Hi there. Today we’ll be looking at getting started with One-Desk and an overview of its key capabilities. Here is our agenda for today.
In today’s webinar we’ll cover the main sections of One-Desk, including what the customer applications are; the organization of your One-Desk; how to view your information; how tickets are created; planning tasks and projects; tracking time, workload, and other performance indicators; invoicing and quoting; and finally your account settings.
I hope you enjoy.
One-Desk is an all-in-one tool with help desk, project management, and professional service automation. You can support your customers, collaborate with your team, work on projects, track time, and more. One-Desk is flexible and customizable to fit a variety of teams and industries.
All you need to sign up with One-Desk is an email address and you will get access to a 14-day full-feature trial. Just click the sign up free button on our homepage.
Once you register, you’ll be greeted by this Quick Setup Wizard. This is always available on the top navigation for you to reference and is full of helpful videos, tutorials, and importantly, the quick setup wizard. If you take a few minutes to go through these steps in the wizard you will be ready to start using One-Desk.
Now let’s get started.
There are 3 main parts that make up One-Desk. The first is the main web interface, which we are looking at now. This is where you or your team will spend most of their time. The second is the mobile app. While I will not be showing the mobile app today, it IS available for iOS & Android. It is intended for your team to be able to access their assignments, reply to customer questions, and log time directly from their phone.
Finally, we have the customer applications.
Customer Applications are the end-user, client, or customer-facing side of One-Desk. They are meant to aid in communication and support, allowing customers to get updates, submit tickets, and more. Customers can also create tickets and respond via email, which I will show you later.
You can view your customer apps by clicking on your name, and hovering over Customer apps. The customer apps include the web widget, the messenger, portal, webforms, and knowledgebase.
Let’s click on the Web Widget. This will open up a new window of a sample page, with the widget.
The widget here is embeddable onto your own website with a JavaScript snippet. The widget contains the other customer applications within the tabs here. Essentially, the widget is an easy way for customers to access the apps. You can alternatively provide customers a link to individual customer apps.
The customer apps themselves, include:
The messenger; a live-chat between you and your customers or end-users. They can send you messages and include attachments. Let’s pretend I’m a customer, and send a message. Any live chat messages from your customers will appear in your main web application so your agents can reply. We’ll see where that is shortly.
Next, is the tickets portal, where your customers can log in and see their tickets along with the progress made on them, provide attachments, see conversation history, and more. The portal helps to minimize customer questions regarding their ticket progress.
Next are the Webforms, this is one method a customer can use to submit new tickets. You can customize your form by adding custom properties, making fields required, and so on. Webforms are helpful to ensure you receive all required information for tickets.
Finally, the knowledge base is a self-service hub of information. Your team can write articles on common questions, your company, services, or anything else. The knowledge base can cut down on common questions and keep everyone on the same page.
Please note that these apps are highly configurable, including colors, logos and more. I will cover that later on.
Organization + basic nav-
Let’s get back to our main web application.
One-Desk lets you easily log new tasks, tickets and other work. The three main apps on the left side here are the Tickets app, Tasks app, and the Projects App. These are the main locations you would go to manage work.
Now let’s talk about how your work items are organized in One-Desk. At the top, we have your organization name. Next, we’ve got portfolios. Portfolios are containers for your projects and are primarily organizational. Common practice would be to have these named after customers you serve, or by departments in your company.
Inside of the portfolios we have projects. Projects act as containers for tickets and tasks. Use projects for both planning and organization.
Finally, we have tickets and tasks. What’s the difference? Well, the ticket is good for logging quick solutions achieved with simple replies, while tasks are for planning a more in-depth solution that requires more time and resources to resolve. You can escalate tickets into tasks or create tasks independently. I’ll show you how this looks shortly.
Now if you would like to see tickets, tasks, projects or other work in more detail, you can do that in one of two ways. You can double-click, which will open up the detail panel in a new tab at the top. However, if you don’t want to navigate away from this dashboard, you can go to the Tools menu in the top bar, and select ‘Dock details panels to the right’. In this view, you are able to still browse through the items on the screen. Both options display the same information, just differently.
Custom work views-
Now, on the left side we can see our work views. These options determine what we see in our dashboard here.
First are the system views, you can think of these as our base layouts. I have the tree view for a hierarchical look at my tickets grouped into their respective projects. The Subtask tree groups our parent ticket with its child subtask. We will learn more about subtasks later. The Flat is a list view. The status board is a Kanban board that allows you to drag and drop tickets into different statuses and visually understand our workload
Under our base views are custom views. Custom views are configured versions of our base layouts; they can have filters, custom groupings, sorts, and different columns. These are some out-of-the-box views, for example ticket inbox sorts and groups my tickets by creation date. You can also create your own custom work views. Click on the icon beside ‘My Views.’ First, select the system layout. Let’s choose the Tree view. Then, add any filters you desire. For example, let’s choose to narrow tickets to tickets assigned to myself. Select filter, assignee, is, me. Finally, add any groupings to your view. Lets group these tickets by priority level. Now let’s save my view. As an admin level user I can choose to share my view. This is helpful for creating unified views across your organization. Anyone can create views and save them for themself on the sidebar here, but only admin users can share them. So here’s the view we created with my tickets grouped by priority. You can get pretty granular with your views. For example, you can add or remove columns, change column size, or even apply searches. You can then go in and save these changes to your custom views.
There is also the Project-level selection. This enables you to select the scope of one project or portfolio at a time. The project scope works independently and on top of your custom views. It also follows you as you go through other applications.
Finally, please note that the view you’re looking at is always reflected in the breadcrumbs up above. You can easily clear filters or selections this way.
Creating Tickets / helpdesk
So, how do you get tickets into your One-Desk? Well, the Helpdesk flow begins when a ticket is submitted to your company. The first way is manually. Click the Add button, and you can then fill in the form to create a ticket. You could do this on behalf of a customer. Second, and probably most popular, is to capture tickets by email. This is one of the steps in your quick setup wizard. You can directly connect your Office 365 or Google support email accounts, or auto forward from another provider. Customers will then email your regular support address and a ticket gets created automatically in One-Desk. Let’s go look at a ticket and I’ll explain what happens. The email subject line will become the title of the ticket. The body message becomes the description. The customer is added as the requester here. Their name and email is captured if a profile does not already exist in your One-Desk account. You can reply to the customer directly from the conversation tab here. These replies will go to the customer’s email. Likewise, the customer can reply from their own email and responses will appear here connected to the ticket.
The third way to get a ticket into One-Desk is through the Import tool. You can import the details of your tickets through the import tool by clicking on Tools, and Import.
The fourth is from a customer submitting a webform. Remember the customer apps we saw earlier? Customers can use that form to submit tickets. The fifth way to get a ticket into One-Desk is through chat. In the customer apps, when a customer starts a conversation, it is sent to you as a message.
Now if we navigate to our messenger application, here. We can see all our conversations. Messages from email, portal, or chat will appear here. You can see this conversation is linked to a ticket. So we can send messages from the ticket view, which we can access by clicking on the ticket name, or you can send messages from inside the messenger here. Everything is synced. You will see this message I sent earlier from the live chat. This conversation is not linked to anything. It is an independent live chat conversation. We can have the conversation with the customer or if we want, we can create a ticket from this conversation. Click the action icon above the conversation, and select ‘Create ticket from conversation.’ Now we see this conversation is linked to the ticket.
Let’s go into the ticket detail panel by clicking the ticket name. Here we can do a few different things: We can change the Lifecycle status with a click of a button. Keep in mind these statuses are configurable. We can also change the percentage of completion. We can assign this ticket to someone. We can move the ticket into a different project. And we can add details and attachments to the ticket.
In the ticket detail panel side-menu here, we’ve got a few tabs that we’ll go through. The first is the conversations tab, which is where you will find the internal and external conversations regarding this item. Let’s reply to our customer from here. Once you’ve replied you’ll see that a countdown has started. If the customer doesn’t see your reply within one minute, it will go out to them by email and an email icon will appear here. This way you never lose touch with your customers. You can also create internal conversations with your users. Click on ‘Create New Conversation,’ then on the internal messages tab, at mention users, or click ‘add’ to loop teammates into the conversation. These conversations are internal only, and your customers will not be able to see them, even in the portal.
The next tab is the timesheets tab. This is where you can log time worked on this ticket, be it through timesheets or timers. You can assign yourself to the ticket and start the timer by clicking the start work button or clicking start timer. Or, you can manually log time by clicking ‘add timesheet.’ On the timesheet you can include notes and billable status. Next, we’ve got the activities tab. This shows you a history of actions taken on this ticket, such as when it was created, when an assignee was added, and so on.
Finally, we’ve got the subtasks and links tab. Subtasks are used to identify short or simple work that is linked to a main item. This could be for work that you do to help to complete this ticket. Linked items are where you can link two different items and decide what the relationship between them is. For example, let’s say this ticket is related to this other ticket. When you add a link it’s easy to navigate between them.
Ticket to task, task/ project flow
Now, if your ticket is requiring more time to resolve and you need to do additional planning to achieve a resolution, then you can change it from a ticket into a task. To do this, simply click on the icon and select the task. You can see our task looks similar, and the conversations are maintained. However we can now score task effort. We can also plan the progression and estimate the effort of this task. Click on the dates here to give the task a planned schedule and planned work. The planned work is the estimate of how long the task should take, for instance an estimate of 5 hours. The planned schedules are the dates in which the task should be worked on. So it might start on Monday and be due by Friday. As well, let’s add a constraint to this such as it must start on this selected date. Our ticket is now moved from the tickets app to the tasks app. All our tasks are housed in this app.
The tasks as well as project applications are important for planning and managing your internal or client projects. Aside from converting a ticket into a task, you can create new tasks from the add button and place them into appropriate projects. You can also create a new project from the add button. You can fill in project properties depending on your use case. For instance, you can define if the project is for a specific customer organization, whether it will be invoiced, and if so, how it will be invoiced. We will get more into invoicing and quoting later in the demo. When creating a project, you can build a project from scratch. In this case you would select empty here. Then, after creation you would create, plan, and assign tasks. You can also create a project from a template. This allows you to copy over tasks, assignments, estimates or other properties. This is a common use case for companies that have one or more services that go through similar processes each time. You can mark an existing project as a template by going to the project detail panel. Then, mark it off as a template.
In our tasks application as well, we also have work views to assist us with planning and monitoring progress. There’s the Gantt view. Here you can click and drag ends to change planned duration, move them along on the timeline to change planned dates, and link the starts or ends of tasks to create dependencies. The blue represents the planned schedule while green is the actual work in progress. The actual progress is generated based on logged time. The blue bar for the project gets darker as more tasks are scheduled at the same time. Next, we’ve got the calendar view. This is similar to the Gantt view in that you can drag items around to reschedule plans. There is also the workload view. This is an informational resource management tool that allows you to see how much planned work each user has assigned versus how long they work in the day.
Now let’s take a look at the applications on the bottom left navigation. At the top, we have the messenger. This shows you external conversations from customers and internal conversations as well.
Next is the Timesheets application. For your employees, tracking time can be done by using Timesheets. The timesheets application keeps track of all logged hours. Like the other apps, you can filter, sort, and group your time entries to get the information you need. You can also export your timesheet data in CSV format. You can open up the timesheet details as well to get more information. If you are an admin user, you can also modify the timesheet. Next is the Knowledge Center. In this app we can manage our knowledge base articles, knowledge base categories, and saved replies. Articles can be created from the add button. The description of the article will be the content of the article and the name will be the title. When you want to publish an article, add it into the appropriate knowledge base category. This will make it visible on your knowledge base. The next tab of our knowledge center is the categories tab. Categories are how your customers browse your knowledgebase. You can also utilize parent categories to organize your categories further.
Lastly are saved replies, also called canned responses. These are pre-written responses that can help you answer common questions. You can create new saved replies and manage them from here. If we head back to our ticket detail panel, We can insert a saved reply from the action menu of our conversation. This will generate the pre-written response, then we can send it to the customer. You can also send links to articles or insert the whole article from this quick search menu. Only pinned articles or replies appear here, but you can browse through all your articles and replies by opening the knowledge library.
More apps – customers, users and analytics
The next application contains your Customer information. Customers will be automatically captured from emails and the Customer Portal. They can also be added manually from the add menu, or through import, or integrations. Moreover, you can add additional customer details and drill down to customer conversations, tickets, and more. On the customer organization level, we also have invoicing preferences specific to the customer organization. More general invoice preferences are in our admin settings which we will see shortly. But if you want to override your general invoice preferences for a specific customer, you can do so here. For instance, you can add specific customer tax rates, discounts, and more. Below that as well are the customer organization prepaid hour settings. You can set their block amount and cost, and see the history of changes, or remaining prepaid hours on the customer account.
Next, is the users application. Users are those working inside our main One-Desk web app, as well as the mobile app. Now, users can be in one or multiple teams. An important point about teams is that when creating projects you share projects with one or multiple teams. If a project is not shared with someone, they will not see the project or any ticket or task inside it. This is one way to segment your work for multiple departments, or keep teams interested in only what is relevant to them. A user can have permissions in the team as well. Lets click to open our user. Here Jon is in two teams. I can set his permission in this team to be restricted, limiting his abilities in projects shared with this team.
The next tab is our user calendar. You can create vacations for the user here. This will affect their availability for the workload and resource management features.
Next, is the permissions tab. A user can be admin or non-admin. Non-admins have no access to admin settings, and can have different application permissions. For instance They can be given less access to the customer app or timesheets app.
Lasty is user notifications, these settings configure whether this user receives emails and other notifications from conversations with customers or other users. Next is our analytics application. Here are various groupings of charts and graphs to analyze your key performance indicators. See the chart series at the top for more chart groupings. If you find certain charts are most helpful for your organization, create a customized dashboard by clicking on the views icon. Select the charts you want on your dashboard, give it a name, and save it on your side panel. You can also change the date range or filter these charts by various properties.
The next tab here is the reports. Reports are a way of extracting your data. There are a number of pre-built reports to choose from. You can also create custom reports using this report wizard. The benefit of reports is also the ability to send reports to customers, or teammates by email on a scheduled basis. The final tab is Activities, which acts like a history of actions done with One-Desk. This way, if you ever have any questions about how an item got to be a certain way, you can see the steps that were taken, and by whom, to get it to that state.
More apps – financials app
Next, we have our financials application. The financials app is where you manage your invoices, quotes, and budget.
The first tab is the invoicing tab. You can create a new invoice from the add menu. One-Desk supports invoicing for billable time, flat fee projects, or prepaid hours. Select the customer to bill, then what you want to invoice for. You can send your invoices directly from One-Desk via email. The next tab in our financials app is costs and revenue. Here, we can estimate and monitor our budget. The planned columns are based on your rates and the planned effort of your work. The actual columns are calculated as your team logs billable time.
The last tab is for Quotes. Like invoices, you can create quotes from the add button. Quotes can be made for flat fee projects or prepaid hours. In this case of flat fee projects, you can generate the quote based on a project template. For a block of hours, the amounts are based on the customer’s prepaid hours cost and amount. Like invoices, you can send quotes directly from One-Desk to your customer’s email. Your customers can also accept the quote directly from their email.
Administration settings – configuration & customization options
Lastly, at the bottom, we’ve got our administration section for your company preferences and settings. In Company Preferences, you can change your company name and logo. You can define a work schedule for the week, the time zone, change your company language, and define your subtask settings. Next is the Email Settings, which has some tabs at the top that I’ll go through. First is the messaging center, which shows all your automated replies, automated emails, and system emails. One-Desk has created certain automation responses already, which you can modify and change. Here is an automation that runs when a ticket status is updated. Here is the message itself. You can configure the message including the dynamic properties that are embedded automatically. Automated emails are sent directly to a selected email. Often these are used as a notification. You can create your own email templates that send through automation rules. Lastly here are system emails. These are important emails that do things such as sending user or customer invitations. Some of these can be modified but it is generally not recommended.
The next two tabs in our email admin settings are the outgoing and incoming tabs. These tabs show emails sent, and delivered, or failed, for the past 72 hours. The next tab here is the Appearance tab. This is where you can edit the look and feel of emails to fit your organization’s branding. You can add an email signature, or header, as well as configure your satisfaction survey messages. The last tab is the settings tab, where we can connect our support emails. When you connect, it will add both an incoming and outgoing channel here. There are also a number of filters to prevent certain emails from creating tickets, such as by email domain or subject line.
The next section is the integrations. One-Desk includes built-in integrations with some of your favorite applications. If you already use an existing system with your company, you can integrate it with One-Desk directly. Or, if you don’t see what you use from in the list, you can always look to see if the 3rd party Zapier has an integration ready for you. Zapier provides a way to automate workflows between different web applications, and they have hundreds of applications you can choose from. We also support Single-Sign-On. You can enable it for users through SAML 2.0 and Open ID, and for customers via OpenID. If you are a developer, we also have an API available.
Next are custom fields. Custom fields can be added to many things in your accounts such as tickets, tasks, or customer profiles. Custom fields allow you to capture information specific to your needs.Simply select: create a custom field and give it a name and data type then add it to the area you want. Here you can also create conditions for your custom fields. This will allow you to display another field if a customer selects a certain option. For example when my customers fill in my Department field here, if they select sales, I want them to see my Customer Approval field.
Next, is our automation and AI configurations. Here in the automation center is where all our automation rules are housed. Automations let us perform actions based on a variety of triggers. There are a number of out-of the box integrations that post messages, or update statuses, and you can modify these as you desire. Automations can run on tickets, tasks, articles, timesheets, or projects. First, select what you want it to run on. The automation will then trigger based on the defined condition and then perform an action. For example I can say all tickets, when created, can be assigned to myself. Or I can filter these tickets, let’s say if the ticket comes from a certain customer it would be assigned to me. There are many other options such as moving tickets into a project, changing priority or sending a message.
The next tab is for our bot settings. By default, we have a simple bot, which can provide a generic greeting or message to your customers in the live chat when you are online or offline. You can change the bot message, name, and avatar here, as well as which options the bot will suggest for your customer. We also have an add-on for the AI bot. You can start a trial for the AI agent from the subscription page. Then, toggle on the AI bot here. The AI works by learning from your One-Desk content.. Under AI corpus you can select which content the bot will learn from. This way ,the bot is tailored specifically to your company information and learns as more content is created. Once the bot is enabled, it will appear for your customers in the live chat, knowledge base, and webforms. The AI can answer questions, deflect tickets, and support self-service by providing answers on your behalf. The AI can also assist agents by suggesting the best saved replies or articles or generating new articles based on the context of the conversation the agent is responding to.
Next, is the ticket settings. You can modify up to 10 different types of tickets. You can change the icon, as well as the ticket type name. If you click on Manage Statuses, you can adjust the lifecycle status for each enabled ticket type. Enabling ticket types is helpful if you have different workflows for different services.
Below that you can configure the detail panel of your tickets, such as removing a property you do not use
If your company has SLAs, service level agreements, you can modify them here . SLAs let you set resolution and response targets based on the priority of your ticket.
In the Tasks settings, you can see that it’s very similar to tickets. You can enable and disable up to ten different task types, and manage their unique statuses. As well, configure the task details panel, and apply SLAs. The same settings apply to our articles. In the Timesheets settings, you can also configure their detail panels including adding custom fields. There’s also a number of defaults and settings you can define for your timer and timesheets. In the Users settings, you can manage the type of users that you have, and configure user profile details, including any custom fields you’ve created. The next settings are for our Customers. Same as users, you can create various types and configure the detail panel.
In the Projects and Portfolios section, it’s very similar to the tickets and tasks. You can enable different types of projects and portfolios. You can also configure unique lifecycle statuses for all your project types and configure your project detail panel. Next are Forms, which refers to your internal creation form, when creating from the add menu. We can edit the defaults and properties that appear on the form. We can also create multiple forms for each ticket type. This serves as a template. We can set a separate name, default values, and properties, in the other form we created.Now when I create a ticket, using this form, those default values are already set for me. This makes logging tickets manually, much faster. Next is our financial settings, we can set our cost and invoicing levels. You can set each from a variety of levels such as by team, by customer, or by service type performed.. You can then set your rates, hourly, with a monthly minimum, or mixed. You can set default values for your invoices here, such as the invoice memo, default tax, and more. Next are some global settings for prepaid hours. As well One-Desk integrates with QuickBooks Online to copy over or send One-Desk invoices. Lastly are the service types. Service types can be used in your cost and invoicing rates and on timesheets. Here you can manage your service types or the default service type.
Next, is our settings for Customer-facing Apps. Here you can create additional customer apps, rename your apps, or disable ones you won’t use.
Below this is the widget appearance, where you can select the bubble size, or messages in the widget bubble. Below that are the general messages that appear in your widget welcome page. The next two tabs are for the classic or mobile friendly app settings. There are two types of customer apps in One-Desk. You can learn more about the differences in this link. The settings here will configure which applications appear in the classic widget. To add the widget to your site you can generate the snippet below. This setting will generate the snippet for the classic version of the widget, if you prefer the mobile friendly version you can generate the snippet on the next tab. The other messenger settings on the left side will configure the appearance and login settings of the mobile friendly messenger. Next is the ticket portal settings. Here you can configure which tickets customers can see in the portal. Below that are the properties the customer can see and edit on a ticket after submission.
Next, is the webforms settings, the forms for your customers. You can edit which properties your customers can enter to create a ticket, add additional properties including your custom fields, and make a field required by checking the box. The knowledge base setting here, again allows you to configure the messages in your Knowledge base, plus add your categories from here. And above are the appearance settings for the Knowledge base. Last are the settings for the classic portal, if you choose to use this version. Again you can define which items the customer can see and properties that are visible. Now, when you are ready to go pro you can do so from your trial account. You get unlimited projects and customers. Pick your plan depending on which features you need. You then pay based on the number of users. Users are the individuals logging into the main web application, assigned to tickets, and so on.
That concludes the One-Desk webinar for today. Thank you for your time! If you want more details on anything we looked at today check out our video guide, or knowledge base, or reach out to our support team through live-chat or at support at One-Desk dot com.