A department is the queue a ticket lands in and the mailbox its replies come back to. Get the mailbox right and the help desk works by itself; get it wrong and customer replies vanish.

Create a department

  1. Open Settings → Support Departments and add one.
  2. Name — what customers choose from. “Billing” and “Technical” beat “Tier 1”.
  3. Description — shown under the name to help them choose correctly.
  4. Email address — the mailbox this department sends from and collects replies into. It must be a real mailbox you control.
  5. Set the display order. The first department is the default choice and gets the misfiled tickets.
  6. Assign the administrators who staff it. Only they see its tickets unless a role grants wider access.

The options that change behavior

Clients only
Only signed-in customers may open a ticket here. Use it for billing.
Hidden
The department exists but is not offered to customers. Use it for internal or escalation-only queues.
No auto-responder
Suppresses the automatic acknowledgment for this department.
Pipe replies only
Accepts replies to existing tickets but will not open a new ticket from an unrecognized message. This is the setting that stops a public address becoming a spam funnel.
Feedback request
Sends a satisfaction request when a ticket closes.
Prevent client closure
Customers cannot close their own tickets here.

Connect the mailbox

Give the department the host, port, login and password of the mailbox to collect from. Then make sure something actually collects:

  1. Polling — the pop.php cron job reads the mailbox on a schedule. Simple; replies appear on the interval. See Set up the scheduler.
  2. Piping — the mail server delivers straight into the help desk. Instant, but needs mail-server configuration.
Use a mailbox nothing else reads.

Polling deletes what it imports. Point it at a shared inbox your team also reads and messages will disappear from under them.

Escalation rules

An escalation acts on a ticket that has been left too long: change its priority, move it to another department, assign it to somebody, or send a notification.

  1. Open Settings → Support Ticket Escalations and add a rule.
  2. Choose which department and which statuses it watches.
  3. Set how long a ticket must sit before the rule fires.
  4. Choose the action — reassign, change priority, change department, notify.
  5. Save and enable it.
Escalations run from the scheduler.

The page shows the cron command they need. If the automation is not running, no escalation has ever fired.

An escalation that only raises priority changes nothing.

If nobody watches priority, the ticket is still ignored, now in red. Make at least one rule notify a person.

Test it end to end

  1. Open a ticket as a customer in the client area and confirm it lands in the right department.
  2. Confirm the auto-responder arrived, unless you disabled it.
  3. Reply as an administrator and confirm the customer receives it.
  4. Reply from the customer’s email client, not the client area, and confirm the reply appears on the ticket. This is the step that proves the mailbox is connected.
  5. Email the department address from an unrecognized address and confirm a new ticket opens — or does not, if you set pipe replies only.