Third Party Help Desk
Running Octocom's AI alongside Zendesk, Gorgias, Help Scout and others — what creates a ticket, what syncs, and how the dashboard changes.
Octocom's AI works with an external help desk. Your team keeps the tools it already uses, the bot handles what it can, and anything needing a person arrives in your help desk as a normal ticket.
This page covers what that mode actually does. If you're using Octocom's own help desk instead, you don't need it.
Supported systems
Tickets can be created in Zendesk, Gorgias, Help Scout, Freshdesk, Intercom, Kustomer, Re:amaze, Richpanel, Dixa, LiveChat, HubSpot and Daktela.
Two additional targets exist for teams without a help desk API: Email, which sends the transcript to an address you nominate, and Console, which is used for testing.
Capabilities differ by system — see What syncs after the ticket is created.
What creates a ticket
Two triggers, configured independently:
- Handoff — the bot could not resolve the issue and escalated. These are the tickets that genuinely need a person, and this is the trigger most teams run on its own.
- Close — the conversation finished. Enabling this gives your help desk a record of everything, including what the bot resolved without help.
Close-triggered tickets are optional and off unless you ask for them. They are also useful mainly for reporting: by the time the ticket appears the conversation is already over.
Ticket creation on close fires on the close event itself, not on inactivity. Auto-close is a separate feature — when it closes a conversation, that close then triggers the ticket like any other.
Per-channel control
Both triggers can be overridden per channel, so you can run a different policy for email than for web chat — "create tickets from everything except web chat closes" is a common shape.
Some defaults are set for you:
- Social comments and mentions — Facebook and Instagram comments, Facebook and Instagram mentions, and TikTok comments — never create tickets unless you explicitly enable them. A public comment thread isn't a support ticket, and most help desks bill per ticket.
- Phone calls create their ticket when the call ends rather than at handoff, so the transcript is complete when the ticket appears.
- Playground conversations don't create tickets unless you turn that on, so testing your bot doesn't pollute your queue.
What syncs after the ticket is created
New customer messages are appended to the existing ticket for Zendesk, Gorgias and Freshdesk. On other systems the ticket is created once and not updated, so a customer who replies afterwards may need handling through your own inbound email rather than the ticket.
Tags can be added to tickets on Zendesk and Help Scout. On every other system tag syncing is silently skipped, so don't build reporting that depends on it.
Bot messages are labelled with a sender name you configure, so the transcript reads clearly to whoever picks the ticket up.
Live chat instead of a ticket
For web chat, a handoff doesn't have to become a ticket. It can instead open a live conversation in Zendesk or LiveChat.com, so your agent talks to the customer in real time in the tool they already have open, while the customer stays in the widget on your site.
This mode has its own settings: the support hours during which live handoff is offered, and the message the customer sees when an agent joins. Outside those hours the handoff falls back to normal ticket creation.
Live chat applies to the web widget only — every other channel creates a ticket.
How the Octocom dashboard changes
Running an external help desk changes what the Octocom dashboard shows, because ownership of the conversation moves to the other system. This is the part most worth understanding before you commit to the setup.
- Assignment, close and snooze disappear. No assignee picker, no Close/Snooze/Reopen buttons. Those decisions belong to your help desk now.
- The sidebar shrinks. Your Inbox, Unassigned and Threads are hidden. Human and Bot remain, without counts.
- Priority and mark-as-spam are hidden.
- Auto-assignment doesn't run. Routing is your help desk's job.
- A handed-off conversation doesn't reopen in Octocom when the customer replies — the ticket is the source of truth from that point.
What you keep is the full conversation record, search, analytics, topics and sentiment, plus everything in the conversation sidebar for context.
What still fires
Two things happen on every handoff regardless of where your agents work:
- Conversation analysis — topics, sentiment, language and data collection fields are computed from the transcript.
- The
Conversation Handed Offevent — so your event handlers run normally. This is the hook to use if you need to push something into your own systems at the moment of escalation.
A note on email threading
If your inbound email arrives through the help desk rather than directly, Octocom trusts that system's threading and skips its own email auto-merging. Each inbound email becomes its own conversation on our side, matching what your help desk did.
Setting any of this up — choosing a system, connecting credentials, picking triggers and per-channel overrides — is done with us rather than self-service. Get in touch and we'll configure it.