Helpdesk Connect

Helpdesk Connect walkthrough

What Helpdesk Connect Does

When the bot cannot solve something itself, a damaged order, a refund, an account problem, it opens a support ticket instead of apologising and stopping. The ticket carries the chat transcript, any order context, a category and the customer's contact address, so whoever picks it up starts with the whole story.

Tickets are not the same thing as Hand-off. Hand-off triggers when a customer asks for a person and moves the live conversation to an agent. A ticket triggers on the issue, something the store has to act on later, and the conversation carries on. If you do not run Hand-off, the bot also files a ticket when someone asks for a human, because that is then the only escalation it has.

After purchase, Add-ons → Helpdesk stops being greyed out in the dashboard sidebar, with Ticket Inbox, Agent Mode, and Settings under it.

Choose One Desk

Open Add-ons → Helpdesk → Settings in the dashboard sidebar. Five choices, and one desk per bot, connecting a second replaces the first.

ProxyAI Tickets, built-in. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to copy. Tickets open on your own board inside ProxyAI, and your replies reach the customer back on the channel they were chatting on.
Gorgias. Enter your Gorgias address, the account email and its key (Gorgias → Settings → REST API). Replies your team writes in Gorgias reach the customer back on their chat.
Help Scout. Choose Connect with Help Scout and approve it, no keys to copy. Replies reach the customer back on their chat. Your first mailbox is chosen automatically and you can change it afterwards.
Zendesk. Enter your Zendesk address, then choose Connect with Zendesk and approve it. Tickets are created there, but a reply written in Zendesk does not come back to the chat.
Freshdesk. Your Freshdesk address and its key. Tickets only, same as Zendesk.

That last point is not a fault in those desks, it means you work the ticket in Zendesk or Freshdesk, and your customer hears back through that desk's own email instead of the chat they started in.

If Connect on Zendesk or Help Scout does nothing at all, that connection is not switched on for the platform yet. Use another desk in the meantime.

Customer Identity, Read This First

A ticket needs a real person to send the answer to, so on the web widget the bot only opens one for a customer who is signed in to your site. Anonymous visitors are asked to log in and try again.

WordPress/WooCommerce (our plugin) and Shopify, automatic. Nothing to set up.
Chat channels (WhatsApp, Telegram, LINE, Messenger, Instagram, Discord) have no login to check, so the bot simply asks the customer for an email address before filing.
Any other website, your site has to tell ProxyAI who is signed in, which is a one-off job for whoever built it. Helpdesk settings hold an Identity signing secret for them, and the ticket-form step of the setup wizard shows the few lines of code they need. Until that is in place, tickets can still be opened from every chat channel; only the website widget asks visitors to log in.

Set Up the Built-In Desk

Choosing Use built-in connects the desk immediately and opens a five-step wizard. Everything after the connect is optional, close the wizard whenever you like and you still have a working board. Come back later with Open setup on the card.

Connect mailbox, optional. Ticket emails go out through the support mailbox you already own, no new accounts and no DNS records. Pick your provider (Gmail / Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, Yahoo, or Other (custom SMTP)), create an app password where the step links you, and paste it once. Microsoft 365 signs in instead.
Replies to board, already working once a mailbox is connected: every ticket email carries a reply address that routes the customer's answer onto your board. Optionally, forward your support address to the address shown and every email customers send it opens a new ticket too.
Auto-archive, two timers side by side. Archive after (Never, 7, 14, 30 or 90 days) moves resolved tickets to Archived; nothing is deleted. Resolve after (Never, 3, 7, 14 or 30 days) resolves a ticket you replied to when the customer never came back.
Email template, enter your Company name, upload a Logo, and describe the look you want in Style. Choose Help me write in the corner of the Style box, and ProxyAI writes a branded email design around your replies. Check the preview, then choose Save template in the preview's title bar; Edit HTML sits beside it if you want to hand-edit. With no template yet, Add HTML under the Style box lets you paste your own. Without a template, replies go out as plain text.
Ticket form and categories, the categories a ticket can be filed under, plus the code for putting a ticket form on your own website.

Once connected the card stops being a form and becomes a summary: email replies, auto-archive, categories, email template.

About email replies

Email is off by default and the desk works fine without it, your reply always goes back on the chat the customer was using. It matters for one case: someone who filled in your ticket form, closed the tab, and would otherwise have to come back and check for an answer.

Replies are sent from your own mailbox, so they arrive from an address your customers already know. Incoming email that lands on the board uses your credits; if credits run out, inbound email pauses and is bounced back to the sender, not charged, until you top up.

Work Tickets on the Board

With the built-in desk, tickets land on a board inside ProxyAI, Add-ons → Helpdesk → Ticket Inbox on the web and in the Shopify, WordPress and Wix apps. Open a card, read the conversation, reply at the bottom, and your answer goes back on the channel the customer was using.

[Working the Tickets Board](/help/add-ons/tickets-board-guide) covers it in full: the columns and what moves a ticket between them, search and archiving, and the Smart Helpdesk Agent, which drafts replies for you to approve before they are sent.

With Gorgias, Zendesk, Freshdesk or Help Scout connected instead, you work those tickets in that desk and this board stays empty.

Add a Ticket Form to Your Site

Step 5 of the wizard gives you a ticket form for your own website, useful for customers who would rather fill in a form than chat. Pick your platform from the tabs, WordPress / Woo, Shopify or Custom website:

WordPress, add the ProxyAI Support Tickets block in the page editor, or paste the [proxyai_tickets] shortcode. Nothing else to set up.
Shopify, add the ProxyAI Tickets block to a page from your theme editor. Nothing else to set up.
Any other site, choose Custom website, then pick Node.js or PHP under Your site runs on. Step 1 is the form code to paste into your page. Step 2, Passing your customer identity to the chatbot and helpdesk, is the function your developer adds to the server so the form knows who is signed in. It runs in your server environment with the Identity signing secret from Helpdesk settings; never put that secret in the page itself.

The form is for signed-in customers, the same rule the chat follows. Logged-out visitors see a note asking them to log in.

Test It

Sign in to your own site as a test customer and open the chat.
Describe a problem the bot cannot fix, a damaged delivery, a refund request.
Confirm the bot says a ticket was opened, and that it never asks a signed-in web customer for an email address.
Find the ticket on the board (or in your own desk) and check the conversation and category came across.
Reply, and confirm the answer arrives in the original chat.
If you connected a mailbox, check the customer's emailed copy looks the way your template does.

If the bot says it opened a ticket and none appears, check a desk is still connected, the bot can only file tickets while one is.