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Departments

Can I group Contacts, such as by departments?

Rain Hyneman avatar
Written by Rain Hyneman
Updated this week

Do you have lots of Contacts or groups of Contacts? You may want visitors to be able to select the department they're here to see and then only see Contacts in that department instead of forcing them to scroll through the entire list. Maybe you're operating a co-working space and wish you could separate Contacts by the company they're with. With our Departments feature, you can do it all!

When you use Departments to group Contacts, visitors to the iPad will not be shown a list of all Contacts. Instead, they will be shown a list of Departments that they can select. Once they've picked the Department, they'll be shown a list of Contacts in that group—and only those Contacts.

An image of the Receptionist app showing a list of Departments.

Adding Departments

Start on the Contacts page of the web portal. From there, edit the Contact you want to add a Department to. You'll see a Departments dropdown; click the text box, type in your new Department name, and hit enter. Remember to save! Then, you can select that Department from the dropdown menu for other Contacts going forward. You can add as many departments as you want!

The Contacts page of the web portal. A Contact is edited and assigned the Customer Experience Department. The Contact is saved, and then the Department is added to another contact.

If you're uploading Contacts in bulk (read about how here!) using a CSV file, you'll notice that our example CSV also includes a Department column. You can also create new Departments via CSV upload; any department names in the Department column that don't match existing contacts will be automatically created.

Changing and Removing Departments

Maybe John has moved from the CX team to Sales, or a company at your co-working space was recently renamed. If you want to change a Contact's department, edit the Contact and either type the new Department or select an existing one from the dropdown.

Need to remove a Contact's Department entirely? Just edit the Contact and select the blank space from the dropdown. Remember to save! If no Contacts are attached to a Department, that Department will disappear from the list.

A gif of the Editing Contact page of the web portal. The Department dropdown is selected and the blank/no department space is selected.

What happens if a Contact doesn't have a Department assigned?

If you add departments to some but not all Contacts, any Contacts without an assigned department will not appear on your contact list on the iPad. For this reason, we advise that either all Contacts or no Contacts have departments. That said, this can be a great way to create "hidden" Contacts; you may not want your company's CEO to appear on check-in lists, but they can still be reached by searching their name.

Have questions or need assistance? Try clicking on the orange chat bubble in the lower right corner to livechat with a member of the team!

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