Grouping your staff (agents) into teams

You can use teams to organize your agents into functional groups, that reflect your company's organization. That makes it really easy to assign incoming conversations to the team that can best resolve them.

For example, you can use separate teams for your support agents and your sales reps, since they'll be responding to different types of conversations. In Kayako, once your teams are in place you can assign conversations to the whole group, rather than having to pick a specific agent. You can create as many teams as you like, and agents can belong to more than one team.

In this article we'll cover some common uses for teams, and then walk you through creating one, step-by-step.

Understanding the different uses for teams

In addition to routing conversations to the right people, teams can also be helpful in automations, views, metrics, and visibility settings:

• Automations - SLAs, business hours, monitors, and triggers can be defined for conversations assigned to a specific team. For example, you could create an 'Enterprise Support' team, give it a shorter SLA, and customize the automated conversation emails to keep your customer's inboxes from getting cluttered.
• Views - Once you start using teams, it's really helpful to set up a view for each team that shows their open conversations. Using 'Assigned Team' as a variable, you can also set up more complex views — such as conversations assigned to 'Support' that have breeched SLA and are tagged with 'VIP'.
• Insights - You can divide up any of your reporting by team, as well. Once you have teams defined, you can easily find out how many conversations each team is receiving, or look at the customer satisfaction score specifically for the support team, for example.
• Permissions - When setting agents visibility permissions, you have three options: the agent can see all conversations, only conversations assigned to them, or only conversations assigned to the teams they belong to. With teams set up, you can use that third option to show each staff member only the conversations that are most relevant to them.

In short, adding teams in Kayako helps keep conversations, and your agents, more organized. Read on for instructions on how to start building your own teams.

Creating a new team

Let's say that in addition to your regular 'Support' team, you want to add a separate team for your technical support agents. That way you can group your agents according to the types of conversations they'll be fielding. Divvying you agents into two teams will make it easy to route the right conversations to the right people.

NOTE: To create teams in Kayako, you will need an administrator account with the 'Manage teams' permission.

1. Sign in to your Kayako and go to the admin area.
2. In the sidebar, click on Teams.
3. You'll see a list of any teams that have already been created. Click the Add New button to create a new team.
4. In the Team name box, enter the name for your new team, in this case 'Technical Support'.
5. From the Business hours dropdown, you can leave it set to the default, or choose a schedule that relates to this team.
   NOTE: Learn more in about setting up multiple team schedules in our article about business hours.
6. Check the box for any agents who should be part of this team. You can uncheck the box to remove them. To easily locate agents, search using the 'Filter agents' box.
7. To create your team, click Save.

That's it! Your team is created.

From here, you may want to set up a view for your new team for them to work through their assigned conversations, create a unique form to collect specific information for conversations assigned to your new team, or add a trigger or monitor to start automatically routing conversations to your new team.