Zendesk Department Spaces

Zendesk Department Spaces is a powerful tool to provide more refined control over the users who can access tickets inside your Zendesk account.  This allows for deeper and more complex capabilities to partition access based on an agent membership in departments.  Previously, ticket access could only be restricted by group, but now the additional control granted by Department Spaces provides a much greater level of customisation.  We have worked with many clients who have requested more granular access control for tickets, and together with the recent updates to Explore permissions, we feel that those requests are much more feasible.

Release

Zendesk Department Spaces was in an Open Beta beginning in Early 2024, and in October of 2024 began general roll-out to all Zendesk accounts.  After a pause due to some issues with the original roll-out as mentioned here, Zendesk has continued rolling out for remaining accounts and plans to finish in March of this year.

Usage

The variety of different organizational structures present in Zendesk users necessitates greater depth of control over the various data within a Zendesk account. Enterprise customers may segment their operations by division, country, region, or product line, among other categories, and they need the tools available to define access control based on an agent’s relationship to those categories. With the addition of Department Spaces, admins can now utilize all of the following tools to define and restrict ticket access:

• User Role: With custom user roles (Enterprise only), an admin can select between several different ticket access levels: Assigned to them, Requested by end users in their organizations, Within their groups, Within their groups and all public groups, and All, including those in private groups. See here for more detail.
• Group: Based on the ticket permissions defined by a user’s roles as describe above, ticket groups can be used to control access. In a nutshell, if an agent’s role only allows access to tickets within her groups, then tickets assigned to other groups cannot be viewed by the agent.
• Department Space: The feature described in this article allows agents to be assigned to specific brands, and they cannot access tickets belonging to a brand in which they are not a member.

In addition to regular ticket access control, department spaces also extends to suspended tickets, which makes managing the tickets for each respective brand significantly easier. Previously, any user that had access to suspended tickets would be able to see suspended tickets regardless of the attributes of the ticket, and it was time-consuming and risky for a user to have to manage a suspended ticket queue that included hundreds of tickets from other departments.

Notes and Limitations

Even though Department Spaces has provided an important boost to access control in Zendesk, there is still room for improvement. The main features that are missing or incomplete are listed below:

• Explore Reporting - Notably, the restriction on ticket access does not yet include Explore reporting, so we must still rely on groups for that. We do hope that Zendesk will provide further updates to this feature in the coming year.
• Omnichannel Routing - Omnichannel routing is not aware of an agent’s department membership, so special consideration is required to avoid potential issues. Please see this Help Centre article in Zendesk for tips on using the two together.
• End-users - Brand is an attribute that is set at the ticket level, so it does not apply to end-users. Currently, Zendesk has rather limited abilities to define access control for which end-user profile an agent can access. We have seen many requests in this regard, and we do hope that Zendesk can provide additional capabilities in the future.
• Other Resources - Access restriction is limited to tickets only, so for views, macros, ticket fields, forms, and other resources, no additional access control is provided.

For a complete description of the capabilities afforded by Department Spaces and details about configuration, please visit the Zendesk Help Centre documentation here.  We are also working on a sample use case configuration walkthrough, which you can see here.