Support Bot - Setup Guide

Bring in the power of conversational ticketing to your helpdesk with the Desk365 Support Bot for Microsoft Teams. Below are the steps to get setup with the Support Bot.

Download the Support Bot

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

  1. Sign in to the Desk365 Web App. 
  2. Go to the Settings > Channels > Microsoft Teams tab.
  3. Download the Support Bot.
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.

 
upload a custom app in Microsoft Teams instance

Finding Support Bot in Teams:

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

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

teams side bar

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

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

Support Bot Welcome Message:

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

welcome message in support bot

Company Not Found Message:

If the Company is not setup yet in the Desk365 platform you would see a message that says “Company Not Found”.

Company Not Found message in support bot

This happens if the Company is not setup in the Desk365 web app. 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.

adding accounts and companies in Desk365 agent app

Support Bot Commands:

Support Bot works with the commands below: 

  1. create
  2. status
  3. reset

Initiate a new request with our support team.

Check the status of your previously created tickets.

Reset bot settings.

list of commands in support bot

Create:

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

create a new ticket in the support bot

You can also create a ticket with additional fields easily if needed. Here, we have added two more ticket fields – ‘Priority’ and ‘Status’. You can easily add new ticket fields to the form by dragging these fields from the left and dropping them into 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.

create a new ticket in Desk365 support bot with additional fields

Custom Ticket Forms

Other than the default create ticket form, you can also configure multiple custom forms that can be used by your end-users to create tickets. More details on creating these custom forms can be found in this blog post.

support bot welcome message screen
Let’s say you’ve created multiple forms for your organization. They’ll now start to appear in the welcom message shown above. You’ll notice that other than the default ‘create’, ‘status’ and ‘reset’ commands, there are four other commands that appear. These are the newly created custom forms. They can be triggered in the Support Bot by typing the commands, ‘hrform’, salesform, ‘itform’ etc. In this example, typing the word ‘hrform’ in the Desk365 Teams Support Bot will result in the ‘HR Form’ to appear.
hr form in support bot

Status:

A list of your previous tickets will be displayed.

list of tickets in support bot

Ticket Details:

By clicking on the “Details” button in the List of Tickets card, you can view the full details of a ticket.

find the ticket details of a given ticket

Add Attachment:

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

ticket details in support bot

      1. Select Add Attachment and Support Bot will ask you to send a file to attach. 

desk365 attachment info

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

Attachment Acknowledgement

Notifications :

The Support Bot makes sure that 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 replied to the ticket.
Agent replied notification

Note Notification :

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

note notification in support bot

Ticket Resolved Notification :

Contact will be notified when a ticket has been resolved.

Ticket resolved notification

Ticket Closed Notification :

Contact will be notified when a ticket has been closed.

Ticket Closed notification
Agent replied notification

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.

modify the support bot according to your brand details

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.

search and find support bot in manage apps section

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.

find the support bot version in Desk365 agent web app portal

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

find the support bot version in Manage apps section

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.

upload a new version of the support bot in Microsoft Teams admin center

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.

delete the support bot in microsoft teams admin center

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.

upload a new app in Microsoft Teams admin center

3. Here you can upload the modified Support Bot.

Try Microsoft Teams ticketing system for your business starting today.