Departments
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    Departments

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    Article summary

    An Omnichannel department is a collection of rooms that can be tailored to represent diverse units in your organization. This feature is essential when there are incoming chats originating from various communication channels, requiring expertise from diverse departments or specialized knowledge experts.

    Key features of Omnichannel departments

    1. Directing conversations to a department: Visitors can choose the specific department they want to forward their inquiries to.

    2. Assigning agents to a department: You can assign agents to specific departments, ensuring that conversations for that department are routed to the most appropriate knowledge experts.

    To access the Department menu, go to Administration > Omnichannel > Departments. You can View, Create New, Edit, or Delete a department.

    Create Omnichannel department

    To create a new Omnichannel department, follow these steps:

    • Click the Create Department button at the top of the Departments page.

    • Fill in the following details:

      • Enabled: Enable the new department.

      • Name: Name of the new department.

      • Description: An optional description of the department.

      • Show on the registration page: Enable this to allow your visitors to choose the department they want to chat with. The department is displayed to the visitor in the Livechat widget.

      • Email: Set an email address to forward conversations to during offline hours.

      • Show on offline page: Enable this to display the department during offline hours.

      • Send this department's Livechat offline messages to a channel: Set the channel where offline messages should be directed.

      • Max. number of simultaneous chats: Set the maximum number of simultaneous chats that agents in this department can attend to.

      • How long to wait to consider visitor abandonment?: Set the time in seconds to wait before considering visitor abandonment.

      • Custom message when the room is automatically closed by visitor inactivity: Set the custom message to be displayed when a room is automatically closed due to visitor abandonment.

      • Waiting queue message: Enter the waiting queue message.

      • List of departments allowed for forwarding (Optional): Allow to set a restricted list of departments that can receive chats from this department.

      • Fallback department for forwarding: Select a fallback department for forwarding messages.

      • Request tag(s) before closing the conversation: Request your agent to set tags for the conversation for later searching purposes.

      • Conversation closing tags: As an administrator, you can add some default conversation tags for this department.

      • Allow department to receive forwarded inquiries even when there's no available agents: Enable this setting to ensure that inquiries are forwarded to a department even when no agents are available within that department. This feature is specifically effective with automatic assignment routing methods and does not apply to manual selection.

      • Business Hour: The field is automatically populated according to the departments assigned to the business hours.

      • Agents: Assign agents to the department.

    • Click Save.

    • Workspaces on the community plan from version 6.0 and above can only create one department. The multiple department feature is exclusively available to workspaces subscribed to any of Rocket.chat's premium plans.

    • Workspaces with multiple departments on versions less than 6.0 can continue using their departments but can't create a new one until they're subscribed to any of Rocket.chat's premium plans.

    The Omnichannel chat behavior varies based on how many departments are created in the workspace:

    • No departments: All Livechat agents receive incoming chats using a round-robin rule.

    • One department: All incoming chats are only assigned to agents in that department using a round-robin rule.

    • Multiple departments: The visitor must select the department to handle their chat during registration.

    Archive Omnichannel department

    When a department is no longer needed, but you don't want to delete it, you can archive it and unarchive it later if a need arises.

    For community workspaces below version 6.0 with multiple departments, archiving departments can be instrumental if you want to avoid upgrading your workspace plan. Instead of deleting a department when you no longer need it, you can archive it. When the need for that department arises, you can unarchive it. This gives community workspaces below version 6.0 the ability to retain the same number of departments they had before the upgrade.

    To archive an Omnichannel department,

    • Click the kebab menu across the department you want to archive.

    • Then, select Archive. Navigate to the Archived tab, and you'll see the archived departments.

    To unarchive an Omnichannel department,

    • From the list of archived departments, Click the kebab menu across the department you want to unarchive.

    • Then, select Unarchive. The department is added back to the list of active departments.

    Edit Omnichannel department

    To edit an Omnichannel department,

    • Click the kebab menu across the department. Then, select Edit.

    • A panel is displayed with all the current omnichannel department information you can modify. Update the department details and click Save.

    Delete Omnichannel department

    To delete an Omnichannel department,

    • Click the kebab menu across the department. Then, select Delete.

    As a workspace administrator, navigate to Administration > Settings > Omnichannel and Enable department removal to allow deleting departments.

    Rocket.Chat offers omnichannel departments to categorize conversations, enhancing collaboration and timely responses for improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.


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