Introducing the Help Desk: every employee question, answered against an SLA

Every company has the same quiet problem. An employee's laptop will not connect to the VPN. Another has a question about a deduction on their payslip. A third is waiting to hear about an expense claim. Each one sends a chat message or an email to whoever they think might know, and then waits. Some of those questions are answered in minutes. Others are forwarded twice, forgotten, and raised again a week later with more frustration.

Today we are introducing the Help Desk in Techno Team Via and the EMS. It gives every employee question a ticket, a department responsible for answering it, and a clear service level agreement for how quickly that should happen.

Why we built it

Internal support usually lives in chat and email, and neither was designed for it. A chat message has no owner, no status and no deadline. An email to a shared mailbox can be read by five people and answered by none. When the person who usually handles a topic is on leave, questions simply wait. Leaders have no way to see how many questions are open, how long they take or where they get stuck.

We wanted something simpler than a full IT service management tool and more structured than a group chat: a single place where any employee can ask for help, where the right team sees the request immediately, and where both sides know what to expect.

How it works for employees

An employee raises a ticket by choosing a category, such as IT Support, HR, Payroll, Expense Claims, Admin & Facilities or Other. The list of categories is set by the company's admin, so it matches how your teams are organised.

They then choose a priority, Urgent, High, Medium or Low, add a subject and a description, and can attach up to three files, such as a screenshot of an error or a copy of a receipt.

After that, the employee can follow the ticket through to the end:

• Reply to the agent's questions in the ticket's conversation.
• Mark it fixed when the problem is solved.
• Reopen a resolved ticket within a set number of days if the problem comes back.
• Rate the help they received from 1 to 5, which closes the ticket.

Everything about the request stays in one thread, so nobody has to repeat themselves or search old emails to find what was said.

How it works for agents

Each category is answered by a department, and the people in that department are its agents. IT Support tickets go to the IT team, Payroll tickets to the people who run payroll, and so on.

Agents work from three views:

• Unassigned: new tickets in their categories that nobody has picked up yet.
• Assigned to Me: the tickets they own.
• My Categories: every ticket in the categories their department answers.

From a ticket, an agent can take it or assign it to a colleague, and change its priority or status. The statuses are Open, In Progress, Waiting on Employee, Resolved and Closed. If a ticket has been raised in the wrong place, the agent changes its category, which hands it to the department that answers that category, with the full history intact.

Agents reply to the employee in the conversation and can also add internal notes that the employee never sees. That makes it easy to record what was checked, ask a colleague for input or leave context for whoever picks the ticket up next, without cluttering the employee's view. The employee sees a clean conversation with the answers that matter to them, while the team keeps its working notes alongside the request.

SLAs counted in working hours

Every ticket carries two targets, set by its priority: a first-response SLA, for how quickly an agent should reply, and a resolution SLA, for how quickly the problem should be solved.

SLAs are counted in working hours: weekdays within the hours you set, with holidays skipped. A Low priority ticket raised late on Friday evening does not breach over the weekend. Time spent waiting on the employee is not counted either, so when an agent asks for a screenshot and sets the ticket to Waiting on Employee, the clock stops until the employee replies.

The default targets are:

All of these are adjustable, so you can start with the defaults and tune them once you see how your teams actually work.

Escalation when an SLA is missed

If a ticket breaches its SLA, it is escalated once: to the agent it is assigned to, or to the category's agents if nobody has taken it yet, and to the HR Director. The escalation happens a single time per breach, so it draws attention without flooding anyone's inbox.

What it gives leaders

For HR Directors, department heads and founders, the Help Desk turns internal support from something invisible into something that can be managed:

• Clear ownership. Every ticket belongs to a category, a department and, once taken, a named agent.
• Clear expectations. Employees know how quickly they should hear back, and agents know what they are working towards.
• Early warning. Missed SLAs reach the HR Director, so a team that is overloaded or a ticket that has fallen through the cracks is visible before it becomes a complaint.
• Tidy closure. Resolved tickets close automatically after a set number of days, so the open list reflects work that is genuinely still open.

Employee ratings from 1 to 5 add a simple measure of how the help was received, ticket by ticket.

Setting it up

Getting started takes a short conversation with the people who will answer tickets. A practical order:

1. Decide your categories. Start from the examples, IT Support, HR, Payroll, Expense Claims, Admin & Facilities and Other, and adjust them to your organisation. Fewer, clearer categories make it easier for employees to choose correctly.
2. Link each category to a department. The people in that department become the category's agents.
3. Set your working hours. These define how SLAs are counted, together with your holiday calendar.
4. Review the SLA targets. Keep the defaults or adjust first-response and resolution times for each priority.
5. Choose the reopen and auto-close windows. Set how many days an employee has to reopen a resolved ticket, and after how many days resolved tickets close automatically.
6. Tell your employees. Explain that questions for these teams now go through the Help Desk, and encourage agents to point chat and email requests there too.

Agree within each team how tickets are shared out, whether one person triages the Unassigned view or everyone picks up from it, before the first tickets arrive.

What's next

This first release focuses on getting every question raised, owned and answered on time. Reporting is coming next, so leaders can look across tickets over time rather than one at a time. We will share more as it becomes available.

The Help Desk is available in Techno Team Via and the EMS. To see how it would work with your own categories and teams, book a demo and we will walk you through it.