Organization Hierarchy

Clear Structure of an Organization

Introduction

The Organization Hierarchy is a new feature in our product designed to rank individuals or groups within an organization based on their privileges and Organization Hierarchy structure. This feature enables clear visualization of the organizational structure, facilitating improved communication, streamlined decision-making, and enhanced understanding of roles and responsibilities.

Hierarchy within an organization assists agents by providing a clear structure based on their roles and permissions. This helps the agents to easily understand the organizational management, their reporting structure, and who has access to their information.

The primary purpose of the hierarchy is organization management, encompassing task allocation, team member management, reporting relationships assignment, work access, and employee task tracking. With the Hierarchy filter in Teambox and CRM, we can easily filter conversations attended by agents and track CRM leads handled by agents.

Features

• Visual Structure: Easily view and understand the organizational structure

• Role Definition: Clearly define roles and responsibilities

• Access Control: Manage permissions based on hierarchy levels.

For example, consider a software product development company with a hierarchical structure: the CEO at the top, followed by project managers, different teams with team leads and members. Each team member reports to their respective team lead, each team lead reports to their manager, and managers report to the CEO.

In this structure, individuals have specific access privileges:

• Team leads have access to their team members' work.

• Managers have access to their team leads and the entire team's work, enabling them to track progress.

• However, a team lead from one team does not have access to other team members' work unless access is granted.

This hierarchical access ensures controlled visibility and management of tasks and projects within the organization.

Understanding and managing connections within the team hierarchy becomes essential. The hierarchy provides a graphical representation of individuals at various roles within an organization. It clearly depicts reporting relationships within teams and facilitates easy comprehension of access permissions over other team members through the hierarchy diagram.

Getting Started

To view Hierarchy click on Organization then select the tab Hierarchy. This picture shows a sample view of Hierarchy.

Each user’s name is displayed with their role (see the picture below), represented as a block connected by branches. These branches indicate the relationships between users. The person at the top is the Admin, who has access to everyone in the organization. Similarly, each user has access to those in the branches under them. Access flows from top to bottom, meaning a user at the top can access users below them in the same branch, but not the other way around. The hierarchy is arranged by selecting the reporting person for each user.

Suppose If User 1 is selected as the reporting person for User 2 in the organization settings, then User 1 will appear above User 2 in the hierarchy. User 1 will have access to User 2, but not the other way around.

Here, you can navigate the hierarchy by zooming in and out using the mouse scroll and moving the hierarchy in all directions by clicking and dragging anywhere on the layout. Clicking the 'Reset Zoom' (see the above picture) button will return the view to its default position.

You can also view each user's details by clicking on the Info icon over each agent block in the hierarchy as shown in the image below.

How to create a Hierarchy

Hierarchy can be built by choosing the reporting persons from the user settings. It can be selected while creating a user or while editing the user details as shown in the image below.

Reporting Person

While creating a user we can allocate him to a Reporting person. In hierarchy this reporting person will come above this created user and whoever the user has the same reporting person all that user will come under him. Reporting person can be changed at any time by editing the user details. The reporting person has access over the data of the user.

Here as shown in the above image suppose we give Ancy as the reporting person for john and also John as the reporting person for Katy and Jerry. In hierarchy it will look like in the below image.

Here Katy and Jerry come under John and John come under Ancy. Now Ancy has access to John, Katy and Jerry, and John has access to Katy and Jerry only. But Katy and Jerry have no access over each other or to John.

This is how we can construct a hierarchy, by viewing this agents can easily understand their roles and permissions and whoever has the access over them.

Organization Permissions

In role permissions their is newly added update for organization permission that are View and Manage User and Create New User

1. View and Manage User

The agent with this role can view the organization module and hierarchy and he can mage the users comes under his Heirarchy.

2. Create New User

On enabling this field agent gets the access to create new users in the organization. While enabling this option a popup field Select Creatable Roles will popup. In this field we have to add those roles of the users which this agent under this role can create.

CRM Hierarchy Permission

Along with the existing CRM permissions two new permission options based on Hierarchy are added

Hierarchy Read

By giving this permission the agent can view the records of the sub users who are under him in the hierarchy in that module, but unable to edit or update.

Hierarchy Write

By enabling this permission the agent under this role can edit the records owned by the sub users who are under him in the hierarchy.

Note that when you enable the hierarchy permissions from the CRM, then the Public Read/Right permissions will get removed. At a time only one of the permissions will work that is either Public read/write or Hierarchy read/write.

One to One Access

This is a hierarchy customization option in the organization. Normally an user has permission to view the agents who come under him in the Hierarchy branch. One to one access is used for giving additional access to view the details of an users who is under another branch or to access the user who is in the same level in the same branch in the hierarchy.

It can be added from the One to One Access tab in the Organization page or by adding along with creating or updating a User.

To add one to one access click on the Add One to One Access button as shown in the image above. Clicking it will popups a field to select the users to whom the one to one access should give as shown in the image below

Here in the user field you have to select the User who need the access and in One to One field you have to select the person whose access you want to give to the one in the User field. Enabling the checkbox Access to sub users of selected user allows the user to access not only the other user but also all the other users under him.

Note that the CRM records and contacts can be accessed through One to one access only if the CRM Hierarchy permissions for the Roles are enabled.

For example, the Service Manager Tom wants to access John who is the Team lead of the product development team as represented in the image below.

For this while creating one to one access Tom’s Name should be selected in the User field and John’s name should be selected in the One to One field and click on Add button. Now Tom can access the data of John like his CRM record, contacts etc. That is Tom can view Jon's records in his login platform and if you are checking the Access to sub user field, it will allow Tom also to access both Katy and Jerry who come under John.

This is how the One to One access works. Like this we can Give access to the users even if they are not connected or neither are the sub users.

Hierarchy Filters

Hierarchy filters are the filters which can be applied based on the Organization Hierarchy. Here filters are applied based on the record owners. Also it allows to filter out the contacts or records which are owned by the users on the basis of their hierarchy.

Hierarchy filters are available in bot CRM, Teambox and Broadcaster.

CRM Hierarchy Filter

By using this filter option we can easily filter out the records in a CRM module based on the users in hierarchy who are the owner of the records. In CRM modules the hierarchy filters are shown in the top of the CRM records as shown in the image below.

Clicking in it open a popup window with hierarchy view as shown in the image below

Here we can apply the filter by selecting the user and clicking on the Apply Filter button. On applying the filter the records with the owner as the selected users from the hierarchy will shown. At a time we can select multiple users from the hierarchy. Clicking on the Clear Selection button clears all filters.

Also there is another option in the Hierarchy Filter that we can choose the User and all his Sub user on one clicking Select all Hierarchy user Icon as shown in the image below.

By clicking on this all the sub users under that users will get selected at one click. On applying the filter we can see the records with the owner as the selected users as shown in the above image

For example if want to filter out all contacts owned by Tom and his sub users we can click the 'select all Hierarchy users' option on the Tom in the Hierarchy block, here all the sub users come under the tom will get selected and on applying filter all the records owned by Tom and his sub users can be filtered.

Teambox Hierarchy Filter

In Teambox, Hierarchy filters work based on users participating in the conversation. When you apply a filter by selecting one or more users in the hierarchy, the chats involving those users will be displayed as the filter result in the Teambox. The filter UI in Teambox is same as the one in CRM Hierarchy filter.

Here for example the filter is applied with the user as Ancy. Then all the chats which Ancy joined in the conversation will list on the Teambox. So with the Hierarchy filter in Teambox we can easily filter out the chats with which the selected user is assigned.

Hierarchy filter in broadcaster

In Broadcaster, when segmenting contacts based on their owner, there's an option to 'Get records from Hierarchy users.' By selecting this, you can filter out all contact records owned by the chosen user and the sub-users under their Hierarchy.

For example if we want to create a campaign for sending a message to the contacts owned by Ancy and to the contacts of all the sub users who come under her in the Hierarchy. Manually it is difficult to segment the contact owners individually. Here we can use the ‘Get Records From Hierarchy’ checkbox. On enabling this checkbox, all the contact numbers owned by Ancy and her sub users in the Hierarchy will get filtered out easily.

Hierarchy In Agent Login

In the agent login, the Hierarchy appears differently from the admin view. It only shows the Hierarchy section for that agent and the users under them. But in the agent Hierarchy view One to One access branch can be seen. A sample view of agent hierarchy view is shown in the image below

The Hierarchy in agent login can be only viewed if we enable the Organization permissions in the role permissions. From agent login we can create one to one access and can create users with the roles added in the Organization permission.