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Helpdesk

GARP Helpdesk is the support desk at https://<workspace>.garp.aiconec.com/helpdesk. Customers raise tickets by email or through a portal; agents answer them from a shared inbox with response and resolution targets; a knowledge base lets customers find answers before they ask. The Helpdesk tile on the apps screen goes to the same place, and only appears for people who have an agent, manager or admin role.

Contacts in Helpdesk are the same contact records the rest of GARP ERP uses, so the person who raised a ticket is the person your sales team already knows. Customers are not: Helpdesk keeps its own Customers list, separate from the customers you invoice in Sales and Purchasing, and a ticket does not show sales history.

Key concepts​

  • Ticket — one support request, with a subject, description, Ticket Type, Priority, Status, the raising contact and the assigned agent. A new workspace has the types Question, Bug and Incident, plus Unspecified for anything that arrives without one, and the priorities Urgent, High, Medium and Low, with Medium the default.
  • Status — you define your own. A new workspace has Open, Replied, Resolved and Closed. Every status has a category — Open, Paused or Resolved — that tells the SLA clock whether to run, pause or stop, and can carry a second name for customers: Replied shows on the portal as Awaiting Response.
  • Agent — a user who works tickets, invited as Agent, Manager or Admin. An agent works tickets and builds private views; a manager also invites agents and manages public views; an admin manages everything.
  • Team — a group of agents. Creating a team also creates a support rotation for it, which hands new open tickets to its members in turn. The rotation stays switched off until you put agents in the team.
  • Service Level Agreement (SLA) — a policy that sets the first-response and resolution time for each priority, the working hours it counts in, and the holiday list it skips. A ticket shows First Response and Resolution counting down, and its SLA Status turns to Failed when a target is missed.
  • Knowledge Base — categories and articles. Published articles appear on the customer portal and are suggested to a customer while they are typing a new ticket.
  • Saved Replies — reply templates an agent drops into an email from the reply editor.
  • Customer portal — the same address, at /helpdesk/my-tickets, where contacts raise tickets, follow their history and read articles. Anyone who is not an agent, manager or admin lands there automatically. The portal needs a login; there is no anonymous view.

How it fits together​

Email / portal / agent ─▶ Ticket ─▶ team rotation or manual assignment ─▶ replies ─▶ Resolved ─▶ Closed
                            │
                        SLA clock (first response and resolution targets)

Replies go out by email and the customer's answers come back onto the same ticket, so the thread stays in one place. A customer reply also reopens the ticket to Open.

Common tasks​

Set up an inbound support address​

  1. In Helpdesk, open Settings, then Email Accounts, and add an account. Pick your provider — GMail, Outlook, Yahoo, Yandex, SparkPost, Frappe Mail — or Custom to enter your own IMAP and SMTP servers.
  2. Enter the address and its password, tick Enable Incoming and Enable Outgoing, and tick Default Incoming and Default Outgoing if this is the address support runs on. The credentials are tested before the account saves.
  3. There is no second step. The account is created already set to turn new mail into tickets, and replies go out from it. Helpdesk follows the mail thread's own headers, so a customer's answer lands back on the ticket it belongs to even when the message has been forwarded. Auto-generated mail is skipped, so out-of-office notices do not open tickets.

Work a ticket as an agent​

  1. Open /helpdesk. You land on Home, which shows your assigned tickets, the ones waiting on your reply, your recent feedback and your average response and resolution times. Choose Tickets in the sidebar for the full list, or Dashboard for ticket volumes, the share of tickets that met their SLA, and average response, resolution and rating figures. A manager can point the dashboard at any agent or team; an agent sees only their own.
  2. The sidebar carries four ready-made views, each already filtered to you: SLA Due, Recently Assigned Tickets, Pending Tickets and My Feedback. For anything else, filter the list yourself and save the view as private or public.
  3. Open a ticket. Use Reply to answer the customer or Comment for an internal note only agents see. The panel tabs are Activity, Emails, Comments and Calls.
  4. Set priority, type and team if the defaults are wrong, and change the status when you are done. Nothing closes a ticket by itself unless you switch on Automatically close stale tickets under Settings, then General, which closes tickets in a status you choose after a set number of days with no message — 14 by default. Customers can also close their own ticket from the portal, and are asked to rate it when they do.

Define an SLA​

  1. Open Settings, then SLA Policies. A policy called Default is already there: 30 minutes to respond and 2 hours to resolve for Urgent, 1 and 4 hours for High, 8 and 24 hours for Medium, 24 and 72 hours for Low, on Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 18:00.
  2. Edit it, or click New SLA Policy. Under Response and Resolution, set the first-response and resolution time for each priority. Under Work Schedule and Holidays, set the working days and hours and pick a holiday list.
  3. Under Assignment Conditions, choose which tickets the policy covers — a ticket type or a customer, for example. Tickets matching no policy fall back to the one marked Set as default SLA.

The clock pauses on any status in the Paused category, which by default means the ticket sitting at Replied while you wait for the customer does not burn resolution time.

Publish a knowledge base article​

  1. Open Knowledge Base in the sidebar and pick a category, or click Add Category. A category called General is there from the start.
  2. Click New Article, write it, and press Publish. Until then it stays a Draft; later you can Unpublish it or move it to Archived.
  3. Published articles show on the customer portal. They are also offered to a customer as soon as they have typed a few characters of a subject on the new-ticket form, above the description box, so common questions can be answered before the ticket is submitted.
note

The default SLA runs Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 18:00, in your workspace's time zone, and its holiday list is empty. Set your real hours and build a list under Settings, then Business Holidays, before you rely on the countdown: Recurring Holidays covers weekends, and single dates cover Idul Fitri, cuti bersama and the other national holidays. Helpdesk is translated into Indonesian, and each person sees it in the language set on their GARP user record.

Setup checklist​

  1. Agents, invited under Settings, then Invite Agents, and grouped into teams under Settings, then Teams. Adding agents to a team switches on that team's rotation.
  2. Ticket types, priorities and statuses, if the defaults do not fit. These live in the desk at /app/hd-ticket-type, /app/hd-ticket-priority and /app/hd-ticket-status.
  3. A holiday list, then at least one SLA policy that uses it and your working hours.
  4. The support email account.
  5. Knowledge base categories and a few starter articles.
  6. Portal access for customers. Set a Domain on each customer record and every contact created from an email at that domain is linked to it automatically. Emailing in creates the contact but not a login, so open the contact under Contacts and use Invite as user to send them a portal invitation.
  • CRM — the same contact records, before the sale. CRM organizations and Helpdesk customers are separate lists.
  • LMS — turn frequently asked questions into a customer course.
  • Invite your team — agents are system users and count against your plan's user limit; portal customers are website users and do not.