What are Teams?

Teams organize your agents into functional groups — by skill, language, department, region, or whatever structure fits your operation. Teams are a core building block that connects to routing, SLAs, opening hours, and reporting.

What a team is

• Name — The label (e.g., Phone Support, Norwegian Email, Tier 2 Escalation)
• Description — Optional context for what the team handles
• Members — Users who belong to this team
• Opening hours rule — Optional opening hours rule tied to the team

Beyond grouping users, the team becomes a target for routing decisions across the rest of the product.

What other features use teams

• Automations — Assign conversation to team X is a common action; team is X is a common condition
• SLA policies — SLA assignment matrix scopes policies to teams (Premium policy → Premium team)
• Opening Hours — Rules can be scoped to specific teams
• Monitor — Filter views by team for supervision
• Analytics — Group every dashboard by team for performance comparison
• Voice queues — Inbound calls route to teams via TaskRouter

A clean team taxonomy pays dividends across all of these. A messy taxonomy creates routing headaches everywhere.

Multi-team membership

Users can belong to multiple teams. A bilingual agent who handles both Norwegian and English email might be in Norwegian Email and English Email simultaneously. Routing automations and SLA assignments can target any team they’re a member of.

There’s no concept of a “primary team” — all memberships are equal. If you need primary-team semantics (e.g., for reporting), pair team membership with a custom field like primary_team on the user.

What’s NOT supported today

• Team hierarchy / sub-teams — teams are flat. You can’t nest “Returns” under “Customer Support” with inheritance. If you need this, model it with naming conventions (CS — Returns, CS — Refunds) and use those individual teams in routing.
• Team-level role overrides — a user’s role applies tenant-wide, not per-team. A user is Agent or Team Lead across all their teams, not differently per team.
• Team-direct SLA link — the team config has an opening hours rule field but not a direct SLA link. SLA scoping happens through the SLA policy’s team-assignment matrix, not through the team config. (This is a vault-doc misconception; the actual data flow is policy → assigned-to-team, not team → linked-to-policy.)

Team naming patterns that scale

Once you have 8+ teams, naming consistency matters. Some patterns:

• <Channel> <Skill> — Phone Support, Email Returns — Channel-specialized teams
• <Region> <Function> — EU Support, APAC Sales — Geographic teams
• <Tier> <Department> — Tier 1 General, Tier 2 Technical — Escalation tiers
• <Language> <Channel> — Norwegian Email, English Chat — Language-divided teams

Avoid generic names like Team A, Misc, or General — six months later, no one remembers the distinction.

Where to start

• Build your first team: Create a team
• Add people: Add or remove team members
• Tie to schedule: Link a team to opening hours
• Use in routing: VIP routing automation recipe