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Contact Groups: Shared Tickets for Teams

Jason He Updated by Jason He

A contact group lets a team share tickets. This article explains why contact groups exist, why the portal asks "for me or for a group", and what contact groups are not designed for.

The short version

  • A contact group exists so a team can share tickets.
  • A ticket belongs either to a person or to a group.
  • The portal asks which one when you create a ticket, because the answer decides who owns it.
  • You can assign a service group to a contact group. This is an extra feature. It is not the purpose of contact groups.
  • Contact groups are not a way to add service types for individuals.

What is a contact group?

A contact group is a set of contacts inside one company. Each company can create its own groups and add contacts to them.

When a ticket belongs to a group, every member of the group can see it and work on it.

Why contact groups exist

Think of nurses on different shifts. A nurse on the morning shift creates a ticket. A nurse on the night shift needs to check its progress and add comments. The ticket belongs to the team, not to one person.

Without a contact group, the ticket belongs to the person who created it. Other people can't follow it, and the work depends on that one person being available.

Contact groups solve this. Other examples are an HR team, a finance team, or a front desk shared by several people.

Person or group?

When you create a ticket from the portal landing page, there is no group context. So the portal asks whether the ticket is for you or for a group.

This question is needed because the answer decides:

  • Who owns the ticket, and who can see and work on it.
  • Which service types you can choose from.

The portal can't guess. The same request, such as "new equipment", might be personal in one case and for the whole team in another. If you open the portal from a specific group, the portal already knows the answer and doesn't ask.

What your contact sees On the landing page, a short question: create a ticket for myself, or for one of my groups. After that, the list of service types for that choice.

Service groups for contact groups

Later, we added the ability to assign a service group to a contact group. This is useful when a team needs services of its own. For example, an HR team may need HR-specific requests.

This is an addition to the feature. Contact groups were not built to manage the service catalogue.

The same service type can appear in more than one group

Service types can repeat between contact groups. For example, "New equipment" can be offered to both the HR group and the Nursing group.

This is intended. The service type is the same, but the ticket belongs to a different team each time. Because of this, the portal must know which group you are creating the ticket for. This is why the question can't be removed or merged into a single list.

What contact groups are not for

Contact groups are not designed to add extra service types to individual people. If you use them that way:

  • The portal still asks "for me or for a group", because ownership still matters.
  • The same service types are repeated across groups, which makes the lists harder to follow.
  • Contacts have to pick a group just to find a service type.

If your goal is to give some people more services, use one of these instead:

When to use contact groups

Use a contact group when:

  • A team needs to share tickets.
  • People work in shifts, or cover for each other.
  • A department wants one place to see all of its requests.

Don't use one only to change which service types a person sees.

How did we do?

Automate Service Group Creation for Each Contact or Company

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