Welcome
What the service desk is for, the handful of ideas everything else builds on, and a map of where to go next.
This is a service desk: one place where the people you look after ask for help, and where your team answers, tracks and resolves those requests. It works for an internal IT desk, a customer support team, a school office, a facilities team or anyone else who handles requests from other people. Nothing in it is tied to one industry.
The core ideas
- Workspace: your organization's own space. Everything below lives inside one workspace, and the people in it share its settings, projects and tickets. One person can belong to several workspaces and switch between them.
- Members: the people on your team who work tickets (agents, approvers, admins). Each has a role that decides what they can see and change.
- Projects: how tickets are grouped, usually one per team, service or queue (IT, HR, Facilities, Billing…). Every ticket belongs to exactly one project, and its key starts with the project's key, like SUP-42.
- Tickets: a single request, incident, question or change. A ticket has a type (its tracker), a status, a priority, an assignee, a conversation and a history.
- Requesters: the people who raise tickets. Your workspace may call them customers, employees, students or something else. Requesters are not members: they do not sign in to the app and do not use a seat.
- SLAs: response and resolution targets per priority. Every new ticket gets its targets, and the app warns and escalates as a ticket gets close to missing them.
- The portal: public pages for requesters where they can report a problem, follow their tickets, read Help Center articles and check the status page, without an account in the app.
How a ticket arrives
Requesters reach you by whichever channels you switch on:
- Email to your support address (Tickets by email).
- Slack or Microsoft Teams (Tickets from Slack and Teams).
- A chat button on your website (Chat widget).
- The public portal and its report form (Customer portal).
- An agent raising it for them (Raising a ticket).
However it arrives, it becomes an ordinary ticket in a project, picks up its SLA targets and, if you have set up assignment rules, an assignee.
A map of the app
The sidebar is grouped by what you are doing. What you see depends on your role and on what your workspace's plan includes.
- Home, Inbox and Chat at the top: your dashboard, your notifications and live conversations waiting for an answer.
- Service desk: Tickets, Service Catalog, Board and Known Errors. See Tickets overview and Service catalog.
- Change: Calendar, Risk, Approvals, On-call and CAB Agenda, for planned changes and who approves them. See Change requests.
- Assets: Configuration Items and Discovery, the record of what you support. See Configuration items.
- Insights: Intake forms, Dashboards, Workload, Reports and Report Builder. See Insights and dashboards.
- Projects: every project you can see, plus All projects.
- Workspace: Members, your requesters (shown under your workspace's own word, such as Customers), Docs, Files, Settings, Coming from… and, for admins, Admin.
Who does what
Every member has one workspace role. A new workspace starts with Owner, Admin, Member, Approver, Auditor and Guest. These are built in and cannot be edited, but admins can create roles of their own. Owners and Admins set the workspace up; Members work tickets in the projects they can see. See Roles.
On your phone
There is also a mobile app for members. Sign in with the same account to see your tickets, raise new ones, answer approvals, read your Inbox and get push notifications. Workspaces are created on the web, so sign up there first.
Where to start
- Create a workspace and invite your team.
- Set up projects for the teams or services that take requests.
- Connect a channel, such as email.
- Set response targets in SLA policies.
- Learn the screens in Finding your way around.