Service desk overview

Tenvara has a service desk built in: customers and their contacts, tickets, email, SLAs, time, contracts and a customer portal, plus problems, major incidents, changes, a service catalogue and status pages when you need them. It is tied into everything else in Tenvara. A ticket can link to the customer's devices and alerts, a chat can become a ticket, and time on a ticket counts against the customer's contract.

The service desk is what a new install starts with. Devices, monitoring, backup and the other areas are switched on one at a time in Settings > Modules.

The parts#

The Service desk sidebar follows the same order: your ticket views and queues, then Requests, Conversations, Service management and Time, with Service desk settings at the bottom.

How work arrives#

Tickets come in from several places, and all of them end up in the same inbox:

• Email. Mail to a support mailbox becomes a new ticket, or a reply on an existing one. See Email to ticket and alert rules.
• Phone and in person. A technician logs the call with New ticket. See Creating tickets.
• The customer portal. Contacts with portal access raise tickets themselves, or ask for something from the service catalogue.
• Teams and Slack. Your customers' people can raise tickets from the Teams or Slack app. See The Teams and Slack apps.
• A schedule. Recurring tickets raise routine work, such as the monthly server check, for each customer.
• Alerts. Alert rules turn monitoring, backup, security and other alerts into tickets.
• Chat. A ticket can be raised from a chat while the chat carries on (see Chats and tickets).
• The tray. People on managed computers report a problem with a screenshot, or record their screen with Record a problem (see Record a problem).

When a new ticket arrives, the queue can assign it straight away by round robin, fewest open tickets or skill, among its members who are working now. Tickets from unknown senders wait in No customer (triage) until someone places them, newsletters and automatic mail that a mailbox rule let through wait in Probably not support, and a new email that matches one of the sender's open tickets is added to it instead of opening a duplicate. Out of hours, each queue follows the cover you chose: your own rota, a provider, or nobody until the morning (see Out-of-hours cover per queue).

Whoever makes a change (a technician, a contact in the portal, an email, an alert rule), it goes through the same path. The ticket's activity log, its SLA clock, the customer's timeline, notifications and live updates are therefore always in step.

What a ticket carries#

Every ticket has a number (from #1001 upwards, never reused), a subject, and:

• a status (moved on by its queue's status rules, and with a reason and a date when it is on hold), priority, type, queue and a category up to three levels deep, an assignee, and anyone else Also working on it,
• the customer, site and requester (a contact, or a name and email for someone who is not a contact yet), plus anyone in Cc,
• public replies, which are emailed to the requester, internal notes, which never are, and forwards to suppliers with their answers,
• attachments, linked devices and linked alerts,
• time entries and expenses,
• SLA targets for the first response, the next update and the resolution, from its SLA policy,
• checklists, links to a parent ticket or child tickets when several people report the same thing, and linked related tickets,
• a Needed by date when the customer needs it by a day, reminders, and resolution details once it is resolved,
• a customer rating once it is resolved, if feedback is turned on,
• an activity log of every change.

Where tickets show up#

Tickets are not only in the inbox. They also appear where the objects they belong to are:

• the Service tab on a customer page, which opens on its Tickets,
• the tickets section on a contact page and on a device page, each with a button to raise a new one,
• the linked ticket on an alert, and the alert on the ticket,
• the command menu (Cmd+K or Ctrl+K), where you can search for a ticket by number or subject.

Notifications#

You get a notification in the bell in the top bar when someone else assigns you a ticket, when a customer or a supplier replies on one of your tickets, when a ticket is escalated to you, when a snoozed ticket comes back or a reminder is due, and when one of your tickets is close to or misses an SLA target. They arrive live, without reloading. What you hear about, and how, follows your role and your own choices: see Notifications. People whose work is not support, such as sales and finance, are not sent support tickets, ticket alerts or support chats.

You can answer a ticket notification email: your answer is added to the ticket as an internal note.

Settings for the service desk#

The service desk settings are in the Service desk group of Settings, and Service desk settings at the bottom of the sidebar opens the first of them:

Three more sit in other groups: Contact roles (under Records) sets what each role at a customer receives and can do in the portal, Alert rules (under Devices and monitoring) chooses which alerts become tickets, and Channels (under Automation and AI) holds on-call and the Out-of-hours providers tab.

Note: Tickets, time and contracts live in the built-in service desk, which Settings > External PSA shows as the active ticketing system.

In this section#

1. Customers, sites and contacts
2. The ticket inbox
3. Creating tickets
4. Working a ticket
5. Ticket setup and SLAs
6. Email to ticket and alert rules
7. Logging time
8. Contracts
9. The customer portal and feedback
10. SLA policies and escalations
11. Problems and major incidents
12. Change management
13. Checklists, ticket templates and recurring tickets
14. The service catalogue
15. Approvals
16. Status pages
17. Approval rules, delegation and out of office
18. Contact roles, merging and duplicates
19. Replies, forwarding and scheduled send
20. Snooze, reminders, merge and split
21. Information requests
22. Forms and question types
23. Putting answers to work
24. Takeover mode
25. Onboarding mode and going live
26. Departments
27. What a queue does to a ticket's status
28. On-hold reasons and paused SLAs
29. Ticket categories
30. Newsletters and automatic mail: Probably not support
31. Verifying who a caller is
32. Out-of-hours cover per queue
33. Tickets that link back to their alert or chat