Workflow recipe: Creating an approval process between department

Here's a quick and easy way to set up an approval process.

Skill Level: Beginner

Time Required: 10 minutes

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Ingredient List

• 2 Groups
• 2 Macros
• 1 View

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Instructions

Groups

You'll need to create at least two groups in the account to pass the ticket between. For this example, let's use Finance and Sales.

Macro #1

Our first macro will be restricted to the Finance group so it can be applied to a ticket when seeking approval from Sales on an exception.

This will assign the ticket to Sales with an open status, including an internal note to provide the background on the exception that first needs to be approved:

View

For Sales to see these tickets and take the necessary action, a view should be created based on the ticket properties we set from the macro. As we set the status to Open with the macro and added the "need_approval" tag, we can populate the tickets pending approval with the following conditions:

The view can be grouped by Priority and set to Descending so tickets needing approval urgently are listed at the top, down to low priority at the bottom of the list. All tickets can be ordered by Latest update, Ascending, so they are listed in reverse chronological order, and the view can be restricted to only the Sales group:

Macro #2

Now that Sales has a view to see the tickets they need to review and approve, they need a macro to reassign the ticket to Finance and let them know if they approve of the exception or not:

Now Finance can proceed or push back and set this ticket to solved, using this ticket as the historical record of the decision on the Sales exception.

Add your own flavor

This same process can be used for any type of interdepartmental approvals. While Finance and Sales were used in the example above, you could also apply this to Support for a new hire ticket approval process.

You can use this workflow if you want a support lead review a new hire's ticket responses before posting them live to a customer:

• New hire applies a macro that allows them to post their response as an Internal note and reassign the ticket to a Support Team Leads / Managers group with a tag like "ticket_review."
• The Support Team Leads / Managers can construct a view to pull these tickets using the "ticket_review" tag.
• The Support Team Leads / Managers can now apply their macro to remove the tag and reassign the ticket to the new employee, providing feedback or giving them the go-ahead in an Internal note to post their comment as a Public reply to the customer.