Your first day in the inbox
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This article is for somebody who has just been given an Auralis account and needs to be useful today. It assumes nothing has been explained to you.
What Auralis is
Auralis is a helpdesk. Everything a customer sends you — an email, a message through the chat widget on your website, a submitted contact form, a phone call, a conversation an AI agent could not finish — becomes a ticket. A ticket holds one customer's request, the whole conversation about it, and the record of everything your team did to it. Your job in the inbox is to move tickets from "somebody needs to look at this" to "this is finished", and to keep the customer informed while you do.
Signing in and finding your workspace
A workspace is one organisation's helpdesk: its tickets, its customers, its team, its settings. Everything you see is scoped to the workspace you are in, and it is possible to belong to more than one, in which case you choose between them after signing in. If you find yourself looking for a ticket a colleague can see and you cannot, the first thing to check is that you are both in the same workspace.
Your role
You have exactly one role in the workspace, and it decides what you can do. Most agents are editors, which means you can do all ticket work: reply, change status and priority, assign, tag, log time. If you are a viewer you can read everything but change nothing. Admins additionally configure the workspace, and owners are admins with two extra protections. If a button is greyed out or an action is refused, your role is the most likely reason; ask an admin rather than assuming the feature is broken. There is a separate article covering the roles in detail.
The inbox
The inbox is the list of tickets, and it is one list with filters on it rather than a set of separate folders. By default it shows the tickets that are still live, most recently updated first, and it leaves out tickets that have been merged into others or deleted.
The filters are the whole skill. You can narrow by status, priority, source and tag, by the person a ticket is assigned to — including the shortcuts for your tickets and for unassigned tickets — by team, by customer, by whether a ticket is overdue, and by whether it is snoozed. You can search within whatever you have already narrowed to; search covers subjects, descriptions, message bodies, and customer names and email addresses.
Two filters are worth setting up on your first morning: assigned to me, which is your actual work, and unassigned, which is the pile that nobody has taken yet. When a combination proves useful, save it as a view so it becomes one click.
The counts shown next to the list describe the whole workspace rather than your current filter. That is deliberate — they are there to tell you what is waiting elsewhere while you look at one slice.
Working a ticket
Open a ticket and you get its timeline: every message and every change, in order. Reading from the top tells you the whole story, including who assigned it to you and why the priority changed.
When you write, you choose between two things:
- A reply goes to the customer.
- An internal note stays inside your team.
Check which one you are writing before you send. The difference matters, and it is not reversible in one direction: an internal note can be deleted afterwards, a reply cannot, because it has already reached the customer.
Your first reply on a ticket is also what stops the first-response clock. Internal notes do not, however much work went into them.
Moving a ticket along
As you work, set the status so the rest of the team knows where things stand:
- Open — still needs you.
- Pending — you have replied and are waiting on the customer.
- On hold — blocked on something inside your own organisation.
- Solved — done.
Open, pending and on hold can be changed to each other freely. Solved and closed are final — the only way back out of them is the reopen action, which exists precisely for the customer who writes back a week later.
Priority is the other field you will touch often. It orders the queue and it selects the service-level targets that apply. Be aware that changing a ticket's priority recalculates its deadlines from that moment.
Getting a ticket to the right person
A ticket can be assigned to a person, to a team, or to both. If a ticket is not yours, put it on the team that owns that kind of work rather than guessing at an individual; depending on how that team is configured, Auralis may hand it to somebody automatically, and if not it will sit in the team's queue where the right people are looking.
If you are going to be away from your desk, mark yourself unavailable rather than leaving the team — that takes you out of automatic assignment without changing your membership.
A workable first-day routine
- Filter to assigned to me and work that list first, sorting by SLA due if anything is close to a deadline.
- Reply to whatever you can answer, and set those tickets to pending.
- For anything you cannot answer, add an internal note saying what you found out, and route it to the team that can.
- Check unassigned and take what is clearly yours.
- Solve what is genuinely finished. Do not leave answered tickets sitting open — the queue is only useful as a signal if it means what it says.