Help Desk overview
The Help Desk is the ticket inbox for conversations that need a human. Learn how tickets, statuses, channels, views, and assignment fit together so your team can resolve what the AI hands off.
View as MarkdownA great agent resolves most questions on its own. The Help Desk is where the rest go — the conversations that need a person. It's a full ticket inbox built into Bookbag: tickets arrive from escalations, email, and other channels, get routed to the right teammate, and move through clear statuses until they're closed.
The Help Desk has two parts: the inbox (tickets, views, filters, the reply composer) and a group of settings (assignment, scheduling, email, translation) that govern how the inbox behaves. This page covers the inbox; each setting has its own page.
Enable and tune the Help Desk per agent under the Help desk settings group. Then work tickets either inside the agent (Help desk → Inbox) or in the dedicated Help Desk app — a full-screen support workspace with its own agent switcher, reachable from Help desk in the workspace sidebar.
The Help Desk app
Beyond the per-agent inbox tab, Bookbag ships a standalone Help Desk workspace for agents who live in tickets all day. It's a full-page app with an agent (chatbot) switcher up top, the same system views and saved views, a New ticket button, and the ticket timeline — so your support team can work without navigating the agent builder.
The Help Desk is where your team supports your customers. Customers reach you when the AI hands a chat to a human, through a connected email inbox, or another channel — those become tickets your team resolves here.
How a ticket is born
Tickets enter the inbox three ways:
- Escalation — the agent calls the Escalate to a human action, which creates a
live_chatticket with an AI-written summary and pauses the AI for that conversation. - Takeover — a teammate clicks Take over on a live conversation in the Conversations view. See Takeover.
- Direct channels — email and the public API can create tickets directly.
Ticket statuses
Every ticket has a status that tells your team whose turn it is. Statuses fall into two groups — active (still open) and closed.
| Status | Group | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| New | Active | Just arrived, not yet picked up. |
| On you | Active | Waiting on an agent to reply. |
| On customer | Active | Agent replied; waiting on the customer. |
| On hold | Active | Paused — waiting on something external. |
| Closed | Closed | Resolved. |
| Cancelled | Closed | Closed without resolution. |
Replying to a customer flips a ticket from On you / New to On customer. A new customer message flips it back. You rarely set status by hand.
The inbox
The inbox is a left rail of views plus a ticket table. Each ticket row shows its status, ID, requester, a details preview, assignee, and the created and updated times. Open a ticket to see its full timeline and reply.
System views
Bookbag ships a set of built-in views, each with a live count:
| View | Shows |
|---|---|
| Inbox | Active tickets assigned to you. |
| Mentions | Tickets where you're @mentioned in a note. |
| All | All active tickets. |
| Unassigned | Active tickets with no assignee. |
| Solved | Closed and cancelled tickets. |
| Conversations | Live chatbot conversations not yet turned into tickets. |
On top of these, your team can build saved views and apply ad-hoc filters.
The ticket timeline
Opening a ticket shows a single threaded timeline of everything that happened:
- Replies — messages exchanged with the customer.
- Notes — internal-only comments, highlighted, that the customer never sees. @mention a teammate to pull them in.
- Events — system entries like status changes, assignment, takeover, and AI resume.
From the composer you can reply, add a note, change status or assignee, and use AI compose to draft or polish a reply. A details panel on the side shows the requester, channel, and any previous tickets from the same person.
Getting notified
When a new ticket is created, Bookbag emails the person who needs to act on it so nothing waits unseen:
- Assigned tickets notify the assignee — unless they're the one who just created or took over the ticket.
- Unassigned tickets notify the workspace owners and admins, so someone picks them up.
Notifications are sent in the background — a mail hiccup never blocks ticket creation. Live counts on the inbox views update in real time alongside the emails.