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.
The Help Desk is configured per agent under the Help desk settings group. Turn it on, then tune email, assignment, scheduling, and translation to fit your team.
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.