Service desk

Customers and contacts, the ticket inbox, SLAs, email to ticket, time, contracts, the customer portal, problems, changes, the service catalogue and status pages.

1. 1 Service desk overview What the built-in service desk covers, how its parts fit together and where to find each one.
2. 2 Customers, sites and contacts Add the companies you look after, their offices, departments and people, with account managers, groups of companies, site hours, contact roles and a record of every email you send them.
3. 3 The ticket inbox Find the tickets that need you with built-in views, queues, unread markers, filters and saved views, let queues assign new tickets, and work through them in bulk or from the keyboard.
4. 4 Creating tickets Log a phone call or open a ticket on someone's behalf, and understand the other ways tickets arrive on their own.
5. 5 Working a ticket Reply to the customer, add and pin internal notes, use macros, change status, priority and assignment, use the details panel, set a needed by date, merge duplicates, resolve with resolution details and turn a fix into an article.
6. 6 Ticket setup and SLAs Set up queues, statuses, priorities with their SLA targets, types, categories and business calendars, find the rest of the Ticket setup tabs, and write the canned responses your team uses.
7. 7 Email to ticket and alert rules Connect a support mailbox so mail becomes tickets and replies, decide what your team's own email becomes, route mail with rules, handle unknown senders, spam and bounces, choose what customers are emailed, redact sensitive text, and choose which alerts open tickets.
8. 8 Logging time Record time against tickets or customers with timers that follow you or by hand, say why time is not billable, charge parts and fees on tickets, and review time before it is billed with rate cards, lock dates and unbilled work.
9. 9 Contracts and invoicing Contract types including all-you-can-eat IT support per user, several contracts per customer with rules and a default, what a contract covers, items by hand with one-off charges and instalments, amendments, renewal quotes, signed agreements, purchase orders, billing holds, and how contracts reach your invoices, Xero and QuickBooks.
10. 10 The customer portal and feedback Give contacts a portal to raise and follow their tickets, choose which portal sections each customer gets, ask customers how you did, and show their best comments on your website.
11. 11 SLA policies and escalations Set up SLA policies per priority, decide which tickets follow them, including by department and for VIPs, escalate before and after a target is missed, read each ticket's SLA verdict, and give queues their own internal OLAs.
12. 12 Problems and major incidents Group tickets under a parent, work the root cause behind repeat incidents as a problem, and run an outage as a major incident with one timeline and one update to everyone affected.
13. 13 Change management Plan changes to customers' systems, assess the risk, get approval from your team and the customer, check the change calendar for clashes, then run and review them.
14. 14 Checklists, ticket templates and recurring tickets Keep a library of checklists for tickets and project tasks, fill tickets in with one click from a template, and raise routine work on a schedule for each customer.
15. 15 The service catalogue Give customers a catalogue of things they can ask for in the portal, each with its own form, approval and fulfilment, and follow every request from approval to done.
16. 16 Approvals One approvals engine for everything that should wait for a yes, the Approvals inbox, approvals on tickets, how customers approve by email or in the portal, and what goes through approvals.
17. 17 Status pages Publish your own public status page and a page per customer, with services driven by monitoring, incidents and planned maintenance, and updates to subscribers by email or text.
18. 18 Approval rules, delegation and out of office Set reminders, escalation and expiry, build approval chains with cost thresholds, give each customer an approval matrix, and make sure approvals keep moving while people are away.
19. 19 Contact roles, merging and duplicates Give contacts roles that decide who gets invoices, quotes, reports, outage notices and approval requests, find possible duplicate customers and contacts, and merge or move them safely.
20. 20 Replies, forwarding and scheduled send Choose who each reply goes to, forward a ticket to a supplier and get their answer back on it, use signatures and macros, send later or undo a send, and log time as you reply.
21. 21 Snooze, reminders, merge and split Snooze tickets until they matter, set reminders on any record, chase and close waiting tickets automatically, handle replies to old tickets, split, link and unmerge tickets, escalate with a reason and read the service desk metrics.
22. 22 Information requests Send a customer's contacts the questions you need answered, let them fill them in at their own pace in the portal, and chase, review and complete each request from one list.
23. 23 Forms and question types Build every form in one library, with phone, address, table and vault questions, conditions that show questions and sections only when they apply, answers filled in from what Tenvara knows, and a version for every change.
24. 24 Putting answers to work Use a customer's answers in project tasks and emails with merge fields, hold a task or phase until a set is answered, save answers into your records after a preview, export a request, and fill a request in from a file.
25. 25 Takeover mode Take a customer over from another provider without the two of you clashing. Agents enrol and report, findings go to one report, and nothing is patched, installed, enforced, automated or backed up until you say so.
26. 26 Onboarding mode and going live A new customer starts in onboarding mode, where everything found goes to one findings report and nothing changes their machines by itself, until you mark the customer live.
27. 27 Departments Give each customer's departments a cost centre, a manager and a place in the structure, put contacts and devices in them, and use them for approvals and SLA policies.
28. 28 What a queue does to a ticket's status Give each queue its own status rules for replies, notes, assignments and moves, choose the statuses it uses and its reopen window, chase and close its own way, and set the status from Send or from your own email.
29. 29 On-hold reasons and paused SLAs Put a ticket on hold with a reason and a date, use Scheduled and Awaiting parts or order, pause only some SLA clocks, and work from the On hold view.
30. 30 Ticket categories Sort tickets into categories three levels deep, start from the ready-made tree, require a category per queue or ticket type, and use categories in SLAs, AI triage, macros and resolution codes.
31. 31 Newsletters and automatic mail: Probably not support Where newsletters and automatic mail that your mailbox rules let through end up, how to decide It is support, Not a ticket or Block sender, and the rules that stop automatic emails going to no-reply addresses.
32. 32 Verifying who a caller is Check that the person asking for a password reset, an MFA reset or an access change is who they say they are, using only the details you already hold, with a policy per customer, a blocker on sensitive tickets and a record of every check.
33. 33 Out-of-hours cover per queue Choose who handles each queue out of hours, nobody, your own on-call rota, a third-party provider or a mix, and how held work, SLA clocks, the morning list and providers' replies work.
34. 34 Tickets that link back to their alert or chat See the live alert behind a ticket, raise a ticket from an alert where the alert rules would put it, act on a Microsoft 365 user from their alert ticket, and raise a ticket from a chat that carries on.