From install to your first solved ticket: the portal page, departments and agents, SLA targets, the notification emails, and how the desk works day to day.
In your dashboard go to Plugins → Add New, search for Demfilz Support Tickets, install and activate. (You can also download the .zip and upload it under Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.) A Support menu appears in your admin sidebar with Dashboard, Tickets, Departments, Canned Replies, Agents, Reports and Settings. Activation creates the ticket tables, a Support Agent role and one starter department called General Support.
Until you choose a portal page you will see a reminder at the top of every Support screen. That is the next step.
Create a page called Support (or Help, or Contact us), and put the shortcode on it:
[dsup_support]If you prefer the block editor, add the Support Tickets block instead. Publish the page, then open Support → Settings → General and choose it under Support portal page. That tells the plugin where the links in your emails should point.
Two narrower shortcodes are available if you want to split the portal across pages: [dsup_submit] is the new ticket form on its own, and [dsup_tickets] is the customer's ticket list on its own.
Still on Settings → General:
TCK-4F9K2A. Change TCK to your own initials if you like.Open Support → Departments. A department is how a ticket finds the right people: give each one a name, a short description (customers do not see it, it is for you), a notification inbox that receives every new ticket in that department, and the agents who look after it. Common setups are General Support, Billing and Technical.
Untick Show this department on the portal to retire a department without losing its history.
Open Support → Agents. Pick any existing WordPress user and click Add - they keep their existing role and simply gain access to the support desk. For someone who should only ever do support, create the user with the Support Agent role first: it can read, answer and manage tickets, but cannot change plugin settings or delete tickets.
For each agent you can set a signature (appended to the replies they email out) and the departments they cover, which is what automatic assignment uses.
Under Settings → Workflow:
Settings → SLA targets holds a first response and a resolution target, in minutes, for each priority. A ticket carries the targets it was given, so raising a ticket's priority tightens its clock immediately. Anything past target is flagged on the dashboard and marked late in the ticket list, and the team is emailed once per missed target if you leave the alert on. Set a target to 0 to switch it off.
Sensible starting points: urgent 2 hours to respond and 12 to resolve, high 8 and 48, normal 24 and 96, low 48 and 240.
Settings → Emails sets the from name and address, the team notification address, which notifications go out at all, and the template for every message. Each template has a subject and a body, and understands placeholders:
{site_name} {site_url} {ticket_ref} {ticket_subject} {ticket_url}
{admin_url} {rating_url} {customer_name} {customer_email}
{agent_name} {department} {priority} {status} {message}Emails go out through your site's normal mail. If your host's mail is unreliable, an SMTP plugin will improve delivery for these the same way it does for the rest of WordPress.
Support → Canned Replies holds the answers you type over and over: how to reset a password, what your refund window is, the details you need before you can help. Leave a canned reply on All departments or tie it to one. Agents insert them from a dropdown above the reply box, then edit before sending.
Open Support → Tickets. The links across the top jump to a status; the filters underneath narrow by status, priority, department, agent and free text, and the current filtered list can be exported to CSV. Bulk actions assign, unassign, change status or delete.
Inside a ticket you get the whole conversation, and on the right the properties panel: status, priority, department and owner. Below the thread is the reply box, where you can:
Set the status to Resolved when the work is done. The customer is emailed and invited to rate the experience, and the ticket closes itself after your quiet period. If they reply in the meantime, the ticket reopens and comes back to you.
Need to log a call or an email that arrived elsewhere? New ticket at the top of the list creates one on the customer's behalf, with the usual notifications if you want them.
On the portal page a customer fills in name, email, subject and message, picks a department and priority if you allow it, and attaches files. They get an emailed copy with a private link. On that link they read replies, add more information, attach more files and close the ticket themselves.
A guest who lost the link uses Already have a ticket? on the portal: they enter their email address and receive a secure link that lists their tickets for two hours. The message is the same whether or not the address has tickets, so the form cannot be used to discover who your customers are.
Support → Reports covers the last 7, 30, 90 or 365 days: tickets opened and resolved, average first response, average resolution, satisfaction, and volume broken down by day, status, department and agent.
Need more? Extra fields on the ticket form, a knowledge base, email piping so replies arrive straight from an inbox, or a link into the systems you already run - tell us what you need and we will come back with a plan and a fixed quote.