Running a helpdesk

Helpdesk, in the Engage part of the sidebar, lets your site's visitors ask you for help as tickets. They write from Support in their account on your site, and your editors and admins answer here. Visitors need to be signed in, so every ticket has a real address to answer.

Set it up

1. 1Open Helpdesk, then Helpdesk settings.
2. 2Leave Take new tickets on, and write a few Words above the form: what to ask here, and how soon you answer.
3. 3Enter an address under Email new tickets to if someone should hear about each new one.
4. 4Add Saved replies for the answers you write every week, so they're one click away when you reply.

Answer tickets

The queue shows open work first, with a dot on anything new. Open a ticket to read the conversation and reply. Next to the reply box, choose the status it should have afterwards; a reply normally waits for the visitor. Turn on Internal note to write something only your team sees.

On the right, set the Priority and Topic, and choose who a ticket is Assigned to. Whoever replies to an unassigned ticket takes it, and gets an email when the visitor writes again.

The assistant

With the helpdesk assistant in your plan, visitors see an answer from your knowledge base before they send a ticket, with the matching entries, and can say it solved their question. On your side, Draft a reply writes a reply from the conversation and your entries. Read it and change it before you send: it only knows what your knowledge base says.

The numbers at the top of the queue show how many tickets were opened and solved in the last 30 days, how many questions the knowledge base answered, and how satisfied visitors were.