AWRA Help Center

Each automation does one routine job the same way every time, and explains itself on the ticket when it acts. Canned replies live under Helpdesk → Canned Replies. Assignment, escalation and intake are settings, under Settings → Support & Helpdesk: Categories & SLA, Escalation Rules and Intake Portals.

Canned Replies

A canned reply is a saved answer, optionally with actions that move the ticket on in the same click. Every agent keeps a personal library; the shared library is visible to every agent and edited only by people allowed to manage canned replies. Replies can be filed in folders, and a folder belongs to one library, so a shared reply goes in a shared folder.

1. Open Helpdesk → Canned Replies and create a reply: a title, the text, and whether it posts as a public reply or an internal note.
2. Add placeholders where the details change. The page lists the fourteen it accepts, including requester.first_name, ticket.number, ticket.due_date, agent.first_name and organization.name, each written inside double curly braces.
3. Optionally add actions: set the status, set the priority, add tags, or assign the ticket to a named agent. A reply needs text or at least one action.
4. On a ticket, search your canned replies from the reply box. Insert drops the filled-in text into the composer so you can edit it before sending; the reply's actions still run when you send. Apply sends it and runs its actions at once.

• Placeholders are filled in on the server, in one pass. A name outside the list stays exactly as typed, so a typo shows in the composer instead of going out blank.
• Actions follow the agent, not the author. If a shared reply closes and reassigns tickets but the agent using it may only reply, the reply still goes out and the actions they may not take are skipped and listed on screen.
• Each reply counts how often it is used, so the library sorts the busiest first and the ones nobody sends are easy to retire. Canned replies are available in the mobile app too.

Auto-Assignment Per Category

Each category decides how its new tickets find an owner. Open Settings → Support & Helpdesk → Categories & SLA and set the category's assignment:

• Default assignee — every ticket goes to the one person named on the category. This is how every category starts.
• Round robin — the agent in the category's pool who has waited longest since their last ticket gets the next one; someone never assigned goes first.
• Fewest open tickets — the pool agent with the lightest open load across the whole desk, with the rotation as the tie-break.

For the two pool strategies, choose at least one agent and, optionally, a cap on open tickets per agent. An agent is skipped when they are no longer employed, on approved leave today (by your workspace’s own date), or at the cap — and the default assignee is skipped for the same reasons. Everyone in a pool, and the default assignee, needs a login with permission to view all tickets; the settings refuse anyone without one, since a ticket given to them could never be opened. If nobody is eligible, the ticket stays unassigned and the department is notified — or, for a ticket with no department, everyone who can assign tickets — rather than it going to someone over their limit. Saving the pool keeps the rotation where it was, so a newly added agent does not receive the next ten tickets.

Assignment never overrides a ticket that already has an owner. Moving an unowned ticket into a category with a strategy assigns it there and then.

Escalation Rules

A rule says: when this has been true for this long, do these things. Open Settings → Support & Helpdesk → Escalation Rules and create one.

1. Choose the trigger: still unassigned (counted from when the ticket was raised), no first response past its deadline, or unresolved past its deadline.
2. Set the delay in minutes, hours or days, and optionally limit the rule to one category.
3. Choose the actions — at least one: raise the priority, reassign to the assignee's manager or to a named person, notify the assignee's manager and named users, or add a tag.
4. Save it as active. Rules are checked every fifteen minutes.

• Levels are several rules on one trigger with growing delays — for example, notify the team lead 30 minutes after a missed first reply, then raise to high and hand to the manager after two hours.
• Each rule fires once per ticket. A reopened ticket can be escalated again.
• Priority only goes up, so a rule that raises to high never lowers an urgent ticket.
• A ticket is only reassigned to someone still employed. When the target cannot take it, the ticket is left where it is and the note says why.
• Every escalation leaves an internal note on the ticket naming the rule, the reason and what was done. The settings page lists the most recent escalations.
• The unresolved trigger leaves a ticket alone while it is waiting on the requester, because its resolution clock is paused then.

Escalation rules sit beside the SLA breach alert rather than replacing it: the alert tells people a deadline has passed; a rule acts on the ticket.

A Deadline On Public-Form Tickets

The public support form asks the customer for no category, and the SLA clock comes from the category. Open Settings → Support & Helpdesk → Intake Portals and choose a category for public-form tickets. Every ticket from the form then files there, starts with first-response and resolution deadlines, and is routed by that category's assignment. If the chosen category is later switched off, new form tickets arrive without one, so keep it active.

The same page shows whether your public link is live; the form needs both a public link and intake switched on before customers can reach it.

Who Can Do What

• Anyone who can see all tickets can keep personal canned replies and use the shared ones.
• Writing to the shared library needs the permission to manage canned replies.
• A canned reply's status, priority and tag actions need the permission to manage tickets; its assignment action needs the permission to assign tickets.
• Categories, assignment, escalation rules and intake settings need the permission to manage helpdesk settings.

Common Mistakes

• Leaving a pool strategy with every agent at the cap, then wondering why tickets sit in the queue. The cap is doing its job; raise it or add agents.
• Writing an unassigned rule that notifies the assignee's manager. An unassigned ticket has no assignee, so the form refuses it; notify or reassign to a named person instead.
• Leaving the public-form category empty, so form tickets have no deadline and never trigger a first-response rule.
• Building one huge rule instead of a ladder of small ones with growing delays.

Related

• Support & Helpdesk Guide — intake, queues, working tickets and the SLA clock.
• Ticket Insights — ageing, SLA pressure and workload.
• Helpdesk automation overview — the feature page, with an escalation played out step by step.