be assigned to the first group you've created, but you can change individual agent's default group through their user profile.

1. Select the agent's profile page.
2. Click the Groups field.
3. A dialog will appear with all of your different groups. Your new default group must be selected. If a default group is selected, it will look like the Documentation group below.
4. Click on the current Default group name to open the default group drop-down menu.
5. Select the new default group from the Default group drop-down menu.
6. Close Edit Groups.

Assigning tickets to groups

Administrators can assign tickets to any group. Agents with the proper permissions can assign tickets, manually or via a macro, to any of the groups they belong to if they have the appropriate permissions, or if the administrator has enabled group reassignment in their ticket settings:

For Team and Professional, set Access to Tickets in agent's groups in the agent's profile. For Enterprise, select Agent can assign ticket to any group in the custom role for the agent.

Note: On Team and Professional plans, when you restrict agent access to tickets within their group, those agents can no longer update end-user information or add end-users to tickets.

Tickets can also be automatically assigned to groups using business rules (see Using groups in business rules below) and by enabling group mapping for an organization. Automatically assigning a group to an organization's tickets is a relationship you set up when creating or editing an organization. See Mapping a group to an organization.

Using groups in business rules

Groups can be used in automations, macros, and triggers. When creating automations and triggers you can use group as a criterion for making updates to tickets. Using a macro, you can assign a group to tickets as an action.

There are many reasons that you might include group in an automation or trigger. Here are several examples of how they are commonly used.

Example: Escalating tickets using group in an automation

In an automation, you can use group as a condition to escalate tickets for a specific group.

The Level 2 support team provides a higher level of service to their customers and promises to solve tickets quickly; this is their service level agreement. This automation helps them manage this commitment by reminding them if their tickets are not updated after 48 hours.

The actions in this automation set the priority to urgent and send an email to the ticket assignee as a reminder to update the ticket. For more information about creating automations, see Streamlining workflow with time-based events and automations.

Example: Notifying a group of a ticket assignment with a trigger

Perhaps the most common use of groups in a trigger is to notify a group when a ticket has been assigned to the group (it's one of the default triggers). You can take a look at this trigger by following these steps:

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Triggers.
2. Locate the Notify group of assignment trigger and then select Edit.

This trigger fires when a group is assigned to a ticket. The change event could have been triggered manually by an agent or automatically by another business rule (automation or trigger).

The actions inform everyone in the group about the new ticket assignment. For more information about triggers, see Creating and managing triggers.

Example: Assigning a group to a ticket using a trigger

A group can be used as a condition in a trigger, which allows you to filter incoming requests and assign them to the appropriate group.

In this example, the conditions are used to determine if the ticket is a sales inquiry.

The actions set the type to Question and then assign the ticket to the Sales group. This example also illustrates that you can extend the use of Zendesk Support to other areas of your business, not just the Support agents.

If only one agent belongs to a group, all tickets assigned to that group will be assigned directly to that agent. The status of the ticket will automatically move from New to Open.

For more information about triggers, see Creating and managing triggers.

Creating views by group

Your groups can be used to create views. Here's an example.

Example: Creating a view of tickets by group

One of the default views shows you all the tickets that have been assigned to the groups you belong to. You can take a look at this view by following these steps:

1. Click the Admin icon () in the sidebar, then select Views.
2. From the list of views, hover over the Unsolved tickets in your groups view and then select Open. Alternatively click the view name.

This view displays unsolved tickets that are assigned to your groups. You could of course select one or more specific groups instead if you were to customize this view.

This is the result, formatted as a table. The tickets are listed by groups.