AsherSupport user manual

Welcome

AsherSupport is two products behind one sign-in: a help desk, where your team answers customer messages as tickets, and a booking calendar, where customers pick a time on your availability. Same login, same customers, same records.

It is built for someone running more than one brand from one team. You add each brand as a product, and every ticket, support address and report can be split by brand — without paying for a second desk.

Who this manual is for

You signed up, and now you have to set the thing up for other people. This manual is written for you: the owner or admin. It assumes no technical background. Where a step genuinely needs someone technical — pointing your email provider at the desk, for instance — it says so plainly.

Your agents can read it too. Nothing in here is hidden from them except the settings screens, which only admins can open.

How this manual is organised

• Getting started — your first thirty minutes, in the order that works.
• The support desk, Working a ticket, Contacts & knowledge base — the day-to-day screens your team lives in.
• Scheduling — availability, event types and booked calls.
• What your customers see — your public portal.
• Admin & settings — one part for every settings screen.
• Reference & troubleshooting — status and priority tables, fixes for the problems that come up most, and a glossary.

Step-by-step tutorials

Every task in this manual, in one place. 24 walkthroughs — pick the thing you are trying to do and it takes you straight to the steps and the screenshot.

Getting started

• Creating your desk
• Set up in this order

Working a ticket

• Replying to the customer
• Creating a ticket for a customer
• Book a call from a ticket

Contacts & knowledge base

• Contacts
• Knowledge base

Scheduling

• Event types
• Availability
• Calendar sync
• Zoom
• Booking a call from a ticket

What your customers see

• Reading the knowledge base
• Submitting a ticket
• Checking ticket status
• Booking a call

Admin & settings

• Team
• Products (your brands)
• Canned responses
• Automations
• SLA policies
• Business hours
• Your profile

Reference & troubleshooting

• Troubleshooting

Getting started

This part covers your first thirty minutes: creating the desk, understanding the two addresses it gives you, and setting things up in an order that does not double back on itself.

Creating your desk

Where to find it: ashersupport.com/signup

1. Enter your company name. This is what your desk is called, and it becomes the name of your first brand.
2. Choose your subdomain. This is your customers' address, so pick the name they would recognise. It must be 3–32 characters, lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens only, and it cannot start or end with a hyphen. A handful of names are reserved (www, app, support and similar). If another company already has the one you want, the form tells you when you submit and you pick another.
3. Enter your name and work email. This becomes the first admin account.
4. Choose a password of at least 8 characters.
5. Select Create your help desk. You land straight inside your desk — there is no waiting room and no setup call.

Your new desk is not empty. It arrives with one brand named after your company, a group called General, one saved reply, and a welcome ticket that walks through the basics. You can rename or delete any of it.

The confirmation email

We also email a link to confirm your address. Until you select it, a slim Confirm your email address banner sits above the top bar with a Send link button that mails it again. Check your spam folder first.

Almost nothing is held back while you wait. You can work tickets, change settings, add agents and manage billing. The single exception: booking confirmations still reach you and your team, but not extra guest addresses typed into your public booking form. Confirming the address lifts that.

Your first sign-in

Where to find it: ashersupport.com/login

Sign in with the email and password you chose at sign-up. You land on your dashboard, which counts everything unresolved across every brand you run.

Your desk has two addresses

This is the thing that confuses almost everyone in the first week, so it is worth two minutes now. Your desk gives you two different web addresses, for two different audiences.

1. The agent console — where your team works

Your team signs in at ashersupport.com and works there. This is the screen in the picture above: tickets, contacts, the knowledge base editor, scheduling, analytics and every admin setting. Every page in it sits under /a/ — for example ashersupport.com/a/tickets.

It is private. A person needs an agent account on your desk to see anything here, and even then, the settings screens are admin-only.

2. The customer portal — where your customers go

Your customers go to your own subdomain, yourcompany.ashersupport.com/support. It carries your brand name, not ours, and it is the only address you ever hand out. On it, a customer can:

• search your knowledge base and read articles;
• submit a ticket, choosing which of your brands it is about;
• check the status of a ticket they already opened;
• book a call from your availability.

Customers do not create accounts and do not have passwords. They are identified by their email address. To see their own tickets they enter their address and we email them a link that opens them — a link, rather than a password, so nobody can read someone else's conversation just by knowing their address.

Set up in this order

Each step below assumes the one above it is done. Following the order saves you re-opening screens.

1. Add your brands. Admin → Products. One product per brand or per product line you support. Do this first — groups, SLA policies and reporting all read better once your brands exist.
2. Add your team. Admin → Team. Add each agent and decide who is an admin. You set their first password and pass it to them yourself.
3. Set your business hours. Admin → Business Hours. Your weekly opening calendar and its timezone. Do this before the SLA step, because an SLA policy asks you to pick a calendar and you want one to pick.
4. Write an SLA policy. Admin → SLA Policies. Set how fast you intend to answer and to resolve, per priority, and attach the calendar from step 3 so your clocks stop when you are closed.
5. Publish a few knowledge base articles. Knowledge base in the sidebar. Three or four answers to your most common questions is enough to start. Set each one to published — only published articles appear on your portal — and they begin deflecting tickets you would otherwise answer by hand.
6. Set your availability. Availability in the sidebar. The hours you are willing to take calls. Without this, your booking page has nothing to offer and shows no times.
7. Create an event type. Event types in the sidebar. A named, fixed-length call — "30-minute onboarding call" — that customers can book. Each one has its own link you can share on its own.

What you can safely leave until later

• Groups — worth having once more than two or three people share the desk.
• Canned responses — easiest to write after you have answered the same question twice.
• Automations — add rules once you can see which tickets keep landing in the wrong place.
• Inbound email — turning your support address into tickets needs someone with access to your email provider. See Email.

The support desk

This section is the tour. It covers how the console is laid out, what the dashboard is telling you, and how to find any ticket in the list. Once you know your way around these three screens, the rest of the manual is detail.

Two tools, one login

AsherSupport is genuinely two products sharing one account. The left navigation is grouped so you can see where one ends and the other begins.

You do not have to use both halves. A team that only answers tickets can ignore the Scheduling group entirely. A team that only takes bookings can live in it. The two do meet in one place: you can book a call directly from a ticket, which is covered in Book a call from a ticket.

The bar across the top

Every console screen has the same top bar. On the left is the name of the screen you are on, and often a count — the number in the grey pill next to Tickets is how many tickets the current view holds. On the right:

• + New opens the new-ticket form, from anywhere.
• Search looks across tickets, contacts and knowledge base articles at once.
• The moon icon switches between the light and dark appearance.
• The round initial at the far right opens your own profile.

The dashboard

Where to find it: Support desk → Dashboard

The dashboard answers one question: what needs attention right now. It counts every ticket in your helpdesk, across all products.

The six cards

Each card is clickable. Clicking it opens the ticket list already filtered to exactly the tickets it counted, so the number you clicked and the list you land on always agree.

The two panels

Tickets by status is the full breakdown — every status with its current count, including Resolved and Closed. It is the honest picture of where work is sitting.

Unresolved by product is the multi-brand view. If you run support for more than one product, brand or client out of the same desk, this tells you at a glance which one is generating the backlog. Products are set up under Admin → Products. Tickets that have not been given a product are grouped as No product, and any product with nothing unresolved drops off the list rather than showing a zero.

The ticket list

Where to find it: Support desk → Tickets

This is where you will spend most of your day. Three columns: the saved views on the left, the toolbar across the top, and the tickets themselves.

Saved views

The left column narrows the list. Only one view is active at a time, and the one you are in is highlighted and named in the top bar.

• All tickets — no filter at all, including Resolved and Closed.
• Unresolved — the backlog: everything not yet Resolved or Closed.
• Overdue — unresolved and past its resolution deadline.
• Due today — unresolved and due before the day is out.
• Under Status: Open, Pending, On hold, Resolved, Closed. On hold gathers Pending, Waiting on Customer and Waiting on Third Party into one list.
• Under Assignment: Unassigned is unresolved tickets with no agent, and My open tickets is the Open tickets assigned to you — your own queue.

Sort

Sort by offers three orders, newest or highest first in each case:

• Date created — the default. Newest tickets at the top.
• Last modified — most recently touched at the top. Useful for picking up conversations that are actually moving.
• Priority — Urgent first, then High, Medium, Low.

Card or Table

The Layout control switches between two ways of showing the same tickets. Card gives each ticket a roomy row and is easier to read one at a time. Table is dense, aligned in columns, and better for scanning thirty tickets for a pattern.

Filters

Filters opens a small panel under the toolbar with two controls, Status and Priority. They narrow whichever view you are already in — so Unresolved plus a Priority of Urgent gives you the urgent backlog. A Clear filters link appears once either is set. The panel stays open while a filter is applied, so you can always see why the list is short.

Export

Export downloads the current list as a CSV file you can open in a spreadsheet. It honours the view and the filters you have applied, but not the sort layout or the page you are on — you get every matching ticket, not just the thirty on screen. Each row carries the ticket number, subject, status, priority, source, type, requester name and email, agent, group, tags, and the created and updated timestamps.

Paging

The list shows 30 tickets per page. On the right of the toolbar, 1 - 24 of 24 tells you which slice you are looking at and how many tickets match in total; the two arrows step back and forward. Changing the view, the sort or a filter always returns you to page one.

What a row tells you

Before you open anything, a single row already answers most of the questions you would ask about a ticket.

Working a ticket

This is the job. Everything else in AsherSupport exists to get you to this screen with the right ticket on it. Read this section properly — especially Reply and Note are not the same thing, which is the one mistake in a help desk that customers actually see.

Opening a ticket

Where to find it: Tickets → click any subject

Click a ticket's subject anywhere it appears — in the list, on the dashboard, in search results, or on a contact's record — and it opens. The breadcrumb at the top left reads All tickets › #2; clicking All tickets takes you back to the list.

Reading the thread

The subject sits at the top, and everything that has been said runs underneath it in order, oldest first. Each message tells you who wrote it and what they did:

• reported via portal — the first message, from the customer. The wording changes with how the ticket arrived: portal, email, phone or chat.
• replied — a message from either side after that. Replies from your team carry a To: line showing the address the reply was sent to.
• added a private note — an internal note. These are tinted amber so you can tell at a glance that the customer is not reading them.

Timestamps on the right are relative — 9 hours ago. Hover over one to see the exact date and time.

The toolbar

Five controls sit above the conversation.

Reply, Note and Forward do not open anything separate — they select the matching tab in the composer at the bottom of the thread and scroll you to it. The button and the tab are one control.

Reply and Note are not the same thing

The product gives you three separate signals about which one you are writing. Learn to read them, and check them before you send anything you would not want quoted back to you.

Replying to the customer

1. Press Reply on the toolbar, or click the Reply tab on the composer.
2. Check the grey line above the writing area. It reads From: … · To: … — the address your reply will be sent from, and the customer address it is going to. If the To address is missing, the contact has no email on file and nothing will be emailed.
3. Write your answer. B, I and U make the selected text bold, italic or underlined; • List and 1. List turn it into a bulleted or numbered list.
4. Press Send.

Sending does three things: the reply is recorded on the ticket for everyone to see, it is emailed to the customer, and the ticket moves to Pending — meaning you have answered and the ball is now in the customer's court.

Forwarding

Use Forward when somebody outside the ticket needs to see it — a supplier, a developer, another department.

1. Press Forward and enter the address in the To field.
2. Optionally add a message. It appears above the forwarded conversation, so use it to say what you need from the recipient.
3. Press Forward.

The recipient gets the public conversation on the ticket — the customer's messages and your replies — and a private note is recorded on the ticket saying where it went. Internal notes are not included in what you forward.

The properties panel

The panel down the right is how a ticket gets classified, routed and prioritised.

The deadline line

Above the properties is a coloured line about the resolution deadline, set by your SLA policy. It reads one of:

• Resolution due … — the clock is running and you are still inside it.
• Overdue — was due … — in red. This ticket is late and is counted on the dashboard's Overdue card.
• Resolved on time or Resolved late — the verdict once the ticket is finished.
• No SLA set — no deadline applies to this ticket.

Statuses and priorities

Status is the honest answer to "where is this?". Six are available.

Priority drives urgency, and through your SLA policy it sets the resolution deadline.

Resolving and closing

There are two ways to finish a ticket. Set Status to Resolved or Closed in the properties panel and press Update, or press Close on the toolbar, which sets the ticket straight to Closed. Either way the moment is recorded, which is what the Avg resolution figure in Analytics is measured from.

Creating a ticket for a customer

Where to find it: + New in the top bar, from any screen

When a customer phones you, or emails you personally rather than the support address, raise the ticket yourself so the work is on the record.

1. Press + New in the top bar.
2. Enter the Requester email. This is required, and it is how the ticket is attached to the right person.
3. Add the Requester name if you have it. It is used only when this email address is new to you and a contact has to be created.
4. Write a Subject — a short summary, in the customer's terms. This is what your team sees in the list, so make it specific.
5. Put the detail in Description. It becomes the first message on the ticket, recorded as though the customer wrote it.
6. Set Product, Type, Status, Priority, Group and Assign to agent as far as you can. All of them can be changed later.
7. Press Create ticket. You land straight on the new ticket.

Book a call from a ticket

Some problems are faster on a call than in writing. At the bottom of the properties panel is Schedule a call.

1. Press Schedule a call.
2. Pick an Event type — the kind of call, with its length shown beside the name.
3. Pick a Date, then a Time.
4. Press Schedule. If the event type produces an online meeting, a Join link appears straight away.

The times offered are only ones you are genuinely free — they come from your own working hours and your existing bookings, so you cannot double-book yourself or offer a slot outside your availability. The booking is attached to the ticket, and appears in Meetings.

Activities: the audit trail

Activities on the right of the toolbar opens a panel listing everything that has happened to this ticket, newest first. Every entry names who did it, what they did, and when.

You will see entries for the ticket being created, replies sent, private notes added, properties updated, forwards, closures, and meetings scheduled, cancelled or completed. Red entries are failures worth noticing — a forward that did not go out, or an email that could not be sent.

Close the panel with the ✕ at its top right, or by clicking the dimmed area outside it.

Contacts & knowledge base

Tickets are the work. This section covers the three things around them: the people who raise them, the articles that stop them being raised at all, and the two screens that help you find and understand everything — Search and Analytics.

Contacts

Where to find it: Support desk → Contacts

A contact is one person who has dealt with your desk. Contacts are created for you: the first time somebody raises a ticket — through the portal, or when you create one on their behalf — a contact appears for that email address. The same address always resolves to the same person, so their history builds up in one place.

Finding somebody

The Search contacts… box at the top matches on name, email address or phone number. Type a fragment and press Enter. The list is sorted alphabetically by name.

Opening a person

Click any name to open their record. On the left are their details, on the right every ticket they have ever raised.

1. Edit Name, Email, Phone or Company as needed.
2. Press Save. Nothing is stored until you do.

Each ticket on the right shows its subject, number, when it was created and its current status. Click one to open it.

Adding somebody yourself

+ New contact creates a person before they have raised anything — useful when you are onboarding a client and want their details on file first.

Knowledge base

Where to find it: Support desk → Knowledge base

The knowledge base is where you write an answer once instead of typing it forty times. Published articles appear on your public support portal, where customers can read them without opening a ticket at all.

How it is organised

Three levels, from broad to specific:

• Categories are the big divisions of your product — Billing, Developer API, Getting started. Each is a card at the top of the screen.
• Folders sit inside a category and group related articles — Invoices, Authentication, Basics. The number beside a folder is how many articles it holds.
• Articles are the answers themselves. Every article lives in exactly one folder.

To add a category, type its name in the dashed New category… box and press Add. To add a folder, use the New folder… box on the category card it belongs to.

Writing an article

1. Press + New article at the top right.
2. Give it a Title. This is what customers see and what search matches on, so write it the way a customer would ask — Download a past invoice, not Invoice retrieval.
3. Choose a Folder. The dropdown shows each one as Category / Folder so you can see exactly where it will land.
4. Set the Status to Draft or Published.
5. Write the article, and save.

The Articles table at the bottom lists every article you have, with its folder, a green Published or grey Draft badge, and when it was last updated. Click a title to edit it.

Search

Where to find it: Search in the top bar, from any screen

One box, searched across three things at once. Type a term, press Search, and the results come back grouped.

A group with no matches is left out entirely, which is why the screenshot above shows Tickets and Articles but no Contacts — nobody is called "invoice". Click any result to open it. Each group returns up to ten results, so for a broad term use the ticket list's views and filters instead.

Analytics

Where to find it: Workspace → Analytics

Analytics is the shape of your desk over time, rather than what needs doing right now — that is the dashboard's job.

The four headline figures

Tickets created

A bar per day for the last fourteen days. This is the one to watch after a release or a price change: a wall of bars two days after a change tells you something went out wrong.

The breakdowns

• Tickets by status — every status with its count. A large Pending or Waiting on Customer figure means a lot of your desk is waiting on other people, not on you.
• Tickets by priority — Urgent down to Low. If almost everything is Urgent, the priority field has stopped carrying information.
• Unresolved by product — which product or brand is generating the current backlog. Tickets with no product set are grouped as No product.
• Resolved by agent — how many tickets each member of your team has resolved. Tickets resolved without an owner appear as Unassigned.

Scheduling

AsherSupport has a booking calendar built into the help desk. You publish the kinds of meeting people can book, you set the hours you are open, and anyone with your link picks a time from what is actually free.

Because it lives in the same product as your tickets, a support conversation can turn into a scheduled call without a second tool and without a second subscription. An agent reading a ticket can book the call from the ticket itself, and the meeting keeps a link back to it.

Where to find it: Scheduling in the left sidebar — Event types, Meetings and Availability.

Event types

An event type is one kind of meeting someone can book with you — a 30-minute onboarding call, a 15-minute check-in, an hour-long technical review. Each one has its own name, duration, location and description, and each one gets its own public link.

Creating one

1. Go to Scheduling → Event types and choose New event type.
2. Give it a Name. This is what people see on your booking page, so name it the way a customer would describe it — "30-min onboarding call", not "OB1".
3. Check the Booking slug. It fills itself in from the name and becomes the end of the public link. Lowercase letters, digits and hyphens only, and it has to be unique for that agent.
4. Write a short Description. It appears under the name on the booking page and is the only chance you get to tell someone what the call is for.
5. Set the Duration (minutes).
6. Pick a Location: Zoom, Google Meet, Phone call, In person, or Custom. Phone, in person and custom ask you for the detail to show the invitee.
7. Set Buffer before (min) and Buffer after (min) if you want padding around the meeting. See Booking rules below.
8. Leave Active (accepting bookings) ticked, and choose Create event type.

The overflow menu

The three-dot button on each card holds the actions you will not need every day.

Your booking link

Every active event type shows its public link on the card, with a Copy link button next to it and an icon that opens the page in a new tab.

The link lives on your own portal address, not on ashersupport.com. It looks like this:

demo.ashersupport.com/support/book/onboarding

The first part is your portal address, and the last part is the booking slug you set on the event type. Paste the link into an email signature, a ticket reply, a canned response, or your own website — anywhere a customer might need a time with you.

The View booking page button at the top of the Event types page opens the page a customer would land on, listing every active event type at once. It is worth opening after any change, so you see what they see.

Availability

Availability is the hours you accept bookings. It is stored as one or more named schedules, and each event type books against one of them.

Where to find it: Scheduling → Availability, or the Availability button on the Event types page.

Setting your weekly hours

1. Open Scheduling → Availability. You start with one schedule, named Working hours and marked DEFAULT.
2. Set the Timezone first, before you touch the hours. Every time in the grid is read in this timezone, so changing it afterwards moves your whole week.
3. Tick the days you work, and set a start and end time for each one.
4. To split a day around lunch or a standing meeting, choose + Add hours on that day and enter a second window. The × next to a window removes it.
5. If most days are identical, set one and choose Copy times to all days.
6. Save.

Named schedules

You can keep more than one set of hours and point different event types at different ones — a longer week for quick check-ins, a narrower one for hour-long reviews, or summer hours you switch to for a season.

• + New schedule creates one. Name it something you will recognise in six months.
• Rename and Duplicate act on the schedule you have selected.
• Make default makes the selected schedule the one new event types use.
• Each schedule in the list shows its timezone and how many event types are Active on it, so you can see what a change is about to affect before you make it.
• You cannot delete your only schedule, and you cannot delete the default one — make another schedule the default first.

To choose which schedule an event type uses, open the event type and use the Availability section.

Date overrides

A date override changes one calendar date without touching the weekly pattern — a public holiday, a conference day, a Saturday you are opening on purpose.

1. Switch the List / Calendar toggle at the top right to Calendar.
2. Click the date you want to change.
3. Choose Unavailable (day off) to close it, or Custom hours to give it different times from its usual weekday.
4. Save. The date now departs from the weekly grid until you remove the override, which puts it back on the weekly hours.

Calendar sync

Connect Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar and anything already on your calendar hides the slots it overlaps. Each new booking is also written back to your calendar, so the meeting appears where you normally look for it.

Where to find it: Scheduling → Availability → Calendar sync

1. Open Scheduling → Availability and switch to the Calendar sync tab.
2. Choose Connect Google Calendar or Connect Outlook Calendar.
3. Sign in to that account and approve the access it asks for. You are returned to AsherSupport when it finishes.

Zoom

Connect Zoom and every call booked with a Zoom location gets a meeting link created for it automatically. The link goes on the confirmation page, into the confirmation email, and into the Join link on your Meetings list.

1. Go to Scheduling → Event types and find the Integrations row at the bottom of the page.
2. Choose Connect on the Zoom card.
3. Sign in to Zoom and approve the access. The card then stops saying "Not connected".

Zoom is connected once for the whole workspace, not per agent.

Booking rules

These are the guardrails. They exist to stop the bookings that are technically valid and practically awful — the call booked for eleven minutes from now, the one booked eight months out, the eleventh call on a day you can survive four.

Where to find it: Scheduling → Event types → open an event type → Booking rules

Choose Save booking rules when you are done. This section saves on its own, separate from the main event type form.

Meetings

The Meetings page is everything that has been booked — what is coming, what has happened, and who booked it.

Where to find it: Scheduling → Meetings

• All meetings / Mine switches between the whole workspace and the meetings you are hosting.
• NEXT UP is the banner at the top — the next meeting, how long until it starts, and a Join button when there is a link.
• Upcoming and Past are separate tables so you never mistake one for the other.
• Each row shows the Invitee with their email address, the Event type, When, Where (with a Join link when there is one), the Host and a Status pill.
• If the meeting was booked from a ticket, the invitee's name has the ticket number under it as a link, so you can go straight back to the conversation.

Times and timezones

Meetings are shown in your timezone, and the page names it — "Times shown in Europe/London (GMT+1)" — with the zone repeated in the When column heading and on every row. Your customer saw the same meeting in their own timezone when they booked it. Both are the same instant; only the label differs.

Cancelling and completing

• Cancel appears on any active meeting that has not finished yet. Cancelling releases the slot and the invitee is told.
• Complete appears only once a meeting has started, and marks it done. It is deliberately hidden before the start time, because completing a call that has not happened would free its slot for somebody else.
• When neither applies — a meeting already finished, or already cancelled — the Actions column shows a dash.

Booking a call from a ticket

This is the reason scheduling lives inside the help desk. When a ticket reaches the point where a written reply will not settle it, you can put a call in the diary without leaving the conversation.

Where to find it: Tickets → open a ticket → Schedule a call in the sidebar

1. Open the ticket and choose Schedule a call in the right-hand sidebar.
2. Pick the Event type. The list shows each one with its length.
3. Pick a Date and a Time. Only open times are offered — your availability, your booking rules and any connected calendar have already been applied.
4. Choose Schedule.

The panel confirms with "Call scheduled." and gives you a Join link when the location produced one. The meeting then appears on your Meetings page with the ticket number beside the invitee's name.

What your customers see

Everything in this section is the half of AsherSupport you will almost never look at, and the half your customers judge you on. It is worth ten minutes of your time to walk through it once, as them.

Your customers get a support portal on your own address, carrying your name. From it they can search your knowledge base, read an article, submit a ticket, check the status of a ticket they already filed, and book a call. They never see the agent side, they never see another customer's tickets, and they do not need an account or a password.

Your customers' address: yourname.ashersupport.com/support

The portal home page

The front door. Your name and logo across the top, a search box, and the four things a person arriving with a problem might want.

The navigation bar carries the whole portal:

The home page also shows Popular articles and your knowledge base categories, so a visitor who does not know what to search for still has somewhere to start. The footer names your desk.

Reading the knowledge base

The knowledge base is your published articles, grouped under the categories and folders you set up on the agent side. Only published articles appear here.

1. The visitor chooses Knowledge base, or searches from the home page.
2. They browse the categories, or search within the knowledge base using the box at the top of the page.
3. They pick an article title.

An article shows its title, when it was last updated, and the body. At the bottom, a Still need help? panel offers Submit a ticket — so the article that did not answer the question becomes a ticket instead of a dead end.

Submitting a ticket

The form is deliberately short. The more you ask for, the fewer people finish it.

1. The customer chooses Submit a ticket, from the nav bar, the header button, or the New support ticket shortcut on the home page.
2. They fill in Your name and Email. Email is required — it is how you reply to them.
3. They pick a Product, if you have set products up. This is optional.
4. They write a Subject and a Description. Both are required.
5. They choose SUBMIT TICKET.

The ticket lands in your desk straight away and the customer is shown their ticket number. They are also emailed a link that opens the ticket, so they can follow the conversation on the portal and reply there.

Checking ticket status

This is the part worth understanding properly, because it is the part customers ask about.

A customer enters their email address and AsherSupport emails them a secure sign-in link. Clicking that link signs them in and shows their tickets. Entering the address on its own does not open anything.

1. The customer chooses Check ticket status.
2. They type the email address they contacted you from and choose Email me a link.
3. The page tells them to check their inbox. The link works for 30 minutes.
4. They open the link from their email. They are now signed in and see Your tickets — every ticket they have filed with you, with its number, subject, status and dates.
5. They open a ticket to read the whole conversation and reply to it. There is a Sign out button when they are finished.

Why an address alone is not enough

An email address is a public identifier. Most people's addresses are on their website, in their email signature, and on every message they have ever sent. If typing an address were enough to open the tickets belonging to it, then anybody who knew a customer's address could read that customer's entire support history — subjects, statuses, and the whole thread. Support tickets routinely contain order numbers, account details, complaints about staff, and things people would not want a colleague or a competitor reading.

Sending a link to the address proves the person asking can actually receive mail at it. That is what makes the conversation private, and it is why there is a step that feels like one more than necessary.

Booking a call

Book a call in the nav bar lists the meeting types you have made active. This is the same set of event types described in Scheduling, seen from the other side.

1. The visitor chooses Book a call, or opens a booking link you sent them.
2. They pick a meeting type and choose See available times.
3. They pick a date, then a time.
4. They fill in their details and confirm.

The date and time picker

• Dates with a dot underneath have open times. Greyed-out dates are full, closed, or outside your booking window. The page says this in as many words, under the calendar.
• Choosing a date lists the available start times beside the calendar, with a count of how many there are and the length of each one.
• Times are shown in the visitor's own timezone, detected from their device. The zone is named under the calendar — "Times shown in Dubai GMT+04:00" — and there is a picker next to it if they want to change it. Somebody booking from a hotel in another country can set the zone they will actually be in.
• A 12h / 24h toggle switches between 1:00 PM and 13:00.
• The panel on the left keeps the meeting name, its length, where it happens and who it is with in view the whole time.
• All meeting types at the top goes back to the list.

Confirming

After picking a time, the visitor gives their name and email, and answers whatever booking questions you added to that event type. They can add guests by email address, and there is a notes field for anything that would help you prepare. Then they choose Confirm booking.

The confirmation page

Confirming lands them on a page that is both the receipt and the place they come back to. It opens with a status badge — Confirmed, or Cancelled, or Already happened — then the meeting name, who it is with, and the date and time in large type with the timezone spelled out underneath.

If the meeting has an online link, a Join meeting button sits right below the time. Under that: where it happens, who booked it, any guests, and the answers they gave you.

Add to your calendar

An Add to your calendar row offers Google, Outlook, Office 365 and Apple / .ics. Whichever they pick, the meeting is added at the correct instant, and their calendar shows it in whatever timezone that device is set to.

Reschedule and cancel

Under Need to change something? the customer can Reschedule or Cancel booking themselves — no email to you, no back-and-forth. Rescheduling keeps the same link, so the page they bookmarked stays correct.

The page reminds them to bookmark it, because it always shows the current details for that booking.

On a phone

Plenty of your customers will meet your support desk on a phone, usually while annoyed. The whole portal works there — searching, reading, submitting a ticket, checking status, and booking a call — with no app to install.

Admin & settings

Where to find it: Admin at the bottom of the left sidebar

Everything in this part is admin-only. Agents can work the desk without ever opening these screens, and if a non-admin follows a link to one, they land back on the Team page rather than seeing an error.

The settings live on one row of tabs across the top: Team, Groups, Products, Canned Responses, Automations, SLA Policies, Business Hours, Email and Billing. Your own name and password live separately, under your avatar.

Team

Where to find it: Admin → Team

Adding an agent

1. Fill in the person's name and email.
2. Set a password of at least 8 characters.
3. Choose their role — Agent or Admin.
4. Select Add agent. They appear in the table as Active straight away.

Admin or agent?

Deactivating someone

When a person leaves, select Deactivate on their row. They stop being able to sign in, and their row stays in the table greyed out so their name still reads correctly on old tickets. Nothing they wrote is deleted.

Deactivating frees the seat they were holding. Reactivating them takes one back, so it goes through the same seat check as adding somebody new. You cannot deactivate yourself.

Seats

Your plan comes with a number of agent seats, and a seat is held by each active agent.

Products (your brands)

Where to find it: Admin → Products

A product is a brand, an app, or a line of business that you support. This is the multi-brand feature: one desk, one team, one bill, several brands kept apart in the places that matter.

Adding a brand

1. Name — what your team and your customers will call it. Required.
2. Support email — the address customers write to for this brand. Mail that arrives at it is filed against this product automatically. See Email.
3. Portal slug — a short, lowercase, one-word name for the brand, used to identify it in links.
4. Primary color — a hex value such as #2f5fe0. It is the dot beside the brand's name in your desk.
5. Description — a line to remind your team what this brand covers.
6. Select Create product. Select Edit on any card to change these later.

What having several brands actually gives you

• Every ticket carries a brand, so you can filter and report by brand. Your dashboard already breaks unresolved tickets down that way.
• Each brand has its own support address, and mail to it lands on that brand.
• Customers choose the brand from a dropdown when they submit a ticket on your portal.
• Your plan sets how many brands you can have. See Billing.

Groups

Where to find it: Admin → Groups

A group is a team that work gets routed to: Billing, Customer Support, Engineering Escalations. Where a product answers "which brand is this about?", a group answers "who should pick this up?"

A ticket can be assigned to a group as well as to a person, so it can sit with the right team before anyone has claimed it. Your desk starts with one group called General.

Canned responses

Where to find it: Admin → Canned Responses

Saved replies for the answers you give over and over: the follow-up question you always have to ask, the closing message, the "we're looking into it" holding note.

1. Add a folder on the left if you want to group them — by brand, or by topic. Your desk starts with one called General.
2. Give the response a title your team will recognise at a glance.
3. Pick the folder it belongs in.
4. Write the body. Basic HTML is accepted, so you can use paragraphs, bold and links.
5. Select Create response. Select Edit on any card to revise it.

Automations

Where to find it: Admin → Automations

Rules that read a new ticket and act on it: IF something is true, THEN do these things. They save your team the same three clicks on every ticket of a given kind.

Building a rule

1. Select + New rule and give it a name you will understand in six months.
2. Set the trigger to When a ticket is created.
3. Add your conditions. You can test the subject, status, priority, source, type, tags, product, group, assigned agent, or whether the ticket is unassigned. Operators are contains, doesn't contain, is, is not, greater than and less than.
4. Add your actions: set status, set priority, assign to a group, assign to an agent, set the product, add a tag, or add a private note.
5. Set the position. When several rules match, they apply in position order, so a later rule can overwrite what an earlier one set.
6. Save. Use Disable on the card to switch a rule off without losing it.

On-create rules run whichever way the ticket arrived — your portal, inbound email, or an agent typing it in.

SLA policies

Where to find it: Admin → SLA Policies

An SLA policy is the promise you are holding yourself to: how quickly you will send a first reply, and how quickly you will resolve, for each priority. Set one and your desk starts stamping due dates on new tickets, which is what makes the Overdue and Due today counts on your dashboard mean anything.

1. Give the policy a name.
2. Pick a business hours calendar, or leave it on Calendar time (24/7). This choice matters — see the warning below.
3. Choose your units — minutes or hours — then fill in a first response and a resolution target for each priority. Leave a field blank to skip that target.
4. Tick Default policy and Active, then select Create policy.

Two more things worth knowing before you rely on these numbers:

• Due dates are stamped when the ticket is created. Editing a policy changes what future tickets get. It does not re-date tickets you already have.
• Switching units does not convert numbers you already typed. Change minutes to hours and a "60" stays a "60" — now meaning sixty hours. Re-check the fields after switching.

Business hours

Where to find it: Admin → Business Hours

A business-hours calendar says when you are open, in one timezone. On its own it changes nothing. Its job is to be attached to an SLA policy.

1. Give the calendar a name that says who it is for — "Weekdays 9–5 (London)".
2. Set the timezone. All the hours below are read in this zone, whatever timezone your customer is in.
3. Tick each day you are open and set its from and to times. Unticked days count as closed.
4. Tick Set as default calendar if this is your main one, then create it.
5. Go to Admin → SLA Policies and pick this calendar on your policy. The calendar does nothing until an SLA policy names it.

Email

Where to find it: Admin → Email

This screen turns incoming email into tickets. Each message that arrives becomes a new ticket; when the subject still carries a [#123] tag, it is filed as a reply on that existing ticket instead — which is how a customer's answer lands back on the right conversation rather than opening a duplicate.

Your support addresses

Each brand has its own support address, set on Admin → Products, and this screen lists them so you can check them at a glance. Mail sent to a brand's address is filed against that brand. Mail to any other address still becomes a ticket, but with no brand on it.

If every row here reads not set, no brand has an address yet — go and add them on the Products screen.

Connecting your provider

What they need to do, in outline: configure inbound receiving for each brand's support address at your provider, then set the forward destination to the webhook URL shown here with the real token in place of the placeholder. The token itself is never displayed on the page — it is held on the server, and requests without it are rejected.

Until this is connected, your customers reach you through your portal, which needs no setup at all.

Billing

Where to find it: Admin → Billing

Your plan, your seats, your renewal date, and the way out. Admins only.

What the screen tells you

The plans

These are the plans and prices shown on the screen above and on the public pricing page.

Changing seats

When a subscription is live, a Seats panel appears and you can raise or lower the count. Lowering seats below the number of active agents is refused outright — nobody on your team is ever deactivated to fit a smaller plan. Deactivate them yourself on the Team page first, then reduce.

Changing plan or cancelling

Plan changes and cancellation both happen from this screen. When billing is connected and your desk has been billed before, Open billing portal takes you to a secure page where you update your card, download invoices, and cancel.

One reassurance worth stating plainly: a failed payment does not lock anyone out. The screen puts a banner up asking you to update your card, and your team keeps working.

Your profile

Where to find it: your avatar, top right → Profile

Your own account, separate from the admin settings. Every agent has one, including agents who cannot open Admin at all.

Your name

The display name is how you appear across the help desk — on ticket assignments, replies and notes. Change it and select Save changes.

Your password

1. Enter a new password of at least 8 characters.
2. Enter it again to confirm.
3. Select Change password.

Your email address and your role are shown on this screen but cannot be changed from it. If either is wrong, contact us.

Reference & troubleshooting

The lookup part. Statuses and priorities, the problems that come up most in the first month, and a glossary of the words this manual uses.

Ticket statuses

Every ticket has exactly one status. Six are available.

How statuses roll up on the dashboard

• Unresolved counts Open, Pending, Waiting on Customer and Waiting on Third Party — every ticket that is not yet Resolved or Closed. This is the number that matters day to day.
• On hold counts Pending, Waiting on Customer and Waiting on Third Party — the work that is genuinely parked.
• Overdue and Due today count unresolved tickets against their due date, which comes from your SLA policy. With no SLA policy set, nothing has a due date and both read zero.

Priorities

Priority does two jobs: it tells your team what to pick up first, and it selects which pair of targets an SLA policy applies to the ticket.

These meanings are conventions, not rules the product enforces. What the product does with priority is look up the first-response and resolution targets you set for it in Admin → SLA Policies. If you have not set targets for a priority, tickets at that priority get no due date.

Troubleshooting

Nobody can book a time with me

The booking page loads but offers no slots, or says there is nothing available.

Almost always this is availability not set. An event type says how long a call is; your availability says when you are willing to take one. Without availability there is nothing to offer, so the picker is empty.

1. Open Availability in the sidebar and set the hours you accept bookings on the Schedules tab.
2. Open Event types and check the event is marked Active. An inactive event type does not take bookings.
3. Open your own booking link in a private browser window and confirm you can see times.

If times appear for some days and not others, check whether a connected calendar is blocking them — busy time on a synced calendar hides the slots it overlaps.

My SLA says overdue but we were closed

A ticket arrived on Friday evening and was already overdue on Monday morning.

Your SLA policy is running on calendar time rather than business hours. On calendar time the clock runs through the night and the weekend, so a Saturday counts against you exactly like a Tuesday.

1. Go to Admin → Business Hours and create a calendar with your real opening hours and timezone, if you do not have one.
2. Go to Admin → SLA Policies, edit the policy marked Default, and set its Business hours field to that calendar instead of Calendar time (24/7).
3. Save.

Two related traps: only the policy marked Default and Active is applied at all, and public holidays are not supported yet, so a bank holiday still counts as a working day.

A customer says they cannot see their ticket

They opened a ticket on your portal, went back to check it, and were shown a sign-in prompt instead.

This is working as designed. Customers do not have accounts or passwords. To see their tickets, they enter their email address on Check ticket status and we email them a link that opens them. That is deliberate: it means nobody can read someone else's conversation just by typing their address.

Tell them to:

1. Go to your portal and choose Check ticket status.
2. Enter the same email address they used when they submitted the ticket — a different address will not find it.
3. Select Email me a link, then open the link from their inbox. Check the spam folder if it has not arrived after a few minutes.

If you have inbound email connected, they can also reply to the email notification and it lands back on the same ticket — no link needed.

Booked calls have no meeting link

Somebody booked a call, the confirmation arrived, and there is no joining link in it.

Zoom is not connected. Open Event types in the sidebar and look at the Integrations panel below your event types. If the Zoom card reads "Not connected — booked calls won't get a Zoom link", select Connect and sign in to Zoom. Only an admin can do this, and it is done once for the whole desk rather than per person.

Bookings taken before you connect Zoom do not gain a link retrospectively. Send those attendees a link by hand.

Outside meetings are not blocking my calendar

Someone booked you at a time you were already busy in Google Calendar or Outlook.

Calendar sync is not connected. AsherSupport only knows about the meetings it took itself until you connect the calendar where the rest of your day lives.

1. Open Availability in the sidebar and choose the Calendar sync tab.
2. Select Connect Google Calendar or Connect Outlook Calendar and sign in.

Once connected, busy time on that calendar hides the slots it overlaps, and each new booking is written back to your calendar so it is visible where you already look.

I cannot add another agent

The Add agent form refuses with a message about seats.

Every active agent holds a seat, and your plan sets how many you have. Either deactivate someone who has left, on Admin → Team, which frees their seat immediately — or add seats on Admin → Billing.

My automation rule is not doing anything

Work through these in order:

• Did the ticket arrive after you saved the rule? Rules run once, at the moment a ticket is created — they do not reach back and re-triage tickets that were already open.
• Is it enabled? A disabled rule shows an Enable link on its card.
• Are all the conditions true? Conditions are ANDed — every one must match. For an either/or, split it into two rules.
• Is a later rule overwriting it? Matching rules apply in position order, so a rule with a higher position can undo what yours set. Check the positions.
• Are you testing on an old ticket? On-create rules only ever run at the moment a ticket arrives. Editing an existing ticket will not trigger one.

Emails to our support address are not becoming tickets

Inbound email needs connecting once, in your email provider, and it is not on by default. Open Admin → Email and check two things: that each brand has a support address (the table shows not set when it does not), and that your provider has been pointed at the webhook address on that screen. The second half is a job for whoever administers your company's email — send them the page.

A customer's reply opened a second ticket

Their reply arrived as a brand-new ticket instead of landing on the existing conversation.

Replies are threaded by the [#123] tag in the subject line. If the tag is missing, there is nothing to match on and the message can only be treated as new. Check whether your email provider or a mailing-list setting is rewriting subject lines, and make sure the tag survives.

Glossary