Question 1

How to create a ticket

Accepted Answer

Agents can open a ticket from anywhere in the dashboard; customers can too, via the portal, inbound email, or live chat. 1. Click the + New button in the topbar (or press the c key from any dashboard page). 2. In the New ticket dialog, enter a Subject ("What's the issue?") and pick a Type and Priority. 3. Optionally set a Contact, Assignee, Sprint, and Story points. 4. Add a Description. It doubles as the input for AI triage, which suggests a type, priority, and tags from what you wrote. 5. Submit the form (⌘↵ works). The ticket gets a real key like INC-42 or REQ-101, allocated atomically per workspace.

Question 2

How to work the shared inbox with queues

Accepted Answer

Queues are saved views of the same shared inbox: built-in ones for the common cuts, plus unlimited custom ones. 1. In the sidebar under Work, click Queues. Built-in queues cover Mine, Unassigned, Urgent, Breached, Awaiting Customer, and by-Type views. 2. Click any queue to open its ticket list. Filters are URL-synced, so every queue is a shareable link. 3. To make a custom queue, filter All tickets the way you want, then on the Queues page click New under "Save current view as queue", give it a Queue name, and click Save. 4. Use the density toggle (comfortable / compact) and sort by deadline, priority, or key to match how you triage.

Question 3

How to assign tickets (one at a time or in bulk)

Accepted Answer

Every ticket has one assignee; bulk actions handle the Monday-morning pile. 1. On a ticket, use the Assignee dropdown in the Details sidebar; the change saves immediately. 2. For many tickets at once, open All tickets and tick the checkboxes next to each one (or the header checkbox to select the whole page). 3. A bulk bar appears showing "N selected" with Mark resolved, Close, → Urgent, Assign me, and an Assign to… dropdown for any teammate. 4. Bulk updates apply to up to 200 tickets per batch.

Question 4

How to reply to a customer vs. leave an internal note

Accepted Answer

The same composer sends public replies and private team notes — one checkbox decides which. 1. Open the ticket and scroll to the reply composer at the bottom of the Conversation tab. 2. Write your message. Markdown is supported, and @mentioning a teammate adds them as a watcher. 3. For a customer-visible reply, leave "Internal note" unchecked and click Send reply. 4. For a private note only your team can see, check "Internal note" and click Add note. Internal notes render on an amber background so nobody mistakes them for public replies. 5. Drag and drop files straight onto the composer to attach them (uploads use signed URLs).

Question 5

How to add an email signature to your replies

Accepted Answer

Automatically append a sign-off to your public reply emails (your name and your company footer) without pasting it every time. 1. Open Settings from the sidebar and find the "Email signature" section. 2. Type your signature. You can use merge tokens that fill in per email: {{agent.name}}, {{agent.email}}, {{workspace.name}}, {{contact.first_name}}. The live preview shows how it will look. 3. Click Save signature. From now on, your public reply emails carry it, added after your message and before the "View & reply" link. 4. Team default (admins): open Workspace settings → "Default team signature" and set one there. It is used for any agent who hasn't set their own personal signature.

Question 6

How to merge duplicate tickets

Accepted Answer

When the same issue arrives twice, merge moves the whole conversation into one surviving ticket and closes the duplicate. 1. Open the duplicate ticket and click Merge into… in the header action row. 2. In the merge picker, search for the survivor by key or subject and click it. 3. Review the confirmation ("Move all messages from REQ-101 into INC-42?") and click Merge & close. 4. The duplicate becomes read-only with a banner linking to the survivor; its messages now live in the surviving ticket's conversation.

Question 7

How to merge duplicate contacts

Accepted Answer

The portal, inbound email, and your CRM import each create contacts, so one customer often ends up as two or three records, each holding a slice of their history. Merging puts them back together. 1. Open Contacts in the sidebar and click the contact you want to KEEP. This record is the survivor. 2. If Desk spots likely duplicates, a Possible duplicates panel appears above the ticket list, tagging each one "same email" or "same name". 3. Check the duplicate is really the same person (click through to it if you want to look first), then click Merge into this contact. 4. Confirm the prompt. Their tickets and recurring schedules move onto the contact you kept, and the duplicate record is deleted. 5. The surviving contact keeps everything it already had; the merge only fills in details it was missing (phone, company, notes, company link, CRM/Books links).

Question 8

How to snooze a ticket

Accepted Answer

Snooze keeps waiting-on-something tickets out of your active queues until a date passes or the customer replies. 1. Open the ticket and click Snooze in the header action row. 2. Pick 1 day, 3 days, 1 week, or "Until customer replies". 3. The ticket shows a Snoozed label and drops out of active queue views until the snooze ends. 4. To wake it early, open the same menu and click Clear snooze.

Question 9

How to see every ticket an asset has caused

Accepted Answer

Each asset in the CMDB has its own page: the full ticket history for that server, service, or license, how much of it is still open, and (if a monitor watches it) whether it is up right now. 1. Open Admin → Assets in the sidebar and click the name of the asset you want. (You can also click an asset name in a ticket's Affected assets panel.) 2. The header shows the asset's name, kind, status badge (active / degraded / offline / retired), identifier, vendor, and owner. Its JSON metadata (IP, OS, version, whatever you recorded) is listed in the Metadata panel on the right. 3. If a monitor is linked to this asset, a live status strip sits under the header with up/down, the last response time, and 24-hour and 30-day uptime percentages. No monitor linked means no strip — that is normal, not an error. 4. Read the blast-radius counters: open, pending, resolved, SLA breached, and how many tickets this asset caused in the last 30 days. 5. Scroll to Tickets for the full history, newest first. Each row is tagged "affected" (the ticket is about this asset) or "related" (a dependency), and shows the ticket key, subject, status, and priority. Click any row to open the ticket. 6. Click View all tickets → to jump to the inbox pre-filtered to this asset, where you can layer on the usual status, priority, and assignee filters.

Question 10

How to track warranty and renewal dates on an asset

Accepted Answer

Licences, TLS certificates, domains, support contracts and hardware warranties all lapse on a specific day. Record that day on the asset and Desk will badge it, surface it on the dashboard before it lapses, and (if you want) open the renewal ticket for you. 1. Open Admin → Assets and either create an asset or click Edit on an existing one. 2. In the Lifecycle section, set Warranty expires (hardware or support cover) and/or Renewal due (a licence, subscription or contract). Both are real date pickers; you no longer need to hide a date in the Metadata JSON. 3. Set Lead days to however far ahead you want the warning: 30 by default, anything from 0 to 365. That single number drives the badge, the dashboard widget, and the auto-ticket window for this asset. 4. Save. The asset list now shows a colour-coded badge: grey while the date is far off, amber once it is inside the lead window, red once it has passed. Tick "Expiring soon only" above the list to see just the assets that need attention. 5. Watch the dashboard: an "Assets expiring soon" panel appears next to SLA at risk, listing everything inside its lead window, soonest first. The panel is hidden entirely when nothing is due. 6. Optional: tick "Open a renewal ticket automatically" on the asset. When the lead window opens, Desk creates one Task: subject "Renew: (expires )", due on the expiry date, with the asset already linked as affected and the details posted as the first note. 7. When you renew, edit the asset and roll the date forward to the new expiry. That re-arms everything: the badge goes grey again, and a fresh renewal ticket will be opened for the new date when its lead window opens.

Question 11

How to tell when a teammate is already replying to a ticket

Accepted Answer

Two agents answering the same customer at once is the classic shared-inbox failure. Desk shows you who else is on a ticket, and warns you specifically when one of them is mid-reply — so you find out before you send, not after. 1. Open any ticket from the inbox. Under the ticket header, a presence row lists the other agents currently on it. 2. Agents who are just reading appear under "Also viewing" with a grey eye icon. Agents who are actively composing appear under "Replying" with an amber pencil icon. 3. When someone else is mid-reply, an amber banner appears directly above your own composer naming them: "Jane is also replying to this ticket — check before you send." 4. If a teammate is present but not typing, the banner softens to "Jane is also viewing this ticket" — the cue is still there, just not an alarm. 5. Your own typing is broadcast the moment you start in the reply box. It clears by itself a few seconds after you stop, the instant you send or schedule the reply, and when you leave the page. 6. Nothing to switch on: presence is live on every ticket for every agent in the workspace.

Question 12

How to create a custom ticket type

Accepted Answer

Every workspace ships with 8 types (Incident, Service Request, Change, Problem, Bug, Feature, Task, Epic), and you can add your own. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click "Types, workflows & tags". 2. Under Ticket types, click + New type. 3. Enter a Name (e.g. "Incident") and a Key prefix (e.g. INC); new tickets of this type get keys like INC-42. 4. Pick a Color and an icon, then click Create.

Question 13

How to add custom fields to a ticket type

Accepted Answer

Custom fields collect structured data per ticket type: text, number, date, or select. 1. Go to Admin → "Types, workflows & tags" and find the ticket type under Ticket types. 2. Open "Edit custom fields" for that type. 3. Click + Add field and set a Label, a Type (text / number / date / select), and for selects the Options (comma-separated). 4. Click Save schema. The fields now appear on tickets of that type, and the customer portal's service catalog collects them up front.

Question 14

How to build a custom workflow

Accepted Answer

Workflows define the states a ticket moves through and which transitions are allowed. 1. Go to Admin → "Types, workflows & tags" and scroll to Workflows. 2. Click + New workflow and list your States one per line in the format key:Label:#color (e.g. open:Open:#3b82f6). 3. Give each state a category (todo / doing / done) so boards and reports know what "in progress" means. 4. Click Create, then open "Edit transitions", click + Add transition for each allowed move, and click Save transitions. 5. On a ticket, the workflow renders as a state strip with "Move to:" buttons for the valid transitions only.

Question 15

How to turn inbound email into tickets

Accepted Answer

Point your email provider's inbound webhook at Desk and every forwarded email becomes a tracked ticket. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Inbound email, then click New endpoint. 2. Name it (e.g. "support@ inbox"), pick your Provider (Postmark, Mailgun, SES, SendGrid, or generic), and set the Default type and Default priority for tickets it creates. 3. Click Create, then Copy the endpoint's webhook URL; your workspace's inbound key is embedded in it, so no shared secret is needed. 4. Paste that URL into your provider's inbound-webhook settings for the mailbox you forward support mail to. 5. Each email auto-creates (or matches) the contact from the From: address, allocates a real ticket key, and threads the body as the first message. The endpoint row shows a receipt count and last-received time so you can confirm it's wired.

Question 16

How to embed the live chat widget on your site

Accepted Answer

A one-line script adds real-time chat to any page you control; agents answer from the dashboard. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click "Chat widget install". 2. Under Customize, set the Brand color, Header title, and Greeting; the Preview pane updates live. 3. Under Embed snippet, click Copy and paste the <script> tag into any HTML page. 4. Agents answer incoming chats from Live chats in the sidebar (under Manage), with realtime updates. 5. When a chat ends, "Close + Make ticket" replays the transcript into a real ticket so the conversation persists in your inbox.

Question 17

How to set up auto-acknowledgement replies

Accepted Answer

Send every new request an instant "we've received it" confirmation, with an honest after-hours ETA computed from your business hours. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Workspace, then open the Automation tab. 2. Check "Enable auto-acknowledgement" (it's off by default). 3. Optionally customize the Subject and Body. Merge fields like {{contact.first_name}}, {{ticket.subject}}, and {{workspace.name}} are filled per ticket. Leave blank to use the built-in default. 4. Click Save. Tickets created from the customer portal and inbound email now get an immediate confirmation email. 5. If a ticket arrives outside your business hours, a "we'll respond by…" line is appended automatically, computed from your business-hours calendar.

Question 18

How to create automation rules

Accepted Answer

Rules fire on ticket events and run actions: set priority, set status, send a macro reply, add a tag, assign, or notify. 1. In the sidebar under Manage, click Automations, then click New rule. 2. Name the rule (e.g. "Escalate VIP tickets"). 3. Under When, pick the trigger event: ticket.created, ticket.updated, or ticket.replied. 4. Optionally add a condition (field, operator, value; e.g. priority equals urgent). 5. Under Then, add one or more actions: set priority, set status, send a macro reply, add a tag, auto-assign (round-robin or least-busy), or notify a user. 6. Save the rule. It runs on every matching event from now on, and each firing is recorded in the audit log.

Question 19

How to choose which notifications reach you by email

Accepted Answer

Each agent controls, per notification kind, whether it shows in-app and whether it also arrives by email, so you get the alerts you care about in the channel you actually watch. 1. Open Notifications from the sidebar (or go to /dashboard/notifications). 2. You'll see a grid of notification kinds down the side (ticket assigned to you, a customer replied, you were mentioned, SLA breaches, negative CSAT, on-call handoff, and more) with In-app and Email columns. 3. Toggle the Email column on for any kind you want delivered to your inbox, and off for any you'd rather only see in-app. Email is on by default for most kinds. 4. Changes save per kind and take effect on the next matching event; no need to save the whole page. 5. Notification emails link straight to the ticket or resource that triggered them, and every one carries a "Manage notification preferences" link back to this page.

Question 20

How to create macros (canned replies with actions)

Accepted Answer

A macro bundles a reply template with ticket field changes, so "Escalate to Tier 2" is one click instead of four. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Settings and scroll to the Macros section. 2. Enter a Macro name (e.g. "Escalate to Tier 2") and the reply body; merge fields like {{contact.first_name}} and {{ticket.key}} are supported. 3. Optionally attach actions: set status, set priority, assign, or add a tag. They apply alongside the reply. 4. Save. On any ticket, pick it from the Insert macro… dropdown in the composer; the body drops in with merge fields already rendered. 5. To apply one macro across many tickets at once, use the Bulk apply a macro page (/dashboard/bulk-macro), up to 50 tickets per batch.

Question 21

How to use saved replies

Accepted Answer

Saved replies are lighter than macros: pure text snippets, personal or shared with the team. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Saved replies, then click New reply. 2. Enter a Name, an optional Shortcut (e.g. /ack), and the Body; Markdown is fine. 3. Your own replies appear under "My replies"; admin-created ones appear under "Shared with team" for everyone. 4. In any ticket composer, pick from the Saved reply… dropdown; merge fields like {{agent.name}} fill in automatically, and unknown tokens are stripped so a raw placeholder never reaches a customer.

Question 22

How to schedule a reply to send later

Accepted Answer

Write the reply now, deliver it when it lands best: at a specific time or when your business hours next open. 1. Write your reply in the ticket composer as usual. 2. Instead of Send reply, click Send later next to it. 3. Choose "Next business-hours open" (resolved from the ticket's SLA calendar) or pick a date & time and click Schedule send. 4. The pending send appears in a Scheduled queue below the composer, with a cancel button if you change your mind. 5. At send time the reply posts, emails the customer, and sets first-response exactly as a live reply would. Closed or merged tickets are skipped automatically.

Question 23

How to auto-assign new tickets (round-robin or least-busy)

Accepted Answer

One toggle routes every new inbox ticket to an available agent the moment it arrives; nothing sits unowned burning its first-response SLA. 1. In the sidebar under Work, click Queues and find the "Automatic ticket assignment" panel. 2. Flip the toggle on and pick a strategy: Round-robin (cycles evenly through available agents) or Least busy (assigns to whoever has the fewest open tickets). 3. Every new ticket in the inbox now routes itself. Manual assignment still works and always wins. 4. Agents control their own availability: in Workspace → Members, the "Accepting new tickets" switch pauses auto-assignment for you (out sick, heads-down) while manual assignment keeps working. 5. If nobody is available, tickets stay unassigned until someone frees up — never dropped.

Question 24

How to route tickets by agent skill

Accepted Answer

Send a specialized ticket only to an agent who can actually solve it: tag agents by skill (billing, Tier-2, a language) and require those skills on a queue. 1. In the sidebar under Work, open Queues. In the "Agent skills" panel, add skill tags to each agent (type a skill and press Enter; e.g. "billing", "tier-2", "de"). 2. Turn on "Automatic ticket assignment" in the panel above, then in "Required skills" add the skills a new inbox ticket must match. 3. Now a new ticket is offered only to available agents who hold every required skill; round-robin or least-busy still balances the load across that qualified set. 4. If no qualified agent is currently available, the ticket falls back to the full available pool so it is never left unassigned; the fallback is recorded for your audit trail. 5. Leave "Required skills" empty to route to any available agent, exactly as before.

Question 25

How to schedule recurring tickets

Accepted Answer

For the things you must do every Monday, month, or quarter: a template that recreates itself on a cadence. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Recurring tickets, then click New schedule. 2. Give it an Internal name, then set the Ticket subject, Ticket body, Type, Priority, and Assignee for the tickets it will create. 3. Set "Every (days)", anywhere from 1 to 365, and optionally "Max runs" to cap the total (e.g. create this 12 times, then stop). 4. Click Create. Each run allocates a fresh ticket key (INC-103, INC-104…) with your pre-filled fields.

Question 26

How to create an SLA policy

Accepted Answer

SLA policies set first-response and resolution targets per priority, and every ticket card shows a live countdown against them. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click SLA policies, then under Policies click + New policy. 2. Name it (e.g. "Standard support") and enter first-response and resolution targets in minutes for each priority (low / normal / high / urgent). 3. Choose how the policy applies: by contact, tag, channel, or as the workspace default. 4. Save. Tickets under the policy show a live SLA countdown pill (green → amber → pulsing red), and breaches are flagged automatically on first response and resolution.

Question 27

How to set up SLA escalation rules

Accepted Answer

Act before a breach, not after: escalate, bump priority, reassign, or notify when a ticket is heading toward its deadline. 1. Go to Admin → SLA policies and scroll to Escalation rules, then click + New rule. 2. Name it (e.g. "Page leads on breach") and pick a Trigger: first response at risk, resolution at risk, first response breached, or resolution breached. 3. For at-risk triggers, set the "At-risk threshold (minutes before due)". 4. Click + Add action and choose what happens: escalate, bump priority, reassign to the least-busy agent, notify a user, or escalate to a role (e.g. notify all owners/admins), with an optional notification message. 5. Save. Each rule fires exactly once per ticket per stage, so nobody gets spammed.

Question 28

How business hours and holidays affect SLA timers

Accepted Answer

SLA clocks only tick during working hours, so a Friday-evening ticket doesn't breach over the weekend. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Workspace and open the Business hours tab to view your workspace's current schedule and holiday calendar. 2. SLA due-by times are computed within these hours; holidays pause the clock entirely. 3. The same calendar powers other features: the auto-acknowledgement after-hours ETA line, "Next business-hours open" scheduled replies, and the unstaffed shading on the Reports coverage heatmap. 4. Editing the schedule is currently done via the API (the Workspace tab shows the active JSON configuration); a visual editor is on the roadmap.

Question 29

How to turn a solved ticket into a knowledge-base article

Accepted Answer

When you solve something new, capture it straight from the ticket instead of retyping it into a blank editor later. 1. Open a ticket you have already resolved or closed. The "Save as KB article" action only appears on settled tickets. 2. Click "Save as KB article" in the ticket actions row, next to Clone and Merge. 3. A draft is created with the ticket subject as the title and your public replies as the body, oldest first, with the ticket referenced at the top. 4. The action turns into an "Article created" link; click it to open the draft in the Knowledge Base and edit it. 5. Set the Category, Visibility, and Status to published when the article reads the way you want. It stays a private draft until you do.

Question 30

How to write and publish a knowledge-base article

Accepted Answer

Your knowledge base powers the help center your customers see in the portal, and deflects tickets before they're filed. 1. In the sidebar under Manage, click Knowledge Base, then click New article. 2. Enter a Title, pick a Category (create one inline with "New category name" if needed), and write the Body in Markdown. 3. Choose a Visibility: Public (customers), Internal (team only), or Private (admins only). 4. Set the Status to published when it's ready (drafts stay invisible everywhere) and click Save. 5. Published public articles appear immediately in your customer portal's help center and in ticket-deflection search.

Question 31

How to control who can read each article

Accepted Answer

Three visibility levels keep customer-facing docs, internal runbooks, and admin notes in one knowledge base without leaks. 1. Open Knowledge Base and edit (or create) an article. 2. In the Visibility select, choose: "Public — customers" (readable on your help center once published), "Internal — team only" (never shown to customers), or "Private — admins only" (workspace owners and admins). 3. Save. The article list shows a Visibility badge per row so you can audit at a glance. 4. The customer portal and deflection search only ever surface public, published articles — internal and private content cannot leak.

Question 32

How to find knowledge-base gaps from failed searches

Accepted Answer

Every search customers run against your help center is logged; the ones that returned nothing are your highest-ROI writing backlog. 1. In the sidebar under Manage, click Reports. 2. Find the "Content gaps — top searches with no results" card and the zero-result-rate tile. 3. Zero-result queries are grouped by phrase and ranked, so you can see what customers looked for and couldn't find. 4. Write a public KB article for each top phrase, then watch the Deflected tile and Top deflecting articles card to confirm it's working.

Question 33

How to set up the customer portal

Accepted Answer

A passwordless, brand-colored portal where customers open tickets, track them, and read your help center. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Workspace and set your "Public URL handle" (e.g. your-company). Your portal lives at /portal/your-company. 2. Set your Brand color on the Branding tab; the portal inherits it. 3. Customers sign in with just their email: the portal sends a single-use magic link that expires in 15 minutes. No passwords, ever. 4. Signed-in customers see "Your tickets", can reply, and can open a "New support ticket". As they type a subject, matching published KB articles surface inline ("These might answer your question"); opening one instead of filing counts as a measurable deflection. 5. The portal's service catalog shows your ticket types so customers pick the right request, and your custom fields are collected up front.

Question 34

What happens to a ticket a customer opens

Accepted Answer

A ticket that arrives by email or through the portal now gets exactly the same treatment as one an agent opens: an SLA clock, your automation rules, and an owner — before anyone has to look at the queue. 1. Nothing to switch on. Any ticket created from the customer portal or from an inbound-email endpoint runs through the same intake as one an agent opens in the dashboard. 2. It gets a real ticket key (REQ-104) and sequence number, so you can find it under Tickets → search by key, and quote that reference back to the customer. 3. Its SLA policy is resolved from your assignments and the first-response and resolution clocks start immediately, so it counts in the SLA attainment report, escalation rules can fire on it, and breach alerts reach your on-call rotation. 4. Your enabled ticket.created automation rules run against it — tagging, routing, priority bumps, whatever you have configured. 5. If the receiving queue has auto-assignment on, it routes to an agent (round-robin, least-busy or skill-based) instead of sitting unowned. 6. On the portal, the request type the customer picked carries through with its workflow state, and any fields you marked required on that type must be filled in; a missing one is rejected with the field named, rather than quietly dropped. 7. A new portal requester is linked to their company account by email domain, so they appear under the right organization on the Organizations page.

Question 35

How to let a customer see their whole company's tickets

Accepted Answer

By default a customer signing into your portal sees only the tickets they personally raised. When a customer's office manager or IT lead needs the whole picture — what colleagues have reported, what is still open — you can grant that per contact. It is off for everyone until you turn it on. 1. The contact must belong to an organization first. Open Dashboard → Contacts → the contact, click Edit, and set Organization. (Contacts whose email domain matches an organization's domains are linked automatically.) 2. On the same edit form, tick "Can see all tickets" under Portal visibility, then Save. The checkbox stays disabled until an organization is set — there is nothing to widen to without one. 3. To grant several people at once, open Dashboard → Organizations → the organization and use the "Sees all tickets" checkbox beside each member in the roster. It saves immediately. 4. The next time that contact signs into the portal they get a "My tickets / All company tickets" switch. It opens on My tickets, so their own view is unchanged unless they ask for more. 5. On the All company tickets view, every ticket someone else raised is labelled "Raised by " so it is obvious whose it is. 6. To revoke, untick the box. The change takes effect on their next portal request — there is nothing to expire or clean up.

Question 36

How CSAT surveys work (and how to read per-agent scores)

Accepted Answer

Every resolved ticket triggers a one-click 1–5 satisfaction survey automatically — no setup required. 1. Resolve a ticket. The customer receives a survey link asking "How did we do?" with a 1 (poor) to 5 (great) scale and an optional comment. 2. Responses land on the ticket (a Customer feedback panel appears on the detail page) and aggregate into Reports. 3. Open Reports to see the CSAT distribution card for the selected window. 4. The Agent leaderboard shows per-agent CSAT (average score + response count) alongside resolved counts, first-reply time, FCR, and reopens: satisfaction by agent, not just for the team. 5. Every 1- or 2-star rating instantly flags the ticket, pings the assigned agent, and fires a webhook so you can win back unhappy customers before they churn.

Question 37

How to read ticket trends and SLA attainment

Accepted Answer

Reports turns your ticket history into volume trends, first-reply histograms, and honest SLA attainment numbers. 1. In the sidebar under Manage, click Reports and pick a window: 7, 30, 90, or 180 days. 2. Ticket volume charts arrivals over the window; First-reply time is a histogram of how fast you actually respond. 3. SLA attainment shows the percentage of tickets that met their first-response and resolution deadlines, broken down by priority with met/eligible counts. 4. Channel mix and Type mix show where tickets come from and what kind they are; First Contact Resolution is reported net of reopens so the number can't be gamed. 5. Backlog aging (its own page under Work) buckets open tickets by age with a priority breakdown and posture indicator.

Question 38

How to use the coverage heatmap to fix off-hours gaps

Accepted Answer

See when tickets arrive vs. when you're staffed; the off-hours gaps that quietly breach SLAs become obvious. 1. Open Reports and scroll to the Coverage heatmap: a 7×24 weekday × hour-of-day grid in your workspace timezone. 2. Toggle between arrival volume and median first-reply time per cell. 3. Cells outside your business hours (and on holidays) are shaded "Unstaffed"; dark cells with high arrivals are your gap. 4. Read the auto-generated insight line (e.g. "14% of tickets arrive outside business hours; their median first reply is 6.2h vs 41m in-hours") and adjust staffing or business hours accordingly.

Question 39

How to see what customers write in about with tag mix

Accepted Answer

Your team already tags tickets; tag mix turns that curation into a ranked view of topics by volume and satisfaction. 1. Open Reports and find the Tag mix card. 2. Your top support tags are ranked by ticket volume for the selected window. 3. Each tag also shows its average CSAT score, so you can spot the highest-volume and worst-scoring subjects at a glance. 4. Pair it with the Content gaps card: a high-volume, low-CSAT tag with zero-result searches is your next KB article and automation candidate.

Question 40

How to run a change with CAB approval and publish its window

Accepted Answer

Schedule a change with its rollback plan, gate it behind approval, and turn the approved window into the maintenance notice your customers see. 1. First, make sure you have a change ticket type: sidebar → Admin → "Types, workflows & tags", edit or add a type, and set its Category to "Change". Only tickets on a change-categorised type get the Change panel. 2. Open a ticket on that type. In the right-hand column you now see a "Change" panel. 3. Pick the Class. Standard is pre-approved and starts immediately. Normal is the default and cannot start work until the CAB approves it. Emergency can start on a written justification. 4. Set the Risk, the Planned start and Planned end, and write the Implementation plan and the Rollback plan. Click "Save change details". 5. Add the systems this touches using the ticket's Assets panel — the change uses those links, so you do not enter them twice. 6. For a normal change, use the Approvals panel to Request approval from your CAB members. Until one of them approves it, moving the ticket into a working state is refused with an explanation. 7. Once approved (or straight away for a standard change), click "Publish window" in the Change panel. That creates the scheduled maintenance window on your public status page, with the same times and the same affected systems. 8. Check the Change calendar in the sidebar: it lists every scheduled change and flags any two that touch the same system in overlapping windows.

Question 41

How to publish a public status page

Accepted Answer

A public health dashboard powered by your CMDB assets: one click to enable, no separate tool to pay for. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click "Public status page". 2. Under Configuration, enable the page and set a Title, Subtitle, and Contact email (shown in the footer). 3. Choose which asset kinds are visible (empty = all) or pick specific assets, and optionally add custom CSS. 4. Click Save changes. Your page is live at /status/your-slug, showing assets grouped by kind with their current status and an overall posture banner (operational / minor / major / critical).

Question 42

How to create uptime monitors (and auto-declare incidents)

Accepted Answer

Active HTTP(S) checks that flip your CMDB asset status, notify the team, and can open public incidents entirely on their own. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Uptime monitors, then click New monitor. 2. Enter a Name and the URL to check, pick a Method and Interval, and set a Timeout. 3. Optionally assert an Expected status code (blank = any 2xx/3xx) and a "Body must contain" keyword. 4. Link the monitor to a CMDB asset; up/down transitions flip that asset's status automatically (which your status page reflects). 5. Set "Open after N failed checks" to avoid flapping, and choose an Impact level. 6. To fully automate outage comms, check "Auto-declare public incident": a failed check opens a public incident and emails confirmed subscribers, then resolves itself the moment the monitor recovers — one incident per outage, never a duplicate.

Question 43

How to monitor from outside your own infrastructure

Accepted Answer

Checks that run only on your own box can't see an outage your customers see: a routing, DNS, or edge failure that stops your public IP answering. An external vantage watches a monitor from off-box so those outages surface. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click External vantages. 2. Type a name for the runner (e.g. "ci-us-east") and click Register. Copy the token shown; it is displayed only once. 3. Deploy the runner somewhere that is NOT this box: a small VM in another provider/region, or a scheduled CI job (a ready-to-use script and CI example ship in the runner/ folder of the repo). 4. Set the runner's DESK_VANTAGE_TOKEN to the token, DESK_INGEST_URL to your desk /api/desk/monitors/ingest URL, and MONITORS_JSON to the monitors it should check, then schedule it (e.g. every 5 minutes). 5. On the Uptime monitors page, each monitor now shows which vantage produced its status. When the local check says up but the external vantage says down, it flags "Unreachable from outside" — the outage your customers would actually experience.

Question 44

How to keep getting paged while something stays down

Accepted Answer

By default a monitor pages once, when it flips to down. If that page is missed at 2am, nothing mentions it again. Ongoing-outage reminders keep the agent on duty informed while a service stays down, with a hard cap, so it can never become a pager loop. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Uptime monitors and click Edit on the monitor you want. 2. Set "Remind every (minutes)", for example 60. Leaving it at 0 keeps today's behaviour: one page on the way down and nothing after. 3. Set "Max reminders per outage" (default 3). This is a hard ceiling: with 60 and 3, an outage produces at most four notifications in total (the first page plus three reminders) and then goes quiet, no matter how long it lasts. 4. Save. Reminders go to whoever is on duty per your on-call rotation, exactly like the first page, and include how long the service has been down. 5. When an outage is under way, the monitor shows a "Down for 4h 12m" badge and a count of reminders sent. Click Acknowledge to stop the reminders.

Question 45

How to set up an on-call rotation

Accepted Answer

Without a rotation, every monitor flap and every SLA breach notifies every member of the workspace, which is how a team ends up muting the channel and missing the outage that mattered. A rotation sends those alerts to the one agent actually on duty. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click On-call rotations, then click New rotation. 2. Name it, pick a Cadence (Daily, Weekly, or Every N days) and for a weekly rotation choose the weekday it hands over on. 3. Set the Handoff time and Timezone. The handoff stays at that wall-clock time through daylight-saving changes, so a 09:00 handoff never drifts to 08:00. 4. Set "Rotation starts". This is the anchor: whoever is first in the list takes the first shift on or after that instant, and every shift before and after is calculated from it. Nothing is generated in advance, so there is no schedule to backfill and no gap at the end of the year. 5. Build the Rotation order with "+ Add agent", using ↑ / ↓ to set who follows whom. Save. 6. Check the "On call now" card and the Next 14 days list to confirm the shifts land where you expect; that preview is produced by the same code that decides who gets paged, so what you see is what will happen. 7. Cover a swap with an Override: pick the agent, a From and Until, and a reason. The override beats the rotation for exactly that window, and the rotation resumes the moment it ends. 8. Keep a noisy monitor off the pager by unticking "Page the on-call agent" on it in Admin → Uptime monitors. 9. To page on-call for SLA breaches too, add an escalation rule in Admin → SLA policies with the "Escalate to on-call" action.

Question 46

How to declare and update a public incident

Accepted Answer

Keep customers informed with a public timeline: investigating, identified, monitoring, resolved. 1. Go to Admin → "Public status page" and under Incidents click + Declare incident. 2. Enter a Title (e.g. "Auth service degraded"), pick the Impact and Affected assets (affected assets are posted to degraded automatically), set the Initial status, and write the initial public update (Markdown OK). Click Declare. 3. As things progress, click Post update on the incident, pick the new Status (investigating / identified / monitoring / resolved), and write the update body. 4. Each incident gets a stable permalink (/status/your-slug/incidents/:id) with its full timeline, the same link subscribers receive by email. 5. After resolution, add a Postmortem from the same page: a root-cause retrospective that renders below the public timeline.

Question 47

How to schedule a maintenance window

Accepted Answer

Give customers a calm heads-up before planned downtime instead of a red alert during it. 1. Go to Admin → "Public status page" and under Scheduled maintenance click + Schedule window. 2. Enter a Title (e.g. "Database upgrade — brief downtime"), the Starts and Ends times, and Details shown publicly (Markdown OK). 3. Click Schedule. The window appears on your status page as an "Upcoming" notice, flips to "In progress" during the window, then "Completed". 4. Maintenance never trips the failure posture banner and never changes any asset status — it reads as planned, because it is.

Question 48

How customers subscribe to status updates

Accepted Answer

Double opt-in email subscriptions keep customers informed on every incident: declare or update, they get the mail. 1. Customers enter their email in the Subscribe form on your public status page. 2. They receive a confirmation email and must click it before any updates are sent (double opt-in, no accidental spam). 3. Confirmed subscribers are emailed automatically whenever you declare or update an incident (including incidents auto-declared by uptime monitors), with the title, current status, update body, and a link to the incident permalink. 4. Every email includes a one-click unsubscribe link.

Question 49

How to import Sentry issues as tickets

Accepted Answer

A daily sync opens a Desk ticket for every unresolved Sentry issue that matches your filters — deduped across runs. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Sentry import. 2. Enter your Sentry base URL (https://sentry.io or self-hosted), organization slug, project slug, and a Sentry auth token. 3. Set the Minimum level (debug → fatal) and optionally an Environment filter (e.g. production). 4. Choose which ticket type imports are reported as and their Ticket priority, then save. 5. The sync runs daily; imported issues are tracked so re-runs never create duplicates. The Recent imports list shows what came in.

Question 50

How to bill support time to Hitt Hosting Books

Accepted Answer

Turn billable time entries into a Books invoice without leaving Desk — one ticket at a time, or a client’s whole unbilled backlog in one pass. 1. Set your rate first: Workspace → Overview → Support billing rate. Enter a default $/hour, and optionally a different rate per labor category (direct, indirect, B&P, IR&D). Without a rate the billing button asks you for one every time. 2. To bill one ticket: open it, go to the Time tab, tick the billable entries you want, and click Bill time. Already-invoiced entries have no checkbox — they cannot be selected twice. 3. Pick the Books customer, optionally override the rate for this invoice, and check the preview: it shows the entries, the minutes, and the exact dollar total you are about to charge. 4. Click Create invoice. A draft invoice appears in Books with one line per ticket, and the entries are immediately marked INVOICED here. 5. To bill a whole client at once: click Unbilled time in the sidebar (or the unbilled-backlog tile on Reports). Filter by organization and date range, select across as many tickets as you like, and raise ONE invoice — which is what you want for fifty small tickets against one client this month. 6. To attach an invoice you raised in Books directly: on the ticket, under Hitt suite → Books invoice, click Attach invoice and pick it. The ticket then shows the invoice number and status, and Detach clears the link.

Question 51

How to link GitLab commits and MRs to tickets

Accepted Answer

Mention a ticket key in a commit or merge request and it links itself to the ticket, optionally resolving it on merge. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click GitLab links and enable the integration. 2. Under Webhook setup, Copy the webhook URL and add it to your GitLab project (Settings → Webhooks) for push and merge-request events. 3. Choose which member internal notes are posted as. 4. From now on, any commit or MR that mentions a ticket key (REQ-101, INC-42) is linked to that ticket, with a system note recording the ref, title, author, and URL. 5. Optionally check "Auto-resolve tickets when a referencing merge request is merged"; the resolve runs through the same audited pipeline as a human resolve, webhooks and CSAT included.

Question 52

How to import contacts (from Hitt CRM or CSV)

Accepted Answer

Bulk-onboard your existing customers from the suite CRM or any CSV export. 1. In the sidebar under Manage, click Contacts. 2. Click "Import from CRM", search your Hitt CRM contacts, and pick the ones to bring over — names, emails, and companies come with them. 3. Or click Import CSV and upload a file with headers: name, email, phone, company, notes (quoted fields, commas in values, and multi-line cells are handled). 4. Imports dedupe on email, so re-importing the same file is safe. CSV batches are bounded to 500 rows with a per-row audit.

Question 53

How to send ticket events to other systems with webhooks

Accepted Answer

HMAC-signed POSTs push ticket events into team chat, on-call tools, automation platforms, or your own services. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Webhooks, then click New webhook. 2. Enter a Name and the destination URL (https only), then pick the Events to subscribe to: created, updated, replied, assigned, resolved, closed, snoozed. 3. Set Max attempts (1–10, with exponential backoff) and add any custom headers the target needs. 4. Click Create, then copy the Webhook signing secret; verify the X-Desk-Signature (HMAC-SHA256) header on your side. 5. Click Test fire to validate the wiring, then open Deliveries to see the result. The delivery log keeps status code, latency, error, and attempt count for the last 50 deliveries.

Question 54

How to create API tokens for programmatic access

Accepted Answer

Personal access tokens give scripts and CI jobs Bearer access to the whole Desk API — no password sharing. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click API tokens, then click New token. 2. Name it after what will use it (e.g. "GitHub Actions deploy log"), pick a Scope (read-only, read-write, or admin), and optionally set an expiry. 3. Click Create, then "Copy to clipboard"; the hdsk_… token is shown once and stored SHA-256 hashed, so this is your only chance. 4. Use it as a Bearer token on any /api/desk/* endpoint. Each token tracks its last-used time, and you can revoke it anytime from the same page.

Question 55

How to invite teammates and set roles

Accepted Answer

Token-based invites with four roles (owner, admin, agent, viewer) and strict role-gated permissions. 1. In the sidebar under Admin, click Workspace and open the Members tab. 2. Click Invite member, enter their Email, and pick a Role. 3. Roles at a glance: Owner (everything, plus delete workspace and transfer ownership; exactly one per workspace), Admin (manage members, workflows, types, automations, SLAs, webhooks, tokens, status page, billing), Agent (work tickets they're assigned or that are unassigned), Viewer (read-only). 4. The invite link is single-use and expires; the invitee accepts it to join. 5. Change a member's role anytime from the Members table, or transfer ownership from the same page.

Question 56

How to start a trial and choose a plan

Accepted Answer

Every feature is available on every plan; plans differ only by seats. The 14-day trial unlocks everything, no card required. 1. Start from the Pricing page: the Free trial gives you 14 days of the full product. 2. When you're ready (or the trial ends), go to Billing in the sidebar under Admin and click "Choose a Plan". 3. Pick Pro or Business. Both are honest per-seat pricing with everything included; nothing is feature-gated. 4. Complete checkout with your card. Invoices, card updates ("Update card"), and cancellation all live on the same Billing page. 5. Your data is never hostage: the Data export section gives you a full JSON workspace export anytime.

Question 57

How to apply a coupon at checkout

Accepted Answer

Coupon codes are entered on the checkout review step, before you reach payment. 1. Go to Billing → "Choose a Plan" and pick your plan to reach checkout. 2. On the review step, find the "Have a coupon?" field, enter your code, and apply it. 3. The discount is validated and shown before you pay. Then click "Continue to payment" and enter your card details. 4. Arrived from a link with ?coupon=CODE in the URL? The code is pre-filled and applied automatically; review and continue.

Question 58

How to get the ops digest emailed to you

Accepted Answer

Instead of remembering to open Reports, have the SLA-attainment, backlog, CSAT and volume summary arrive in your inbox on a schedule you choose. 1. Go to Workspace settings → the Automation tab, and scroll to "Scheduled ops digest". 2. Tick "Enable the ops digest". It is off by default, so nothing is sent until you turn it on. 3. Pick a cadence: Weekly (then choose the weekday) or Daily. 4. Set the send hour (0–23). It uses your workspace timezone from Business hours, so there is no separate timezone to configure. 5. Set the reporting window in days (1–90; 7 by default); this is the period the numbers cover. 6. Click Save. To see it immediately, click "Send test digest now"; it delivers the current window to the same recipients.

How to get things done in Hitt Hosting Desk

Tickets & Shared Inbox

Types, Workflows & Custom Fields

Email, Chat & Auto-Replies

Automation & Productivity

SLAs & Business Hours

Knowledge Base & Customer Portal

CSAT & Reporting

Status Pages & Monitoring

Integrations & API

Team & Billing

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