Departments & visibility

What departments do

Departments are the primary way to partition operational lanes (Sales, Support, Billing). They help you:

• focus agents on the conversations they should handle
• align staffing and access with your operating model
• keep queues predictable at higher volume

How departments affect what you see

Shared Inbox can automatically filter conversations based on a user’s assigned departments:

• if you have no departments, you typically see the global inbox
• if you have one or more departments, you see conversations in those lanes

This keeps “Waiting” manageable and reduces cross-team noise.

Departments vs tags

• Departments define the lane (who should handle this)
• Tags capture state and intent within the lane (VIP, refund, escalation, etc.)

Departments in workflows

Workflows typically encode routing intent and then hand off into Shared Inbox with department context.

See:

• Workflows
• Inbox handoff