Get started with Helpdesk

What you need first

Helpdesk is the support workspace on top of your agent: conversations become tickets with a status, an owner, a priority and a topic; the agent keeps answering what it can; your team takes what it should; and a nightly review closes what is handled. The core takes about ten minutes to set up; SLA, hours, workflows and roles you add as you go. Before you start, you need three things.

• An agent that already talks to customers on WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram, email or your website chat. Each of those channels opens tickets in the Helpdesk.
• The same AssistantLabs account you use for Agents. Helpdesk lives at helpdesk.assistantlabs.io and is one workspace per organization — your organization, your sign-in. If you land on a “request access” screen, send the request from it.
• Optional: Claude connected to your account. It is what makes the “With Claude” route below work — see Connect your agent to Claude. Using ChatGPT instead? Its own guide says what it can reach and what it may change: Connect to ChatGPT.

No agent yet? You can still open a ticket by hand (“New ticket”) for a phone call or an email. Connecting an agent is what makes the inbox fill itself.

Choose which conversations enter the helpdesk

This is the first decision, and it is worth making before you connect: which of your agent’s conversations become tickets. Two filters, and a conversation must pass both.

• Channels — WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, Telegram, email and website chat. Tick the ones you want; the number beside each is how many of the agent’s last conversations came through it.
• Labels — either Any label (every conversation on those channels) or Only conversations with these labels (it must carry at least one you pick).
• It applies to the history import and to every new ticket after it. The first import already follows your choice.
• It is forward-only. Changing it later decides which new tickets open and brings in up to 20 matching recent conversations; nothing already in the inbox is removed.
• It can never be empty. No channel, or label mode with no label, is refused — in the app and by the server — because that inbox would stay empty.

Where the labels come from

The labels are your agent’s own — never free text. They get applied by the agent’s tagging rules (see Set up tags), or by a person in the Agents inbox. The picker lists the labels in use with how many recent conversations carry each; pick only ones that really get applied, or the inbox will look broken.

Create the workspace and connect your agent

The workspace creates itself the first time you sign in. Connecting is one card: pick the agent, say which conversations should arrive, click Connect and import.

Changed your mind later? The same card lives in Settings → Agent, next to a Disconnect button. Disconnecting stops new conversations; tickets already in the inbox stay.

How tickets arrive

You do not create tickets — they open on their own. The rules are short, and worth knowing before the first message lands.

• A ticket opens on the first message from a customer on a connected channel, when that customer has no open ticket. Every later message updates the same ticket.
• A resolved ticket stays closed. If the customer writes again, a fresh ticket opens — nothing is lost, and nothing is reopened behind your back.
• Each ticket gets a title and a summary from the customer’s first messages, so the inbox reads like a list of subjects, not a list of phone numbers.
• You choose which conversations count: every conversation on the channels you ticked, or only the ones carrying labels you pick. The labels are your agent’s own.
• Tickets you open by hand (“New ticket”) show as “Internal” and are never answered by the agent.

A busy agent also sells, books and chats. If you only want complaints and orders in the inbox, filter by label — you can change it any time.

The master switch: in Settings → Tools & permissions, “Turn conversations into tickets” stops tickets from being made at all. Messages still arrive in Agents; the Helpdesk simply stays empty. Leave it on.

Work a ticket

Every ticket is in exactly one of four states, and the inbox shows them as a handful of plain words.

What you will see on a ticket

• New — the customer wrote and nobody has looked yet.
• AI replying — your agent is answering. You can step in at any moment with Take over.
• Needs review — the agent stepped back (“AI paused”), so a person has to act.
• You’re replying / Dana is replying — somebody has taken the conversation.
• Overdue — escalated, or went quiet and was closed by the idle sweep. This is not an SLA breach; SLA chips are separate and off until you turn them on.
• Resolved — finished. Shows under Views → Resolved.

The left rail is the same thing as queues: All open, Assigned to me, Unassigned; under Priority, Overdue, AI paused, Escalated; then one queue per channel. “Needs you” and “AI handling” split any queue in two.

On WhatsApp, the 24-hour window applies. Outside it, pick an approved template from the composer instead of a free-form reply.

Turn on auto-resolve — and watch it

Auto-resolve is the Nightly review of open tickets. Each night it looks at tickets the agent answered last, closes the ones that are handled and flags the ones a person must act on. It is on unless someone turned it off — so the job is to check it, not to wire it.

What it does — and does not do

• Looks only at tickets where the agent spoke last. A ticket waiting on your reply is skipped.
• Decides: handled or not. Handled becomes Resolved. Not handled becomes Escalated with a one-line reason, shown in the ticket as a line from “Helpdesk”.
• Fills in the rest: priority, sentiment, topic, a summary and tags, matched against your own vocabulary.
• Hands the conversation back to the agent when it resolves a ticket, so a person who stepped in does not leave it muted.
• It assumes. It never asks the customer “is this fixed?”. If a closed ticket was wrong, the customer’s next message simply opens a new ticket.

The safe way to start

• Day 1: leave it on and change nothing. Let one night run.
• Next morning: open Views → Resolved and read the last message of each ticket it closed. Anything where the customer was still waiting is a miss.
• Look at Overdue and Escalated: these are the ones it did not close — each carries the reason.
• Keep it if the misses are rare. Switch it off if they are not — it is one switch, and tickets already closed stay closed.

Beyond the inbox: what else you can set up

Once tickets flow, Helpdesk has controls around them. Each is optional, and each does only what is written here.

• Priority, topic and tags. Every ticket has a priority (Low to Critical), one topic and labels. Set Priority and Topic by hand in the ticket header, or let the nightly review fill them. The vocabulary is under Settings → Topics & tags.
• SLA targets. A first-reply and a resolution target, a default plus its own targets per priority, shown as a chip on each row and an SLA card in the ticket. Off until you switch on Track SLAs in Settings → SLA policies; with business hours on, closed hours do not use up a target.
• Business hours. A weekly schedule, closed dates and a time zone in Settings → Business hours. They pause SLA timers and are written into your agent’s instructions. Out of hours you can send an auto-reply, auto-tag arriving tickets, and choose whether the agent answers.
• How the agent behaves. A mode — send itself, send only above a confidence floor, or assisted, where every reply waits for a person to approve — plus tone guidance, policies, and approved and blocked phrases. It applies from the agent’s next message. Set it with Claude, or in the helpdesk’s agent behaviour settings.
• Workflows. What happens after a request: message the customer, tell the team on WhatsApp or Slack, ask for approval, give someone a task, call an API, refund through Shopify, update the ticket, branch on a condition. The agent or your team starts one from a ticket. Build them in Settings → Workflows.
• Order answers. Per connected store (Shopify, eShop, WooCommerce): how much proof is needed, which details may be shared, and how many orders one chat may be told about a day — with a live “Answering / Not answering” badge. Off until you switch it on, in Settings → Tools & permissions.
• Contacts and history. Every customer has a record with their tickets and notes under Contacts; Settings → Audit log shows who changed what, including what Claude changed.

Also in the helpdesk

• Routing rules. In Settings → Routing rules, write rules from the top down — when a ticket comes from a channel, carries a tag or arrives at a time → assign to one person, a team taking turns, or no one. The first rule that matches assigns each new ticket.
• Reports. The Reports tab shows how the helpdesk is doing — tickets a day, first-response time, customer satisfaction and how much the AI resolved on its own — and you can ask it a question about your data in plain words.

Invite your team

Two roles: admin (changes settings) and member (works tickets). Organization admins already count as Helpdesk admins.

Don’t have the user ID? Use Invite by email — the person joins from the invitation.

Know when something needs you

Helpdesk tells you when something needs you — and you decide how loudly.

• The Inbox tab shows a count of open tickets, and the list is split into “Needs you” and “AI handling”.
• Workflow messages — an approval request, a team update, a task reminder — go to the owner on WhatsApp or to a Slack channel. Connect Slack under Settings → Integrations.
• WhatsApp alerts by tag come from Agents: “ping me when a chat is tagged Complaint”. See Set up WhatsApp notifications.
• Ask Claude when you sit down: the plugin’s /al-waiting lists everyone still waiting on a reply, with drafts, and /al-daily gives the one-screen day.

Your first week

A realistic first week, in the order that pays back fastest.

• Day 1 — connect the agent. Narrow what arrives. Message your own agent from a personal phone and watch the ticket appear.
• Day 1 — fill in Settings → Business hours. They are added to what your agent knows, and SLA timers can pause while you are closed.
• Day 2 — add your team and agree who looks at Overdue each morning.
• Day 3 — read every ticket under Needs you. Open Settings → Topics & tags and keep a short topic list.
• Day 4 — read what the nightly review closed. Keep it or switch it off.
• Day 5 — decide on SLA targets (Settings → SLA policies). They are off until you switch them on.
• If you run a store — decide order answers in Settings → Tools & permissions. They are off until you switch them on.

Then: read The Helpdesk app for what else it can do, and Set up tags so the right conversations are labelled.

Common mistakes

These are the ones that cost new setups the most time.

• Leaving a channel unticked. Telegram, email and website chat open tickets too — tick every channel you want in the inbox.
• Filtering by a label nobody applies. The inbox looks broken. Check the number beside each label first.
• Replying and walking away with the agent paused. The customer’s next question waits for a person who moved on. Resolve the ticket or resume the agent.
• Reading “Overdue” as an SLA breach. It means escalated or gone quiet. SLA chips are a separate, optional layer.
• Expecting the team invitation to send an email. Add people by user ID.
• Switching off an amber-badge feature to “tidy up”. Those three change what your agent says and does.
• Resolving a ticket a colleague is working. It is visible to the whole team as your decision.