What Helpdesk is for

Your AI agent answers customers on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram, email and your website. Helpdesk is the desk around it. Every conversation arrives as a ticket, the routine ones close themselves, and the ones that need a person reach the right one, with a summary on top.

It is built for you if any of these sound familiar:

You scroll through chats to find the ones that need you. The agent answers most of them, but you can't tell at a glance which customers are still waiting.
More than one person answers customers. You need to know who is on which conversation, hand the right ones to the right person, and leave each other notes.
Some requests need more than an answer. A refund someone has to approve, an invoice someone has to fix, a reminder that the job still isn't done.

A manager for your AI agents. The agent still does the talking, on the channels you connected in Agents. Helpdesk runs the desk around it: it decides what each agent can see and do, resolves the routine, escalates what matters, keeps score, and keeps your team on only what needs a human.

One inbox for every conversation

WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram, email and your website chat all flow into the same inbox. When the customer writes again, the same ticket picks up the new messages, and a customer who starts on Instagram and follows up on WhatsApp stays one ticket with one history.

A title and a summary on every ticket. Written by AI when the ticket opens, in the customer's language: what they need and what has already happened. Their details, past tickets and order history are pulled in next to it, so anyone on the team can pick the ticket up in seconds.
Queues and views that split the work. “Needs you” holds what is waiting on a person, “AI handling” holds what the agent is still answering, each channel has its own queue, and tickets closed outside your hours have one too. Views for assigned to me, unassigned, overdue, escalated, AI paused and starred narrow it further. Sort by who has waited longest or by priority, set the priority of several tickets at once, and move between tickets with the arrow keys.
Reply on the customer's own channel. Your reply goes out wherever they wrote. Replying pauses the agent on that conversation so you don't talk over each other, and one tap hands it back. On WhatsApp, once 24 hours have passed since the customer's last message, only an approved template gets through: the ticket tells you, and you pick the template and send it right from the reply box.
Internal notes. Leave a note on a ticket, or pin it to a specific message, that only your team sees.
Assign, prioritise, file. Take a ticket yourself, take it over from a teammate or assign it to anyone, set its priority from low to critical, and file it under a topic.
Tickets you open yourself. A phone call, an email, something a teammate noticed. Open a ticket by hand, link it to a contact, and work it with notes.

You choose which conversations arrive

In Settings > Agent you pick the channels, and you can go further: only conversations that carry certain labels. Labels are the ones your agent puts on conversations, or your team adds in the Agents inbox. When you first connect, Helpdesk brings in your agent's most recent conversations (up to 20), so the inbox doesn't start empty. If you change labels or channels on the agent, “Re-sync from Agents” in the workspace menu brings Helpdesk up to date.

Start narrow. If most of your agent's chats never need a person, let only labelled conversations in at first, for example complaints or orders. How the agent labels conversations is in Set up tags.

Contacts

Every customer who writes has a contact, with their tickets, labels and your team's notes, on the same customer record the CRM and your other apps use. Details the nightly review picks up from the conversation, like an email or a company name, are added for you. On each contact you see:

The numbers that matter. Total and open tickets, average satisfaction score, average first reply and lifetime value.
A health signal. Healthy, at risk or needs attention, from their sentiment and history, so you spot the customer about to leave.

Add a contact yourself from the contacts page, or import them from your Wix store.

Auto-resolve, SLAs and business hours

Most tickets are the same handful of questions: returns, bookings, hours, order status. Your agent answers them in your tone, in any language, and closes the ticket with a clean record kept, so your team only sees what truly needs them.

On top of that, every night Helpdesk goes over the open tickets where the agent spoke last, and decides which are done:

It closes what was handled. If the customer got their answer, the ticket is resolved, and a line inside the ticket says why.
It flags what still needs a person. Anything ambiguous, unhappy or unanswered moves to “Needs you”, with the reason, and is triaged and waiting for you in the morning.
It fills in the details. Each ticket it reviews gets a priority, a read of how the customer feels, a topic and the language, so the urgent and the unhappy rise to the top of the list. Topics come from your own list in Settings > Topics & tags, where each one can have a colour and an icon. The review adds new topics it finds, and never changes a topic someone set by hand.

A ticket where the customer wrote last is never closed by the review: someone owes them a reply. If you would rather close everything yourself, switch the review off in Settings > Tools & permissions. The review assumes: it never asks the customer whether it is fixed, and if a closed ticket turns out to be wrong, the customer's next message opens a new one.

SLA targets

In Settings > SLA policies you set how fast a ticket should get its first reply and how fast it should be resolved: a default for every ticket, plus its own targets for each priority. SLAs are off until you switch them on. Once they are on, each ticket shows a countdown, like “Reply in 20m” or “Overdue 1h”, the tickets closest to their deadline move up the list. A reply from the agent counts as a first reply, just like one from a person.

Business hours

In Settings > Business hours you set the weekly schedule (there are ready presets, Sunday to Thursday included) and the dates you are closed. Suggested public holidays are one click away. Your hours shape the whole desk:

SLA clocks count open hours only. A ticket that arrives on Friday evening doesn't go overdue over a weekend you are closed.
Customers get an honest answer. Outside your hours the agent says when you'll be back, like “we're back at 9am”, instead of silence or a promise nobody keeps. Switch on an auto-reply for the first message that arrives while you are closed, and write it yourself.
You decide what the agent handles while you are off. Let it answer billing, order and account questions out of hours and escalate the rest, and tag every ticket that arrives while you are closed.
After-hours closures are kept apart. Tickets closed on a day you are closed land in their own queue, so you can check them when you are back.

Routing: the right person, automatically

When a ticket needs a human, Helpdesk hands it to the right teammate by itself, by channel, tag or the hours it arrives in. Nobody has to sit and triage the queue, and nothing sits unassigned.

In Settings > Routing rules you write the rules once. Each rule says when it applies and what happens:

When. The channel the ticket came from, a tag on the ticket or on the contact, and the hours it arrives in.
Then. Assign it to one person or to a team taking turns, one ticket each, set a priority and add tags.
In order. Rules are checked from top to bottom and the first match wins. Pause a rule without deleting it, duplicate one to start the next, and have rules check a ticket again when it changes.

Teams are set up on the same page. The whole thread travels with the ticket, so whoever gets it starts with the full story.

What your agent may do: permissions, orders, workflows

A conversational agent talks to everyone, which is exactly why it shouldn't see everything. Helpdesk is the control layer: it decides what each agent can read and act on, holds sensitive actions for a person, and keeps a record of every one.

Guardrails and permissions

Sensitive actions run as workflows. A refund or a cancellation does not happen in the middle of a chat. It is a workflow step that waits for a person's approval, and the agent promises the customer only what that workflow says.
Set once, held on every channel. The same settings apply to your agent wherever it talks.
Roles. Admins change settings; members work tickets.
A record of everything. Every privileged action goes into the audit log, including what was changed through Claude.

Settings > Tools & permissions is where Helpdesk reaches into the agent itself. Anything there that changes how your agent behaves is marked as such.

Answering “where is my order?”

If your Shopify, eShop or WooCommerce store is connected, this is where you decide whether the agent answers order questions from it. It stays off until you turn it on. Then you choose:

How much proof is needed. Verified customers only (the default: the phone or email on the order must match the person asking), an order number is enough, or don't answer and send every order question to a person.
What the agent may share. Any of: order status, payment status, order date, amount, items, tracking number and shipping details.
A daily limit. When an order number is enough, you cap how many different orders one conversation can ask about in a day.

The page shows, store by store, whether the agent is answering customers right now. Beyond answering, a refund runs as a workflow step that waits for your approval, never straight from a chat.

Switches that change the agent

Hand a conversation to a person. The agent can tell the customer it is passing them on, and the ticket moves to “Needs you” with what they asked for.
Apply helpdesk instructions. Your business hours, your support persona and your saved replies are added to what the agent already knows. Saved replies are wording you approved, and the agent mirrors it whenever the situation fits.
Let the agent start workflows. More on these below.

Two more switches only affect Helpdesk itself: turning conversations into tickets, and the nightly review. And if you want a person to see every reply before it goes out, put the agent in assisted mode: it drafts each reply in the ticket, and your team sends it, edits it or skips it.

Workflows: what happens after the request

Some requests need steps, not just an answer. In Settings > Workflows you line those steps up once, and they run on the ticket by themselves. A workflow can:

Message the customer on their channel, with an approved WhatsApp template ready for when the 24-hour window has closed.
Ask for approval from the owner on WhatsApp or on the Tasks board, from the team in Slack with a button, or from the customer through a link in their own chat.
Give someone a task with reminders, and escalate the ticket if it isn't done in time.
Refund in Shopify, in full or in part, if your store connection allows refunds. It never refunds the same order twice.
Call your own system through its API, and wait for it to report back if needed.
Update the ticket: close it, escalate it, set a priority, add a label or an internal note. Steps can wait between them, and an “If” step takes another path when something is true.

Your team can start a workflow from any ticket. If you allow it, the agent can start one too when a request matches. Before it starts, the agent asks the customer for what the workflow needs, like an order number. You can limit a workflow to certain channels, topics or tags. Each run shows up on the ticket step by step, and you approve, reject or mark a task done right there. Ready-made examples, like approving a refund or updating invoice details, give you a head start.

The agent promises only what you wrote. Each workflow has a line the agent tells the customer when it starts, for example that the owner was asked to approve the refund. Write something the workflow can actually keep.

Team and audit log

In Settings > Team & roles you invite teammates by email, or add people who already have an AssistantLabs account, as admins or members. Only admins change settings, and the audit log in Settings > Audit log records every privileged action: who did it, what changed and when. Workspace name and time zone live in Settings > General, and every clock in Helpdesk runs on that time zone.

Home, reports and your daily summary

The numbers you need to run the desk, without a spreadsheet.

Home. How many tickets are open, how many are past their SLA, how many were resolved this week and how much of that the AI did, your median first reply and your satisfaction score, and what is waiting on you right now.
Reports. The Reports tab shows volume, response times, satisfaction and how much the AI resolved, so you can see what the nightly review and your targets are doing.
Ask Claude. With the AssistantLabs plugin in Claude, ask who is waiting and why, what is overdue, or what customers asked about this week. /al-waiting lists everyone still waiting on a reply, with drafts, and /al-daily gives you the one-screen day. Schedule it in Claude for a summary every morning.

Helpdesk itself speaks your language: English, Hebrew, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese or Vietnamese, chosen per person in your account settings, along with your own time zone.

Works with your other apps

All the AssistantLabs apps share one account, one login and one record per customer, and you move between them from the app switcher. Here is how Helpdesk works with each of them.

Agents. This is the connection everything else rests on. Helpdesk runs on the agent you choose, and its conversations become your tickets. The channels themselves, with their welcome message, tone and languages, are set up on the agent in Agents, and the agent's knowledge is what lets it close tickets on its own. The agent's labels decide what reaches the inbox. Replying from Helpdesk pauses the agent on that conversation, and resolving the ticket hands the conversation back to it. Your business hours, persona, saved replies, permissions, hand-off and workflows reach the agent from here. More in The Agents app.
Booking. “Can I move my appointment?” is a ticket that closes itself: the agent moves the booking in the Booking diary mid-chat, confirms it with the customer, and the ticket is resolved with the new slot on record. A customer's bookings, visits and no-shows sit on the same record as their tickets, so whoever picks up a complaint sees the appointment it is about.
Sales. One shopper, one journey. Sales nudges her to finish the order; when it runs late, Helpdesk answers “where is my order?” and keeps her updated until it lands; then Sales sends the review request and the reorder nudge. Both run on the same Shopify connection and the same customer record, so a customer with an open complaint is in view before a journey reaches out.
CRM. The CRM is the memory the whole platform shares. Helpdesk reads and writes the same contact record: tickets, notes and what the nightly review learns land on the customer's timeline in the CRM, and every ticket opens with their full history, company and custom fields in view. One customer, one history, no duplicate profiles.
Marketing. Marketing brings people in, Helpdesk supports them, on the same contact record, so a customer who came from a campaign arrives in Helpdesk with that history. And the topics customers ask about most feed straight back: with Claude connected, ask what customers complained about this week and have a post or an email drafted that answers it.
Tasks. Your approvals run through Tasks. When a workflow needs your yes, like a refund over your limit, it lands on your Tasks board next to everything else that needs your decision, and you approve or decline in one tap. Tasks a workflow hands your team show up there too, and the ticket carries on the moment they are done.

Your store, Slack and Claude

Shopify, eShop and WooCommerce, through one shared connection. You connect the store once, in your agent's settings in Agents. Helpdesk uses that same connection, as does Sales, so there is nothing to connect twice. A customer's orders show on their tickets and contact, you can look an order up by its number, and you can import your Wix contacts under Settings > Integrations. Helpdesk adds the order-answer rules, the permissions and the refund step.
Slack. Connect a Slack channel and workflows can post approvals with a button, team updates and task reminders there.
Claude. Install the AssistantLabs plugin from Claude's plugin directory (Customize → Plugins → Discover, search AssistantLabs, Add), then type /al and sign in the first time. Helpdesk is one of the apps it reaches: ask who is waiting and why, have a ticket resolved, escalated, assigned or noted, pause the agent on a conversation, look up and add contacts, approve a workflow step, change settings like business hours, routing, SLA targets or the agent's persona, and build workflows, all in plain language. See Connect your agent to Claude.

How to get started

The order matters, because Helpdesk can only show what your agent already receives.

Have an agent answering on a channel. Helpdesk needs an AssistantLabs agent connected to at least one channel. If you don't have one yet, start with Connect WhatsApp to your agent.
Open Helpdesk. Go to helpdesk.assistantlabs.io, or pick it from the app switcher, and sign in with the same account. If Helpdesk isn't switched on for your account yet, you'll see a request-access screen: send the request and we'll turn it on.
Connect the agent. Choose your agent, and its recent conversations arrive as tickets.
Choose what arrives. In Settings > Agent, pick the channels and, if you like, only conversations with certain labels.
Set your hours, topics and routing. Fill in Settings > Business hours, Settings > Topics & tags and Settings > Routing rules. Turn on SLA targets if you want response times tracked.
Decide what the agent may do. In Settings > Tools & permissions, decide on order answers and hand-offs. Then build one workflow for the request you handle most often, and invite your teammates.

Ready to start? Follow Start with Helpdesk: every step two ways, with Claude or in the app.

The first review runs right away. As soon as you connect, Helpdesk runs the same review it runs every night over the conversations it brought in, so the inbox already shows what is done and what still needs you. Rather have it set up for you? Our team can set up the whole workspace with you.

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