How do I assign discussions to Support Staff?

Tender provides two mechanisms for designating responsibility for a given discussion: queues and assignment. They work very similarly, and even offer some overlapping functionality. You can queue and assign from several places in the Tender UI, including the dashboard, via email, or when viewing an individual discussion.

Choosing which one is best for a given workflow is up to you. Both of these features are only visible to support staff.

Queues

Queues are like tags that can you apply to individual discussions, either to organize them or designate areas of responsibility. Any discussion can be in multiple queues. The queues are listed in the sidebar of the support dashboard.

Staff can choose any number of queues to be notified about automatically. This means when a discussion is added to a queue all staff who are watching that queue will be notified and added as watchers to the discussion.

You can find the link to manage your queues under the "Organize" header of your dashboard sidebar.

Assignment

It's also possible to assign a discussion directly to yourself or a member of your support staff.

This behaves much like a queue, except that a discussion can only be assigned to one staff member at a time. You can make assignments to team members from the dashboard view or from within a discussion.

Notification is automatic on assignment, so you can be assured that if you're assigning to a member of your staff they will see it.

Currently it's not possible to manage the assignment list, all staff are automatically assignable.