Odoo, a widely used open-source business management platform, includes a robust Helpdesk application that helps businesses streamline customer support processes. In Odoo 18, one of the standout capabilities of the Helpdesk module is its improved ticket assignment and visibility features, both of which are crucial for optimizing support operations.
Overview of the Odoo 18 Helpdesk Module
The Helpdesk app in Odoo is built to assist companies in efficiently handling customer queries, support cases, and service requests. It acts as a centralized hub for support teams to track, manage, and resolve issues in a structured way. The latest Odoo 18 release brings notable enhancements to usability and functionality, making ticket handling faster, more organized, and more transparent.
In Odoo 18’s Helpdesk module, effective ticket assignment and clear visibility provide significant advantages for support operations. Automated ticket distribution minimizes manual effort, allowing agents to focus on resolving customer issues quickly, while improved tracking ensures faster, more accurate responses that enhance customer satisfaction. Managers can leverage performance insights to streamline workflows and allocate resources more effectively, leading to greater accountability and the identification of process bottlenecks. Additionally, the system scales seamlessly with business growth, maintaining consistent service quality. To enable these features, a Helpdesk team must first be configured by navigating to the Configuration tab in the Helpdesk module and selecting Teams from the available options.
In the Team view, you can access a list of all previously created teams, along with key details such as their name, assigned email alias, and associated company.
To check the specific details, open the Customer Care team record, where you will find the relevant configuration and information displayed.
Within the Customer Care team settings, the Assignment & Visibility section allows you to define how tickets are assigned and who can view them. The Visibility field offers three configuration options:
- Invited Internal Users – Only invited internal users can see the team and tickets they follow. Access can be adjusted per ticket by adding or removing users as followers. Helpdesk administrators, however, retain access to all tickets regardless of follower status.
- All Internal Users – Every internal user can access the team and all its tickets without restriction.
- Invited Portal Users and All Internal Users – All internal users have unrestricted access to tickets, while portal users can only view tickets they follow. Portal user access can also be modified individually at the ticket level by managing their follower status.
Automatic Assignment:
This feature is used to automatically distribute incoming tickets among the team members. Managing customer support tickets efficiently is essential for maintaining high service quality. Odoo Helpdesk includes an Automatic Assignment feature that ensures tickets are distributed fairly among team members, preventing bottlenecks and balancing workload.
When Automatic Assignment is enabled in a Helpdesk Team, new tickets are automatically routed to the right people. Team members on Time Off are intelligently excluded, so tickets won’t be assigned to unavailable staff.
There are two assignment methods available:
1.Each user is assigned an equal number of tickets
Odoo will look at all tickets created (lifetime) and ensure that over time, each user receives the same total number of tickets.
Example: If you have 2 agents and 10 tickets come in, Odoo will try to assign 5 tickets to each, regardless of whether they are currently open or already closed.
This method balances the overall workload historically.
2.Each user has an equal number of open tickets
Odoo looks only at the currently open (unresolved) tickets. The system assigns new tickets to the agent with the least number of open tickets.
Example: If User A has 5 open tickets and User B has 2 open tickets, the next ticket will go to User B until the numbers balance.
This method balances the active workload in real-time.
Team Members are the pool of agents eligible to receive tickets automatically. If a user is not added as a team member, they will never receive automatic assignments for that team. Suppose the Helpdesk Team has two members: Mitchell Admin and John Doe.
When we create 2 tickets, one ticket is assigned to Mitchell and the other to John. If we create a 3rd ticket, it is automatically assigned to Mitchell again, because the system distributes tickets equally.
Example Ticket 1:
Here, when I create a new ticket in the Helpdesk Team ‘Customer Care,’ it is automatically assigned to Mitchell Admin because he is part of the team and Odoo distributes tickets equally among the members.
Ticket 2:
Here you can see that the second ticket (‘Sample Ticket 2’) in the Helpdesk Team ‘Customer Care’ was automatically assigned to John Doe. Since the first ticket went to Mitchell, Odoo assigned the next one to John to ensure fair distribution among team members.
The Automatic Assignment feature in Odoo 18 Helpdesk is a powerful tool for ensuring fair workload distribution and efficient handling of customer issues. By intelligently rotating tickets between team members or balancing active workloads in real time, Odoo reduces manual intervention and eliminates bias in ticket allocation. Managers can configure assignment strategies that best fit their team’s workflow—either maintaining historical equality or focusing on real-time workload balancing.
With features like automatic exclusion of users on time off, clear visibility options, and seamless scalability as teams grow, Odoo 18 ensures that support operations remain efficient, transparent, and customer-focused. Businesses adopting this approach can expect improved response times, higher agent productivity, and ultimately greater customer satisfaction.
To read more about How the Automatic Helpesk Ticket Assignment Handled in Odoo 18, refer to our blog How the Automatic Helpesk Ticket Assignment Handled in Odoo 18