Departments
3 minute read
The purpose of creating departments within Blesta is for Blesta clients to be able to open tickets. Departments within Blesta will map to a Cerb Group and Bucket. By adding the department functionality within Blesta, a single Cerb instance can be connected to multiple Blesta companies or a separate Blesta instance, all without any special configuration done at the Cerb side.
Note
Departments require that a Blesta user (Clients and Contacts) opening the ticket have a service they can access. The service can be active, canceled, pending, suspended or in review. This means anonymous users or users without access to a service are not able to open tickets.
Staff can open tickets on behalf of customers within Cerb ensuring the ticket is owned by correct organization.
Add Departments
Departments may be created under:
- [Admin Portal] -> [Select your Company] -> [Cerb] -> [Departments]
- Click [Create Department] button
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | The name of the department as shown when creating a ticket |
| Description | The description of the department when creating a ticket. HTML is allowed |
| Group | The name of the group new tickets will be assigned to |
| Bucket | The name of the bucket new tickets will be assigned to |
| Custom Fields - Type | The type of custom field that will be shown within Blesta |
| Custom Fields - Name | The name of the custom field that will be shown to the Blesta client |
| Custom Fields - Visible | When set, this custom field will be shown when creating and viewing tickets |
| Custom Fields - Required | When set, this custom field will be required when creating a new ticket |
Best Practices for Multi-Company Support
If you are connecting your Cerb instance to multiple Blesta companies or even a separate Blesta instances, best practice would have your Cerb Buckets and Groups organized as such:
- Group: Sales
- Bucket: Company/Brand A
- Bucket: Company/Brand B
- Bucket: Company/Brand C
- Group: Support
- Bucket: Company/Brand A
- Bucket: Company/Brand B
- Bucket: Company/Brand C
This allows Cerb workers to be assigned to a group, such as sales, that can span multiple brands. Note in this configuration once a worker is assigned to a Cerb group, they would have access to all the buckets within it. This setup works well when workers have knowledge of each brand.
However, their are other cases where a worker might not know every brand. In this setup, you might want to organization your group and buckets in the reverse:
- Group: Company/Brand A
- Bucket: Sales
- Bucket: Support
- Group: Company/Brand B
- Bucket: Sales
- Bucket: Support
- Group: Company/Brand C
- Bucket: Sales
- Bucket: Support
This allows workers to to be assigned to a group within a specific company, A for example, and some or all questions based on the bucket they operate in.
Lastly, you can make a hybrid of both layouts. The possibilities are endless within Cerb why creating departments in the Blesta-Cerb plugin allows you to map to what ever style works today and in the future.