Working the help console

The help console is every conversation in the borough on one screen: people down the left, the conversation in the middle, what you know about them on the right.

Longest wait first

The list is ordered by who has been waiting longest for an answer, not by who wrote most recently. Anything past the promise City Council made is marked.

Work down from the top. That ordering is the whole point of the screen: it is what stops a quiet, patient school waiting a fortnight while three noisy threads get answered twice.

One conversation per person, for ever

There are no tickets. Each person has one conversation that never closes, and the left column is a list of people rather than a queue of subjects. A question somebody asked in March is still there in September, which is usually the context you want.

The five states

None of them close it, and a message from the person always puts it back to Active, whatever it was set to. That is what makes Resolved safe to use: filing something cannot swallow the next thing somebody says.

Answering and filing are one action

The status is on the reply form, set to Waiting on them by default. So you answer and file in the same action, and nothing moves behind somebody who is still typing. A reply never guesses what happens next.

Handing it on

Assign it to a named colleague, who is told. Or change which team it is filed under: the conversations are not filtered to your own areas, because a school asking about the website does not know whose the website is.

Notes

The right-hand panel takes internal notes, which schools never see. They are kept in a place no school-facing screen reads from at all, rather than as a flag on a message, so there is no missing condition that could show one to the wrong person.

Saved replies

Saved replies are the answers you write often, edited by you rather than compiled in. Choosing one puts the text in the box and never sends it, so the last edit is always yours. It works the same way with scripting switched off.

Screenshots

People can send a picture of the page they are on, and the page's address comes with every message. Both are usually worth more than the description.

The chase

A job each morning names anything unanswered past its target: to the assignee where there is one, to the support address otherwise. It sends nothing when nothing is overdue, because a daily all-clear is how a team learns to filter the sender.