Set up a support desk

Give your business a helpdesk for its own customers. Your agent answers from your knowledge base, opens and reads support tickets when there's a real issue to track, and steps aside when someone needs a person, the thread flips to your unified inbox where a teammate takes over. Everything is audited, and a privacy chokepoint keeps internal notes away from the customer.

What you'll build

An agent that answers from your own content, opens a support ticket when an issue needs tracking, and hands off to a human the moment someone asks for one, plus the team habit for working that queue. About 15 minutes end to end.

Before you start

• An agent you can edit, see Your first agent in 10 minutes.
• Knowledge added so the agent answers before it tickets, a website crawl and a few PDFs go a long way. See Train from your website.
• The Web Chat channel enabled so you can talk to the agent in the test chat, plus at least one real channel so customers reach the inbox.
• To work tickets and take over threads, your role needs manage support and reply inbox, see Roles & permissions.

Steps

1. Give the agent the Customer Support ability

Open the agent's Skills tab and attach Support & finance → open and read customer support tickets. This lets the agent create, list, and read tickets mid-conversation.

Expected result: The agent's tool list now includes opening and reading support tickets. These are owner-context tools, see Abilities for the public-safe vs owner-only split.

2. Make it answer first, ticket second

You want the agent to resolve what it can and only open a ticket for what it can't. Confirm knowledge is Ready in the Knowledge base tab, and turn on Answer only from my knowledge in Behavior & guardrails so it grounds replies instead of guessing.

Expected result: The agent answers common questions directly from your content, and reaches for a ticket only when there's a genuine, trackable issue.

3. Test the ticketing capability

Open the live Chat with Agent panel (needs Web Chat enabled, see Testing your agent). First ask something your knowledge covers, then report a problem it can't solve, e.g. "My order #1043 arrived damaged."

Expected result: The first question gets a grounded answer; the problem report makes the agent open a ticket and give you a reference. Internal notes your team later adds are never surfaced back to the customer. That's the privacy chokepoint.

4. Escalate to a human, in the inbox

When a customer asks for a person (or the agent's answer isn't well-grounded), the thread flips to Needs human in the unified inbox. A teammate clicks Take over from AI, replies as your team, and clicks Return to AI agent when done. Full click-by-click: Hand off to a human.

Expected result: The escalated thread shows under the Needs human filter chip; taking over pauses AI replies for that contact until you hand back.

5. Work the ticket queue

From the Support area (gated by manage support), your team works tickets: reply, assign an owner, set status and priority, and add internal notes for context, which stay internal.

Expected result: Tickets move through their lifecycle with a clear owner, and every reply, assignment, and status change lands in the audit log (actor and refs only, never the message body).

Verify it works

• The agent's Skills tab lists the customer-support ticket tools (Step 1).
• A question your knowledge covers gets a grounded, on-content answer.
• Reporting an unresolved issue makes the agent open a ticket with a reference.
• Asking for a person flips the thread to Needs human in the inbox; you can take over and hand back.
• The team can reply, assign, and set status/priority from the Support area, and internal notes never reach the customer.
• Ticket and inbox actions appear in the audit log.

Troubleshooting

• The agent never opens a ticket. The Customer Support ability isn't attached (Step 1), or it's resolving everything from knowledge, try a clearly unresolvable problem.
• It tickets instead of answering. Add or fix knowledge so common questions are covered; a Ready knowledge base plus the answer-only guardrail keeps tickets for real issues.
• A customer wanted a person but nothing escalated. They may not have asked plainly. Anyone with reply inbox can still take over any live thread manually from the inbox.
• I can see tickets but can't change them. You have view access but not manage support, ask an owner or admin to grant it.

What's next

• Unified inbox, filters, assignment, and status in full.
• Hand off to a human, the take-over and hand-back habit.
• Knowledge base, ground the agent so it answers before it tickets.
• Abilities (tools), how the support tools attach, and the public-safe vs owner-only boundary.
• Audit log, the record of every ticket and inbox action.