What the Service Desk is
The Service Desk is where customer requests live. A customer emails you, fills in a form, or writes to you through the portal; that becomes a ticket, the ticket lands in a queue, and somebody picks it up.
It’s an optional module. If Support isn’t in your left-hand rail, your organisation hasn’t turned it on — an admin does that under Feature Flags, and you’ll also need access to at least one queue before you see any work.
The shape of it
Section titled “The shape of it”- A ticket is one customer request, start to finish. It has a number
(
TKT-44-260803-0013), a title, and a conversation. - A queue is the tray it sits in — Support, Network Operations, Billing. Queues are how work is divided up, and they’re also how access is granted.
- A requester is the person who asked. They’re a contact at a company, not a member of your staff.
- State says where the ticket is (new, open, pending customer, resolved, closed). Priority says how much it matters. Type says what kind of thing it is (Incident, Request, Problem, Change).
Finding your work
Section titled “Finding your work”
Tickets in the rail opens the list, and it opens on Open — everything live in the queues you can reach. The other tabs narrow it:
- My work — tickets you own or are responsible for.
- Unassigned — nobody has picked these up yet. This is the tab worth checking first thing.
- All — including the closed ones.
- Archived — tickets taken out of circulation.
The box next to the tabs filters the visible list by number or title as you type. Press Enter and it searches everything instead, including the text of the conversations — that’s the same engine behind Search in the rail.
Filters opens the rest: queue, state, priority, type, owner, company. And Columns lets you choose what the table shows, because eight columns is more than most people want at once.
How tickets arrive
Section titled “How tickets arrive”- Email. A queue can have an address. Mail sent there becomes a ticket, and replies to an existing ticket join its conversation rather than starting a new one.
- The portal. Customers with a portal login can raise and track tickets themselves. See What your customers see.
- An agent. New ticket at the top right, for when someone phones.
- The API, and inbound webhooks from another system.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- Working a ticket — the day-to-day job.
- Queues and who can see them — why you might be looking at an empty list.
- States, priorities and types — the words, and how to change them.