Ticketing and the service desk

Tickets in Atlas come from three places: email, the client portal, and raised by hand. All three land in the same queue, against the same client record, and are answered the same way.

Email ingestion

Point a support mailbox at Atlas and mail arriving there becomes a ticket. A reply to an existing thread attaches to that ticket rather than opening a new one, matched on the mail thread rather than the subject line, so "Re: Re: Fwd:" does not start a third ticket.

Quoted history and signatures are folded away in the thread view, so a long back-and-forth reads as a conversation rather than a wall of repeated text. Inline images sent from Outlook render in place instead of arriving as unnamed attachments.

Queues, priority and type

Every ticket carries a queue (which team handles it), a priority, and, for support work, a type: incident, service request, or change. Change tickets pick up an approval and rollback record, and appear on the change calendar.

Automatic client linking

A ticket emailed in by an address Atlas recognises is linked to that client automatically, by contact address first and then by domain. Where it cannot tell, it leaves the ticket unlinked rather than guessing: an unlinked ticket is easy to fix, a wrongly-linked one is not.

If the team later moves a ticket to a different client, satisfaction surveys follow the client, not the original sender.

SLA

SLA clocks run against your business hours, not wall-clock time, and pause while a ticket is pending on the client. The queue shows what is at risk and what has breached, ordered by urgency.

Satisfaction surveys

When a ticket is resolved, a survey is scheduled rather than sent immediately: a ticket resolved and reopened within the grace window never sends one. The survey goes to the person who experienced the work: the requester when they are a contact of the client, or a client contact who took part in the thread. Where nobody at the client was ever involved, no survey is sent. Your own team never receives one, even when your company is also set up as a client, and a ticket that an automated email opened (a quarantine digest, a report) is not surveyed.

Time and billing

Time tracked on a ticket flows to invoicing through ad-hoc billing rates, or draws down a prepaid block of support hours where the client has one. The remaining balance is visible on the ticket.