Support, service desks, and the help center

Support is where a promise returns wearing muddy shoes. Zoabase gives that promise a ticket number, an owner, a visible next step, and—when the fix needs real delivery work—a bridge into the project board.

Work the support inbox

Open Work → Service desk for the inbox across every project desk and the general inbox. Standard queues include All active, Assigned to me, Unassigned, First response overdue, Waiting for customer, Resolved, Spam, and All tickets. Filter further by desk, request type, status, assignee, source, priority, tag, organization, or search text. Save the current filters as a personal view.

A ticket holds customer context, source, priority, assignee, tags, request details, conversation, workflow state, first-response target, and any linked development issue. Email, phone, chat, and manual are source labels, not connected inboxes.

Inside a ticket, choose Customer reply for text the requester may see in the portal. Choose Private note for staff-only collaboration. Notes never appear in customer responses and do not count as the first public response. Shared quick replies can insert customer, ticket, agent, and workspace variables, and remain editable before sending.

Assign an agent, add tags, change priority, move through the workflow, or mark a general ticket waiting, closed, or spam. Customer replies reopen work according to the desk workflow.

Heads up: Replies are delivered in Zoabase’s customer portal, and customers are emailed when a request is received, when an agent replies (private notes never are) and when it’s resolved — each email carries their private link. Zoabase does not ingest a mailbox, so customers answer from the portal, not by replying to the email.

Route, measure, and escalate

Admins can create routing rules that run in creation order when a ticket is created. A rule matches a source and/or keyword, then can assign an agent, set priority, add tags, and post an automatic acknowledgment in the portal. Later rules may override assignment and priority.

First-response targets use elapsed clock time from ticket creation: Urgent 1 hour, High 4 hours, Medium 24 hours, and Low 48 hours. Changing priority recalculates the due time from creation. Only the first agent reply counts; private notes and automatic acknowledgments do not. Reopening preserves the first-response history.

Reports show queue totals, overdue responses, average first response, and customer satisfaction. Export ticket details as CSV. Customers may rate a closed request from one to five and add feedback; a new message clears the previous resolution’s rating.

Use Escalate to project issue when support uncovers delivery work. Select a project and create a linked bug with the customer context, priority, and support labels. The ticket and issue remain separate records with separate statuses: fixing the issue does not silently close the customer conversation.

Enable a service desk on a project

Open a project’s Service desk tab. A project admin can enable the desk, which seeds three request types—Get help, Report a bug, and Request access—and starter workflows for customer support, bug reports, and service requests with approval.

Each request type has an icon, name, description, portal group, workflow, default priority, order, and active state. Turn off Customers can raise it in the help center for an agent-only type.

The form builder supports Short text, Paragraph, Number, Email, Link, Date, Dropdown, Multi-select, Radio, and Checkbox fields. Fields can be required, guided, or internal. Conditional logic can depend on an earlier choice. Hidden answers are discarded, and the server validates the same rules as the browser. Preview as a customer or agent.

Design the workflow

A workflow has statuses grouped into To do, In progress, Waiting, and Done. Categories drive queues, targets, and reports. Give a status a friendlier customer-facing name—for example, staff see “Waiting for customer” while the requester sees “Waiting for your reply.”

Transitions appear as action buttons on the ticket. They may start from specific statuses or any status, and can be limited to any agent, the assignee, or project/workspace admins. Validators can require a comment or completed request fields. Post actions can assign or unassign, set priority, or post an automatic customer message.

Templates cover Customer support, Service request with approval, Incident management, and Bug report. A lane diagram shows the flow. Safe-edit rules prevent removing a status that still has tickets or deleting a workflow used by a request type.

Heads up: Approval transitions can be admin-only, but named or multiple approvers are not supported. There is no general-purpose automation engine for existing tickets; routing rules apply on creation and workflows provide transition post actions.

Publish the help center

Your help center at /help/<your-workspace> lists published workspace knowledge, the general contact form, and service-desk portals the visitor may open. A desk portal at /help/<your-workspace>/KEY shows its introduction and grouped request types.

Choose one access mode in Portal & settings:

Mode	Who can open it
Public	Anyone
Private	Signed-in help-center customers and team members who can see the project
Customers only	Confirmed customers on that desk’s list and authorized team members

Help-center customer accounts are separate from workspace users. Anyone can register, but with no confirmation email, a self-registered address remains unconfirmed. It can open Private desks but not Customers-only desks.

For Customers only, a project admin adds addresses to the desk list. Zoabase returns a one-time invite link, valid for 14 days when created, for the admin to share. Accepting it sets a password and confirms the address. Removing a customer revokes desk access but keeps the account and request history.

Signed-in customers use My requests to filter open or closed requests across desks, read replies, respond, and rate resolved work. They can always open their own requests even if later removed from a desk. Private per-ticket links also work, subject to the portal’s access rules, and staff can replace a link to revoke the old one.

Publish knowledge, not internal clutter

In Service desk → Knowledge, create or edit a workspace document. Admins explicitly publish or unpublish it to the help center. Project and channel documents cannot be published. Agents can insert accessible knowledge into a draft and review it before sending.

Tip: Northwind can publish “How to send review footage,” keep the client’s actual project brief private, and link the article in a quick reply. The reusable answer becomes public; the work stays protected.

Heads up: Ticket attachments, email delivery, mailbox ingestion, an embedded widget, AI drafting, ticket merging, business-hour calendars, time-to-resolution targets, and named approval chains are not built.