Support Bot - Setup Guide

Bring in the power of conversational ticketing to your helpdesk with the Desk365 Support Bot for Microsoft Teams. Follow the steps below to set up the Support Bot.

Download the Support Bot

First you’ll need to download the app manifest zip:

Sign in to the Desk365 Agent Portal.
Go to the Settings > Channels > Microsoft Teams and choose the ‘Support Bot’ tab.
Download the Support Bot.

Install/Upload Support Bot

If you’re installing the Support Bot for the first time, we recommend you to follow the instructions which we have explained in detail below.

You’ll need to have appropriate permissions to upload Teams Apps to do the below:

1. In the lower left corner of Teams, choose the Apps icon. On the Apps page, choose Manage your apps.

2. You can choose to:

(i) Upload a custom app.

(ii) Submit an app to your org.

3. Option (i) above is best if you just want to test the Support Bot and Option (ii) is best when the Support Bot is used organization wide.

4. You can then choose the Support Bot app you downloaded before and install it.

Finding Support Bot in Teams:

Once it is installed for your organization a user can easily add Support Bot to their Teams instance.

1. Select Apps in the Teams sidebar to open the Apps tab.

2. Find and select Support Bot to open the details window.

3. In the support bot details window, click Add.
That’s it! You have added the Support Bot to your Microsoft Teams instance.

Support Bot Welcome Message:

When the Support Bot is installed, it sends a welcome message. This message provides a quick introduction to get started.

Company Not Found Message:

If the Company is not setup yet in the Desk365 Agent Portal, you would see a message that says ‘Company Not Found’. In that case, please contact your customer support team.

Note to Support Agents: You’ll need to add a Company with the domain name of your customer as shown here. This domain is used to check users of the Support Bot and associate them with your support team. Once it is done, you should be able to see the correct ‘Welcome Message’ in the Support Bot.

To explain this further with an example, if you’re using Desk365 as an internal helpdesk for your organization, you can add your company name and enter your company domains associated with it. This domain is used to check users of the Support Bot and associate them with your support team.

On the other hand, if you’re using Desk365 as an external helpdesk with your customers, you can add all your customers in the ‘Companies’ tab and link them to their respective domains.

Once this is done, your customers will have the ability to use the Support Bot from their end.

Support Bot Commands:

Support Bot works with the commands below:

create
status
reset

Initiate a new request with our support team.

Check the status of your previously created tickets.

Reset bot settings.

Create:

Clicking on ‘New Request’ or typing the word ‘create’ will result in the Create a New Ticket card to appear.

If necessary, it is also easy for you to create a ticket with additional fields. For this example, we have added two more ticket fields – ‘Priority’ and ‘Status’. To add new ticket fields to the form, navigate to Settings > Admin > Ticket Forms tab and choose the ‘Create Ticket’ form in the Support Bot.

Now, simply drag and drop the desired fields from the left-hand side onto the list on the right. This immediately adds them to the form.

Learn how to add custom fields to the Create Ticket form in Desk365 with the help of this blog post.

Custom Ticket Forms

In addition to the default create ticket forms, you have the option to set up multiple custom forms for your end-users to create tickets. More details on creating these custom forms can be found in this blog post.

Let’s say you’ve created multiple forms for your organization. They’ll now start to appear in the welcome message as shown in the above screenshot. You’ll notice that, in addition to the default commands such as ‘create’, ‘status’, and ‘reset’, there are four additional commands present. These commands correspond to the newly created custom forms.

To create a ticket with these forms in the Support Bot, simply enter the commands ‘hrform’, ‘salesform’, ‘itisform’, and so on. For instance, if you type the command ‘hrform’ in the Desk365 Teams Support Bot, the ‘HR Form’ will be displayed.

Status:

To get a list of your previous tickets along with their status, you can either click on the ‘Check Status’ button or send the command ‘status’ in the Desk365 Teams Support Bot.

A list of your previous tickets along with their status will be displayed.

Ticket Details:

You can access the full details of a ticket by clicking on it in the list of displayed tickets.

Add Attachment:

Support Bot allows you to add an attachment to a ticket..

1. Select ‘Attachment’ button and Support Bot will ask you to send a file to attach.

2. Once attached, the Support Bot will add this file to the ticket and send you an acknowledgement.

Notifications :

The Support Bot makes sure that end-users are updated on the status of their tickets with Teams notifications. Here are some examples:

Reply Notification :

Contact will be notified when an agent has replied to the ticket.

Note Notification :

Contact will be notified when a new public note has been added to the ticket.

Ticket Resolved Notification :

Contact will be notified when a ticket has been resolved.

Ticket Closed Notification :

Contact will be notified when a ticket has been closed.

Customizing the Support Bot

You can also customize the Desk365 Teams Support Bot according to your brand themes and colors.

1. To get started, go to Settings > Channels > Microsoft Teams.

2. Select the ‘Support Bot’ Tab.

3. Click on the ‘Modify Support Bot’ button found below. Here, you can make all the customizations with respect to your brand guidelines.

4. After entering your brand details, click on the ‘Modify Support Bot’ button to make changes to the Support Bot.

5. Finally, click on the ‘Download Support Bot’ button.

Now, the Support Bot that you customized has been downloaded and you can upload the Support Bot as a custom app in your Microsoft Teams Apps instance.

Click on ‘Manage your apps’ and select the ‘Upload an app’ Option.

Choose ‘Upload a custom app’ and upload your new version of the Support Bot.

Learn how to customize your Support Bot in Desk365 with respect to your brand guidelines with the help of this blog post.

Uploading the newly customized Support Bot

Go to Microsoft Teams admin center > Teams apps > Manage apps.

Search for ‘Support Bot’ and click on it as shown in the image below.

If the version of your newly customized Support Bot and the one which is already present in your Teams tenant are different, then a simple upload will work. Otherwise, you’ll need to delete the previous version and upload the new version. You can identify the version of the Support Bot you’re planning to upload from the Agent Portal as shown below.

You can also identify the version of your current Support Bot from the Microsoft Teams Admin center as shown below.

If the customized Support Bot has a different version number:

In this case, you can just choose the ‘Upload file’ option in the Microsoft Teams admin center and upload your newly customized Support Bot.

Note: You may notice the logo and color changes reflect immediately in some windows while it doesn’t fully reflect the changes in some other areas of Teams. This is dependent on the Microsoft Teams servers. We suggest waiting a few hours to see it reflected uniformly everywhere.

If the newly customized Support Bot has the same version number:

In this case of the customized Support Bot having the same version number as the currently installed bot, we suggest you delete the current bot and newly install the customized Support Bot.

1. Delete your previous version of the Support Bot that you had installed previously as shown in the image below.

Note: Make sure it is deleted properly, if not refresh the page once or please log off once and log in back again.

2. Now go back to the ‘Manage apps’ section. Choose the ‘Upload new app’ option.

3. Here you can upload the modified Support Bot.

Using app setup policies to pin and auto-install Support Bot in Teams

As an administrator of your organization, you can use app setup policies in Teams admin center to both install and pin apps, as well as manage which particular users have the ability to upload custom apps. Pinning helps encourage the use of relevant apps within your organization and provides expedited access to them.

When an app is pinned by an admin, it gets automatically installed for the users for whom the app is allowed, and it cannot be uninstalled by end-users.

App setup policies provide the ability to install authorized apps on behalf of users when they start Teams, as well as select which apps to pin and specify their order on the Teams app bar.

If you’re looking for a way to pin or auto-install the Support Bot for end-users in your own domain, please follow the steps below:

1. Sign in to the Teams admin center and navigate to Teams apps > Setup policies. Choose Global (Org-wide default) which is the default policy for users who aren’t assigned to a policy.

If you cannot find a specific policy, you have the option to create a custom policy by selecting the ‘Add’ button, and then assigning it to a specific group of users.

2. Under ‘Installed apps’, click on ‘Add apps’.