Help desk

The help desk is your team's work queue. Everything a customer asks for, everything monitoring detects and everything you open by hand ends up in the same place: a ticket with a number, an owner and a status.

This guide covers the whole module, from the moment a request comes in to the moment the customer rates the service.

How a ticket comes in

There are four entry points. Three are opened by a person and one is automatic.

Every ticket starts in Open status, without exception.

From a monitoring alert. On any monitoring screen, the alert row menu has Open ticket. Nothing is created at that moment: the new ticket form opens with the subject, description, computer and priority already filled in from the alert. You review them, adjust whatever you need, and confirm. If that alert already had a ticket, KairosLink does not create a new one: it takes you to the existing one.

From the portal. The contact writes a subject, a description and a priority, and optionally picks one of their computers. While they type the subject, the portal suggests knowledge base articles that might solve the problem without opening a ticket. If they open it anyway, your team gets the notice.

Microsoft 365 licenses. Only three situations open a ticket on their own: a suspended license with people assigned, a negative seat count and an expired license. Upcoming expiry warnings do not open a ticket.

The queue

Side menu, Tickets. This is your organization's full queue, sorted by last update.

At the top there is a row of status chips with a counter for each one, plus an All chip. Below that, the search box and the filters by customer and by rating.

Search looks at the subject and the number. It does not search inside the description or the replies: if what you are looking for is in the body of the ticket, find it by customer or by number.

There are eleven columns, and two are worth explaining:

• SLA shows the ticket's status light. If the first response target has already passed, the chip reads Unanswered and overrides everything else.
• Rating shows the stars the customer left, if they left any.

The Settings button, top right, leads to classifications, escalation levels and SLA. Only roles with organization settings permission can see it: a technician does not have it.

The ticket page

You get there by clicking the number or the subject in the queue.

At the top is the header with the number, the subject and the customer. If you have SLA enabled, below it there is a collapsible bar with both targets, First response and Resolution, each with its chip and its due date.

The rest is five panels:

Panels can be dragged and collapsed, and the layout is saved per user. Whoever arranges their ticket page finds it the same way next time. On mobile they stack into a single column in a fixed order.

Replying to the customer and writing internal notes

This is the most important part of the module and where mistakes cost the most.

In the Conversation panel there is a Reply field and an Internal note (not visible to the customer) checkbox.

Public reply. Leave the box unchecked and hit Send. The customer sees that reply in their portal, and it reaches them by email. The first public reply is what meets the first response SLA.

Internal note. Check the box and hit Send. It appears with a different background and the INTERNAL NOTE badge. The customer does not see it in the portal and it triggers no email at all. It also does not meet the first response SLA, which is correct: writing for your team is not replying to your customer.

These are two separate submissions. You cannot reply and write a note in the same step.

Two things the customer does see

The ticket description is always public. It lives in the Ticket details block and can be edited from the Edit button. Everything you write there is read by the customer in their portal. Do not use it as a scratchpad: that is what the internal note is for.

Automatic tickets carry technical detail in the description. A ticket born from an alert includes the severity, the check type, the measured value and the computer name. A Microsoft 365 license ticket includes the tenant, the license identifier and the purchased, assigned and available seats. The customer sees all of it. If you do not want them to, edit the description before they log in.

The emails your customer receives

Your customer receives three emails, in their own language and with your MSP's branding.

Rules worth knowing:

• An internal note never generates an email. Not to the customer, not to anyone.
• The resolved email replaces the status change one. Both never go out for the same change.
• One email per real change. If you save the form after touching the priority or the assignee but leave the status as it was, nothing goes out.
• They are queued. A slow mail server does not hold up your technician's screen.
• If the email fails, the ticket is saved anyway. No work is ever lost over a delivery problem.

Who receives them

The active portal contacts for that customer, plus any addresses you have set in the customer's notification routing, Tickets category. Duplicate addresses are sent to only once.

If a customer has no portal contacts and no addresses set, nothing goes out and it is logged. It is worth checking this customer by customer: a customer with no recipients hears nothing, and from the panel everything looks normal.

How to turn it off

On the customer record, notifications tab, there is a switch: Notify the customer by email about their ticket progress. It comes on, and existing customers were left on.

Turning it off does not affect your team's internal notices: the assigned technician still gets their assignment email as before.

Rating from the email

The resolution email carries five stars. Each star is its own link: the customer taps one and the rating is recorded on the spot, with no portal login and no password.

The link takes them to a screen where they can confirm the score, change it if they tapped the wrong star, and leave a comment. Links expire after 30 days.

The link does one thing only: rate that ticket. It does not show the subject, the replies or any other ticket belonging to the customer. If the email is forwarded to someone else, the most that person can do is leave a star.

If the ticket was reopened, the link stops rating and says so on screen. An expired or tampered link does not show a raw error either: it explains what happened and offers a way into the portal.

Ratings are aggregated in the satisfaction report, with the overall average and the average per technician.

Statuses

There are five: Open, Pending, On hold, Resolved and Closed.

You change them from the Status dropdown in the Detail panel. That same Save button saves the status, the priority, the classification, the level and the assignee at once: it is a single form.

There is no mandatory order. You can go from Open to Closed in one step, and you can reopen a closed ticket whenever you need to.

Moving to Resolved stamps the resolution date, and moving to Closed stamps the closing date. If you move the ticket backwards, those dates are cleared and the resolution SLA starts counting again.

No ticket closes by itself. There is no auto close on inactivity or after N days in Resolved: closing is always done by a person.

Assigning

In the Detail panel, the Assignee (primary) dropdown sets the ticket owner. The technician gets an email and a bell notification, and only if the assignee actually changed: reassigning to the same technician does not notify again.

Below it, the Ticket technicians block lets you add more people without removing the primary one, using the Add technician... dropdown and the Add button. Added technicians are not notified: tell them yourself.

There is no automatic assignment. Portal tickets and Microsoft 365 tickets start unassigned and stay that way until someone picks them up.

Time worked

The Time panel is only visible to users with ticket permission. The customer sees none of this: not the entries, not the total, not the billable flag.

With the timer. Hit Start timer. A running clock appears, with Pause and Stop and save. When you stop it, the seconds convert to minutes with a floor of one minute. Time logged with the timer is always marked billable.

Two things to keep in mind about the timer: there is one timer per person across the whole application, not one per ticket, and another technician's timer is not visible. If two people work the same ticket, the screen does not show it.

By hand. The Manual entry block: date, From, To, an optional note and the Billable checkbox, which comes checked. If the end time is earlier than the start time, KairosLink assumes the work crossed midnight and adds a day.

A time entry can be deleted from its row menu, but not edited. If you logged the timer wrong, delete it and enter it by hand.

The hour bank

It is set per customer, on the customer record: Enable time tracking for this customer, Monthly hour bank and Overage rate (USD/hour).

Usage is calculated over the calendar month and resets on the 1st. It adds up billable and non billable hours alike: the billable flag does not filter what the bank consumes.

At 80 percent and at 100 percent, your team gets an email and a bell notice, once per threshold per month. Going over the bank blocks nothing: time keeps being logged and the report shows the overage and, if you set a rate, the amount to invoice.

Where to see it: Reports, time tab, hours per customer panel. The status light is green below 80, amber between 80 and 100, red above.

SLA

Set up under Settings, SLA tab. It is one policy per organization, with two target times per priority: response and resolution.

The values every organization starts with:

The clock starts when the ticket is created and runs continuously, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. There are no business hours, no working days and no holidays.

Three consequences worth keeping in mind:

• Putting a ticket On hold does not pause the SLA. The clock keeps running.
• Changing the priority recalculates the due date retroactively, because the calculation always starts from the creation date. An old ticket bumped to Urgent can go from On track to Overdue at once.
• An overdue SLA notifies nobody. It changes the chip color in the queue and on the ticket page, and nothing else. Watch the SLA column.

Classifications and levels

Both are set up from Settings in the queue, and both work the same way: you add them with a name, rename them, deactivate them to take them out of circulation without losing history, and delete them only if no ticket uses them.

Classifications are the ticket types you use: incident, request, question, whatever fits your operation.

Escalation levels are the labels of your support ladder: L1, L2, L3, Consulting, On-site support.

The level is a label. It triggers no notifications, does not change the SLA and does not route the ticket to anyone. Escalating in KairosLink means changing the level and reassigning the ticket to the right technician.

Setting up classifications, levels and SLA requires organization settings permission. In practice, Owner and Admin: the Technician role can work tickets but cannot configure the module.

What your customer sees in the portal

A portal contact sees every ticket belonging to their company, not only the ones they opened.

From the portal, the customer can read, open new tickets and rate resolved ones. They cannot reply to an existing ticket from the portal: if they need to add something, they open a new one or contact you outside the system.

What this module does not do today

So you do not go looking for it:

• There are no attachments. Neither the technician nor the customer can upload a file to a ticket.
• No inbound email. A ticket cannot be opened by sending an email, and replying to one of these emails does not come back into the ticket.
• The customer does not reply from the portal, they only open new tickets and rate.
• There are no reply templates. The closest thing is inserting a link to a knowledge base article from the corresponding panel.
• A sent reply cannot be edited or deleted. Check before you hit Send, especially the internal note checkbox.

Frequently asked questions

If I reply to the ticket, does the customer get an email? Yes, if the customer has notices switched on and has recipients set. An internal note sends nothing.

Can I attach a screenshot? No. The module has no attachments on either end.

I put the ticket On hold, does the SLA stop? No. The clock runs from the moment the ticket was created, without stopping, regardless of status.

Will it warn me when an SLA is about to breach? No. It only changes the chip color in the queue and on the ticket page.

I marked a note as a public reply by mistake, can I hide it? Not from the screen, and if the customer has notices switched on the email already went out. That is why it pays to check the box before sending.

What is the escalation level for? For labelling and organizing. It triggers nothing on its own.

I try to start the timer and it says I already have one running. Where is it? On another ticket. The limit is one timer per person across the whole application.

Does the customer see the hours I logged? No. Nothing from the Time panel reaches the portal. Usage is visible only on your side, under Reports.

How long does the rating link in the email last? Thirty days. After that the customer can still rate by logging into the portal.

I turned off notices for a customer. Does my team stop getting notifications? No. That switch only controls emails to the end customer. The assignment email to the technician works exactly as before.