Department Spaces for Multiple Countries

We have worked with many international clients and have devised countless solutions to manage tickets across the different countries.  For the purpose of this walkthrough, we are going to design and perform a configuration for a multi-national Bubble Tea shop based out of Taiwan: Far Northern Boba.

Far Northern Boba has been in operation for approximately 15 years, and recently has expanded operations into six countries in the region: Japan, Korea, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia.  Each country is represented by a brand in Zendesk.  There are five main types of Zendesk staff users: support staff, team lead, manager, admin, and reporting staff.  Each brand has different groups associated with it, listed out below:

Far Northern Boba requires that support staff and team leads can only access the tickets from their countries, but that managers and reporting staff could access tickets in other countries. This was difficult to achieve before the availability of department spaces.  Staff agents may only belong to one or two groups for their respective country, but they should still be able to view tickets in other groups as long as they belong to the country.  It would be untenable to require agents to belong to each group in their country due to downstream impact.  The alternative would be to allow users to have access to all tickets within the account, which would also provide them access to other teams that should have hidden tickets.  Utilizing the capabilities afforded by department spaces provides just the level of access control needed to meet their requirements.

In addition to regular ticket access control, department spaces also extends to suspended tickets, which makes managing the tickets for each respective country lead 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.

Together with recent enhancements to Explore reporting, we feel that this client and others are much more able to define access controls as required by their organization.

How to Use:

Department Spaces can be configured by Admins in the Brands page of Zendesk.

You can also see the membership of agents in the Team members page.