Organization Hierarchy

What do you mean by different departments - is it like Support vs IT vs Sales? Do each of the departments use Zendesk as well? Are they agents? If so, I think it's common for each department to have a Group, with an intake process for each. Maybe department A will also create side conversation tickets for department B. That can be done between Groups.

If you're talking about tracking which department various agents belong to - say, for reporting reasons - then a simple user dropdown field makes sense. 

Might need some more context to better understand your situation though!

Tyler Duncan - can you tell us more about your use case please?

As what I have understand it you pretty much want to use Zendesk for all of your departments? For us we actually have 6 departments which also means 5 groups in Zendesk.

1. There are 2 departments/groups which are customer facing
2. 4 departments/groups are for internal communication only (agent to agent)

We are escalating internally via side conversation ticket for us to track down as well the productivity of other groups and report it in Explore. 

At the moment, each user profile has a user field called department.  The department user field is a drop-down list of departments.  I want the department field to become an object with properties.  I noticed that the same departments listed in the dropdown are also in organization.  I want to consider changing the department field to a lookup field, which would be an organization.  The lookup field option would be a good option instead of an creating a custom object, seeing as custom objects cannot be referenced to another lookup relationship.  By adding organization fields to the organization would help in the development of workflows, user onboarding, and more projects I see that would fit in the functionality with the use of lookup relationship fields. 

Has anyone come across the use of developing departments using custom objects or organizations? 

@viktor14 I am not authorized to view the article.