What you can accomplish with Atera’s helpdesk agent and customer portal

Atera’s helpdesk agent is one of the easiest ways to create a ticket, taking you inside the Customer Portal with a super simple hotkey shortcut. In this article, we will cover exactly what you can use this functionality for, to level up your business growth!

Tickets, please!

Whether you’re running an MSP business with multiple customers, or you’re handling internal IT for a single organization, tickets are the way that your end users tell you that something needs your attention. Instead of dozens of disparate emails, WhatsApp messages, smoke signals, and more, a ticketing system gives you one clear dashboard of to-dos.

With Atera’s comprehensive platform, you gain multifaceted avenues for ticket creation. Remember, these methods vary in accessibility—some exclusively for customers, others solely for technicians, and certain instances allowing use by both groups. Atera’s AI capabilities further enrich your experience. Its AI service desk intelligently categorizes incoming tickets, expediting resolution pathways. The AI helpdesk enhances technician efficiency by offering predictive insights into issues. All of these features synergize into an AI-powered IT environment, where the fusion of human expertise and artificial intelligence streamlines operations, fostering proactive solutions and elevating your IT support endeavors.

For example, a ticket can be created by the customer via an email, so that the end users can continue their preferred method of communication without adding management and consolidation on your side. For technicians, opening a ticket from inside Atera itself is a tech-only method to make sure nothing slips through the net. You can learn more about the six ways of opening tickets here.

Collect all six to win a prize! (Disclaimer: The prize is your own feeling of ticket-loving satisfaction.)

Utilizing the customer portal

One of the ways in which customers or colleagues can open tickets is directly from Atera’s Customer Portal. This is a closed environment that end-users can access through login credentials, where all tickets can be viewed, and where new tickets can be created.

The view that end-users get when they visit the Customer Portal will depend on their role and permissions. For example, a regular user will be able to see all the open tickets in which they were the requester, no matter how these requests have been sent. In contrast, if you’re the main contact on the account, you will see all the tickets associated with that account. This is a great perk for admin users or managers, who want oversight over all open tickets for a particular customer, or want to see the productivity and efficiency of all of their technicians or support engineers.

By checking out the Customer Portal, users can see the status of tickets down to granular detail, such as whether the ticket has been viewed, opened, responded to, or closed. This is useful for the customer so that they have an up-to-date view of resolution activity, and it’s also super helpful for technicians, stopping follow-up emails or messages, as there is visibility over the actions being taken by your IT team. Technicians can use this data to show customers how many issues have been dealt with, or what concurrent challenges are being worked on by their staff.

What else is the customer portal used for?

The Customer Portal is also home to self-serve capabilities, customized to each customer account or to different groups of users for internal IT.

Have you heard of the Pareto principle? It states that 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. More simply put, there are a small number of very critical items which have an outsized effect. This is also known as the 80/20 rule. In IT support, this phenomenon is shown by how roughly 80% of a support agent’s time is taken up with the same 20% of questions and concerns.

How many times have your technicians explained how to reset passwords, how to update software, where to find system information, or the steps needed to reset that maddening router?

Atera offers a solution to this challenge, the ability to create self-serve knowledge base articles which can be targeted and customized to the right readers. You can add photos and pictures to these articles to turn them into how-to walkthroughs, and also include links to additional media or content online.

As a busy IT pro, this saves you hours in the day. Preferably, customers and colleagues will get into the habit of checking the knowledge base using the search feature to see if there is a ready answer for their problem. However, even if they do open a ticket, you can send them links to the right articles in the knowledge base, dramatically reducing your Average Handling Time (AHT) and Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR).

Okay, but where does the helpdesk agent come in?

Thanks, you’ve been mega patient. 🙏

The helpdesk agent is installed on Windows devices by technicians, allowing all end-users a streamlined and accessible way to quickly open tickets from inside the customer portal.

If the helpdesk agent is installed on your device, you’ll see a hotdesk key in the bottom right-hand corner of your desktop. You can easily click on this icon at any time to open a ticket with a single click, where you’ll be prompted to add further information. Let’s say for example you’re in the middle of working in Microsoft Office, or you’re browsing on Chrome, when you run into a challenge. Instead of needing to navigate to a specific URL for the Customer Portal, you are one click away from using the hotkey. From this shortcut, you can also manage your open tickets if you want to take a quick look or edit an open item, and you can check and change your personal settings, too.

An MSP on Growth or Power plans, or an IT pro on Expert or Master? Your end-users can also use the hotkey shortcut to directly open a chat session with a technician, getting instant support from a pop-up widget, conveniently side by side with their open workload and processes. What better way to show your customers or colleagues that your door is always open?

Benefits of chat include:

• Instant communication: Technicians can open chat with a user, and a user can open chat with a technician, giving the perfect two-way tin-can communication.
• Feature-rich console: Technicians can transfer files and video content via chat, making it easy to support users with additional resources for support.
• Time-saving ticket creation: If the problem needs to be escalated, there’s no need to open a separate ticket. Tickets will be generated automatically after two minutes.

What if I don’t want users to have the helpdesk agent?

No one gets forced to do anything here at Atera, except to drink those all-important eight glasses of water a day. Hydration is no joke.

If your customers or colleagues are particular about which shortcuts make it to their icon bar, or if you’d rather they don’t have chat capabilities at their fingertips, you can toggle these options on or off from inside the Customer Portal.

Helpdesk agent and customer portal: your favorite business-boosting duo

So, if you’re looking to streamline and supercharge the way your users and technicians handle tickets, look no further than this dynamic duo! While the Customer Portal is a one-stop-shop for viewing and managing tickets, and troubleshooting issues via self-serve, the Helpdesk Agent supports users in getting into the Portal quickly, and communicating with technicians through one-click ticket creation or chat capabilities.

If you already adore the Customer Portal, and want to supercharge its capabilities or encourage users to make better use of it, we can guarantee that the Atera Helpdesk Agent is your new best friend.

Technicians can activate the Helpdesk Agent using these instructions.