Support
Service desk
What a ticket is, how states drive the clock, and the two things the desk refuses to let you record.
A ticket is what a customer asked for. It has a requester, a channel it arrived on, a queue, and a promise about how quickly it will be answered. Everything else on this page follows from taking that promise seriously.
A ticket is not a work item
It is deliberately its own record rather than an issue on the backlog. A work item cannot exist without a project and carries a rank, an estimate and a sprint; a ticket has none of those and belongs to no cadence. Putting tickets on the backlog either pollutes the sprint order or invents a second board nobody looks at.
Escalation is a link, never a conversion
When a reported bug needs actual work, the ticket points at a work item and stays open with its clock running while the fix enters a sprint. Turning one into the other would make *how long the customer waited* and *how long the fix took* the same number — and those are two different people's questions.
States are yours; categories are what the clock reads
Call them what you like — New, With us, With the client, Done. Each one is filed under a category, and the category is what the product reasons about. It is the same arrangement workflow states use for work items.
| Category | What it does to the clock |
|---|---|
| Open | Runs |
| Waiting on the customer | Pauses — the remaining time is kept for when they answer |
| Resolved | Stops, and the ticket can still be reopened |
| Closed | Stops |
Which category you choose is a decision about your own numbers
Filing “Awaiting a third party” under Open means the clock keeps running while you wait on somebody who is not your customer. Filing it under Waiting means it does not. Neither is wrong; the product will not guess, and it spells each one out on the settings screen for that reason.
Two things the desk refuses to let you do
- Pause the clock before anybody has replied
- Otherwise the first-response target is met by changing a dropdown, and the measurement stops meaning anything. Reply first, then mark it as waiting on them.
- Count an internal note as a response
- An internal note is never sent and never counts. Neither does an automatic acknowledgement — a desk that let one count would meet every response target by configuring a robot, which is the exact thing the measurement exists to detect.
Everything else is allowed. There is no matrix of permitted moves: every desk that has one ends up with an agent who cannot record what actually happened, and the workaround is always to close the ticket and open another — which destroys the history the desk exists to keep.
The queue
One list, in four views: everything open, the ones assigned to you, the ones assigned to nobody, and what has been resolved. Each row carries its own two clocks — first reply and resolution — so what is urgent is visible without opening anything.
It is ordered by priority and age, not by how close the SLA is
That would be the obvious sort and it is the wrong one. The remaining time is derived rather than stored, so it cannot be a database ordering — which would leave sorting the page of results that came back instead of the queue. That looks right and is worse than not sorting at all, because you would trust it.
Who can do what
The desk sits on the work-management role, not a third ladder. An agent answering a customer is doing work management, and a separate role would mean every organisation configuring two. See Roles and access.
| Owner | Admin | Manager | Member | Guest | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read the queue and tickets | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | — |
| Reply, assign, move, merge | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | — |
| Configure states, policies, the support address, canned replies and the help centre | Yes | Yes | — | — | — |
Every member can work the queue
Deliberately. A desk where only managers can answer a customer, or only managers can see what was asked for, is one where the rest of the organisation has no idea what customers are dealing with. Configuring the desk is the part that is restricted, because it changes what everybody promises.
Addresses worth knowing
| Address | What it is |
|---|---|
/desk | The queue. ?scope=mine, unassigned and resolved are the other three views. |
/desk/412 | One ticket, by the number — that is what gets read out on the phone and pasted into an email. A merged number redirects to the ticket it was folded into. |
/desk/insights | What the queue is doing. ?days=7 and ?days=90 are the other windows. |
/settings/service-desk | States, policies, canned replies, the help centre and the shared address, on one screen. |
/help/<your-organisation> | Your public help centre, if you have connected one. |
The rest of it
- [The SLA clock](/docs/service-desk-sla)
- How the promise is measured: business minutes against your own opening hours and holidays, derived on every read, and never paused because an agent is away.
- [Where tickets come from](/docs/service-desk-channels)
- Email at a shared address, the chat widget, the customer portal, and tickets raised by hand — and why an out-of-office reply must never open one.
- [Working a ticket](/docs/service-desk-working)
- Replying, internal notes, canned replies, assignment, merging two tickets about one problem, and escalating to a work item.
- [What the customer sees](/docs/service-desk-customer)
- Their own view of their own ticket, what is deliberately kept off it, and the one question asked when it is resolved.
- [The help centre](/docs/service-desk-knowledge)
- Articles written in SharePoint or Google Docs, published as a public help site you choose the contents of.
- [Desk insights](/docs/service-desk-insights)
- What the queue is doing — attainment against what was promised, how long things take, volume by channel, and the one list that can still be acted on.
- [Setting it up](/docs/service-desk-setup)
- States, what you promise, opening hours, the support address, and what each of them does to tickets that already exist.
What it does not do
- Time can be recorded against a ticket and priced onto an invoice, but whether a contract already covers it cannot be answered — retainers, block hours and included allowances belong to a professional-services module that does not exist.
- No trend over time in [insights](/docs/service-desk-insights). Every figure is one period; comparing two means opening the page twice.
- No splitting a ticket that turns out to be two problems. Merging exists and the reverse does not.
- The help centre is not offered inside the chat widget, which is the other place somebody could be answered before they write in. A hosted form can now open a ticket, but does not suggest an article either.
- No change or problem management, no asset database, no call-centre routing. Those are a different product for a different kind of organisation.