User Groups are how you organize your team by the work they do — IT Support Tech, Accounting, Service Manager, Director of IT — and the mechanism that routes tickets to the right people. This article covers building User Groups, assigning Members to them, and the connection to Queues that makes routing work.

User Groups vs. Roles

Two related concepts are easy to confuse:

• Role is a system-level permission tier (Owner, Admin, Technician). It controls who can administer the account.
• User Group is a logical team grouping you define yourself. It controls which Queues a Member can work tickets in.

A Member has exactly one Role and any number of User Group assignments. Most routing decisions you make every day are about User Groups, not Roles.

Why User Groups matter

Every Queue in ZestMSP has one or more Assigned user groups. When a ticket lands in a Queue, only Members in those groups can pick it up. That means User Groups are the bridge between who someone is and what work shows up for them.

Example flow:

1. Sheryl is a Member.
2. Sheryl is in the IT Support Tech User Group.
3. The Support Request Queue has the IT Support Tech group assigned.
4. A ticket arrives in Support Request, so Sheryl can work it.

Change any of those three lines and the routing changes.

Create a User Group

1. Go to Team Management → User Groups.
2. Click + Create a new group.
3. Give the group a name. Use the role or function people perform — e.g., Network Admin, Accounting, On-call Lead — not a person's title.
4. Save.

The new group appears in the list on the left. Click it to open its detail view.

Assign Members to a group

1. From the User Groups list, click the group you want to populate.
2. On the right, click + Assign members.
3. Pick the Members you want in this group.
4. Save.

To remove someone, select their row and click Remove member.

Tip: A Member can belong to many groups at once. Use this for cross-functional people — your service manager might be in Service Manager (for escalations), IT Administrator (for incident response), and Owner (for executive-level alerts).

Connect a User Group to a Queue

Creating the group isn't enough on its own — you also need to assign it to the Queues whose work it should handle. Do this from the Queue side:

1. Go to Configurations → Queues.
2. Click the Queue name.
3. In User groups, add the group(s) that should work tickets in this Queue.
4. Save.

See Set up Queues, Issue Types, and SLA targets for the full Queue configuration.

Recommended group structure

A few patterns that work well at most MSPs:

• By function: IT Support Tech, Network Admin, Service Manager, Accounting, Procurement, Sales. Map cleanly to Queues.
• By tier: Tier 1, Tier 2, Tier 3. Use when your service desk escalates through tiers.
• By on-call rotation: On-call. Rotate Members in and out as the rotation changes. The Queue assignment stays the same.

Avoid creating a User Group for a single person — use Member-level assignment in the ticket's Primary resource field instead.

Related articles

• Invite Members and manage your team
• Set up Queues, Issue Types, and SLA targets
• Create and work a Ticket