Configure support Departments, routing and assignment

Define the team and its access

A Department is the owning team for a Ticket. Each Department maps to one Identity Organization Unit. Eligible staff must be active, belong to that unit and hold the required Ticket Agent permission. A general ticket permission does not automatically reveal every Department's cases.

Before configuring routing, identify the team that should receive each type of request. Set an enabled Department, its default Open and Closed statuses, assignment behavior and optional SLA policy. Configure the tenant fallback Department so unmatched external requests still have an owner. See roles and permissions when a colleague cannot see or receive expected work.

Choose the default email reply address

Every Department that receives email or portal tickets needs one active default outbound support address backed by a send-capable mailbox. Configure the mailbox in External Connections and Channels, then select its address binding in Department administration. Provider credentials are managed at the connection; they do not belong in a Department form.

The final routed Department determines the ticket's preferred email reply binding. Moving a ticket to another Department revalidates the assignee, statuses, SLA and destination reply setup. A Department without an active default sender cannot serve as a valid destination for that email workflow.

If the sender becomes unavailable during creation, the request can remain as one recoverable ticket with an outbound configuration issue. Correct the binding and use the available recovery action. Do not recreate the customer request or send it from an arbitrary mailbox.

Build rules in priority order

External ticket routing uses ordered rules. Enabled rules are evaluated in order, and the first matching rule stops evaluation. Each rule specifies ticket creation, customer reply or both as its trigger. Specific cases therefore belong before a broad fallback rule.

Supported conditions cover source/channel or support address, requester/domain/Account context, authorized subject/body keyword predicates, current Department, priority, status, assignment state, attachments and detected automatic-message classification. Use the typed options available in your rule editor. Rules are not arbitrary scripts.

Actions can choose a Department, assign an eligible agent directly, use round-robin, set priority and select or disable an SLA policy. A status action is valid only on creation. Customer-reply rules cannot move a newly reopened ticket away from its default Open status. That protects the visibility of fresh customer work.

Choose direct or round-robin assignment

Direct assignment selects a specific eligible agent. Round-robin selects the next eligible person within the Department. The assignment cursor advances when the assignment commits, so a retry should not count as another turn in the rotation.

On reopening, a previous assignee is retained when still active and eligible, unless an explicit routing decision takes precedence. Otherwise the Department's round-robin strategy can choose another agent. If nobody qualifies, the ticket remains unassigned and available for review; assignment failure does not discard intake.

For a billing example, an early rule might route requests addressed to the billing support address to the Billing Department and use its round-robin pool. A later general rule can handle other requests. This is an illustrative configuration; apply only conditions and actions supported by your deployment.

Review the result before expanding automation

After configuring a rule, verify a representative request and inspect the resulting Department, assignee, priority and rule activity. Check a non-matching request as well. Rule changes create a version, making the applied configuration traceable. Do not use private customer content as a public example when documenting your routing.

If a rule appears ineffective, check its trigger, order, enabled state and whether an earlier rule matched. If an agent cannot be assigned, check current unit membership and permissions. If a ticket disappears after a Department move, confirm your access to the destination team.

Internal tickets use explicit staff-selected Departments and do not run this external routing automation or SLA clocks. Use the internal ticket workflow for campaign and staff requests.