Administering Service Hub

This article is for administrators of Service Hub — building the catalog people request from, the groups requests route to, and the forms they fill in. For raising and working requests, see Getting Help with Service Hub and Working the Queue in Service Hub.

Before you begin

Settings appears only for administrators. A freshly enabled Service Hub has no catalog and no groups, so nothing can be requested until you have set both up — the order below is the one that works.

The Settings Hub

Settings groups its pages by what they do. INTAKE covers “How requests enter the system”, and AUTOMATION covers what happens next.

Page	What it does
Catalog Items	The individual things people can request
Catalog Groups	How the catalog is organised for browsing
Categories	Classification used across tickets
Teams and Groups	“First routing tier — controls queue visibility”
Technicians	“Individual agents who receive assignments”
Form Templates	The questions a request asks
Custom Fields	“Agent-facing fields on tickets with queue columns”
Mailbox Monitor	“Inbound emails auto-create tickets”
Automation Rules	“Auto-update fields, create follow-ups, and more”
Lifecycles	Multi-step work behind a single request
Canned Responses	Reusable replies for agents
Chat Settings and Chat Triggers	The assistant that can raise requests
Notifications	“Email vs Teams delivery per ticket source”

Groups and Routing

Build routing before the catalog, because catalog items point at groups. Groups are the “First routing tier — controls queue visibility”, and every group sits under a parent Team — saving one without gives “A parent Team is required before saving a group.”

Technicians are “Individual agents who receive assignments”. Adding everyone available reports “All directory users are already technicians.”

Set the default group before you publish a catalog item

There is a Default group for unmatched requests, and anything that does not match a rule lands there. Left unset or pointed at an unwatched queue, requests arrive nowhere and nobody is told — the failure looks like requests vanishing.

Business Hours

Business hours drive response expectations, and are set per team — Add Team Override where a team works different hours from the default. Timezones are explicit, including the ones that catch people out: Arizona (no DST) and Alaska (AKT) alongside America/Chicago, America/Denver and the international zones. Saving confirms with “Business hours saved”.

The Catalog

Catalog Items are the things people can ask for; Catalog Groups organise them for browsing. Each item routes to a group and carries a form.

A request is only as good as the form behind it

An item with no questions produces a title and a free-text description, which is what generates the back-and-forth agents spend their time on. Ask the two or three things the team always needs.

Building a Form

Form Templates holds the question sets. Each takes a Template Name, and saving an empty one is refused with “Add fields before saving as a template”.

Each field carries a Label, Help Text, Placeholder, Description and a Required field setting. The Type options:

• Choice and Dropdown — one from a list
• Multi-Check and Checkboxes — “Check any that apply”
• Long Text — “Multi-line text area”
• Number — “Numeric input”
• Email — “Email address”
• Date picker
• File Upload — “Attach a file”
• Layout — structure rather than a question

Custom Fields is a different thing and worth not confusing: those are “Agent-facing fields on tickets with queue columns” — what agents see and filter by, rather than what requesters fill in.

Intake Beyond the Catalog

Mailbox Monitor means “Inbound emails auto-create tickets”. A ticket arriving that way is marked “Arrived via the monitored shared mailbox”, so its origin is never ambiguous.

Chat Settings and Chat Triggers control the assistant that can raise a request conversationally, including which group it routes to.

Email intake bypasses your forms

An emailed ticket has only what the sender wrote, so it arrives without the structured answers a catalog item would have collected. Expect those to need a clarifying comment, and weigh that against the convenience before enabling it.

Automation and Lifecycles

Automation Rules “Auto-update fields, create follow-ups, and more”. Conditions combine strictly — “All conditions must match (AND logic).” — so a rule with several conditions fires less often than it looks like it should. Rules can substitute ticket values such as Assignee Name, Assignee First Name and Assignee Email.

Lifecycles break one request into ordered steps with their own assignees, which is what produces the lifecycle tasks agents see in My Work. Use one where a request genuinely involves several teams in sequence — onboarding is the usual example.

Canned Responses gives agents reusable replies.

Troubleshooting

Users report the Service Catalog is empty

Solutions:

• Nothing has been published yet. Create Catalog Groups, then Catalog Items within them.
• Create Teams and Groups first — an item has nowhere to route without them.

Requests are submitted but never reach a queue

Solutions:

• Check Default group for unmatched requests. Anything not matching a rule goes there, and an unwatched default is indistinguishable from requests disappearing.
• Check the catalog item points at a group that still exists and has technicians.
• Check your agents are in the group — queue visibility follows group membership.

An automation rule isn’t firing

Solutions:

• Conditions are combined with AND, not OR — “All conditions must match (AND logic).” Remove conditions until it fires, then add them back one at a time.
• Check the rule is Active.

Response times look wrong for one team

Solutions:

• Check business hours. Use Add Team Override where a team works different hours from the default.
• Check the timezone, particularly Arizona (no DST), which does not shift with daylight saving.

A form template won’t save

Solutions:

• Add at least one field — “Add fields before saving as a template”.
• Give it a Template Name.

Related Articles

• Getting Help with Service Hub — What requesters see once the catalog exists
• Working the Queue in Service Hub — What your agents see, and how routing reaches them
• Getting Access to Apps and Extensions — Enabling the app and granting groups access to it