We're excited to announce the release of Tickets, LibraryH3lp's new help desk module!

You already use Chat, 3mail, FAQs, and the Sharing Tool to connect with guests and provide great service. Tickets builds on these tools by helping you manage questions and requests that don't fit neatly into a live conversation.

Think of Tickets as your centralized place to track, organize, collaborate on, and resolve requests over time.

Why Tickets?

Chat is wonderful, but not every interaction happens in real time.  

Sometimes a guest submits a question after hours. Sometimes a request requires research, follow-up, or coordination between departments.  And sometimes you just need a better way to keep track of who is working on what.  

A shared email box might not be quite enough if the guest's request is complex or if you have a big team.

That's where Tickets comes in. With Tickets, you can:

• Track requests from start to finish

• Keep guests informed through email notifications

• Assign work to staff members

• Organize requests with statuses and tags

• Collaborate using staff-only notes

• Transfer requests between departments

Instead of managing these interactions through a shared mailbox, Tickets gives you a dedicated workspace designed for ongoing support.

Multiple Ways to Create Tickets

Tickets can be created through:

• Guest web forms

• Email

• Manual staff entry

Prefer structured intake forms? Use Guest Forms.

Want guests to simply send an email? Tickets can do that too.

Need to create a request on behalf of a guest? Create tickets directly from the Tickets interface. This is especially handy when the guest is on the phone or is in-person at a help desk.

Built for Teamwork

One of the biggest advantages of Tickets is collaboration.

Tickets can be assigned to staff members, reassigned when responsibilities change, and transferred between queues when another department is better suited to help.

Staff-only notes make it easy to share context internally without exposing those conversations to guests.

Whether your team consists of two people or multiple departments, Tickets helps keep everyone on the same page.

Familiar LibraryH3lp Concepts

If you're already using LibraryH3lp Chat, many parts of Tickets will feel familiar.

Like Chat queues, Tickets uses queues to organize expertise and route requests to the right people.

Need separate workflows for circulation, reference, technical services, archives, IT, or other departments? Create as many queues as you need. Tickets can be transferred between queues as needed.

Stay Informed

Tickets includes both email and visual notifications.

Staff can optionally receive emails when tickets are created, assigned, updated, or closed. Guests can receive emails throughout the lifecycle of a request, helping everyone stay informed without extra effort. Or you can set up email notifications to be more infrequent, only sent when specific events occur.

A Better Home for Complex Requests

Chat is great for immediate help. FAQs are great for self-service. Email helps teams communicate.

Tickets fills a different need.

It's designed for questions and requests that require tracking, follow-up, collaboration, or resolution over time.

Tickets won't replace every interaction. Chat remains the fastest way to provide immediate help, and FAQs remain a great self-service option for answers to standard questions. But when a request is more complex, Tickets gives your team a purpose-built way to manage it.

How Tickets Fits Into Your Subscription

The Tickets module is available in two ways:

• Tickets Solo — for organizations that only need ticket management.

• Core Plus One — for organizations that want to add Tickets to their existing LibraryH3lp Core subscription.

We've updated our pricing page so you can explore options and generate an instant estimate for your organization.

We're excited to see how libraries and other organizations use Tickets to streamline workflows, improve communication, and provide even better service.

The Tickets module is available now in LibraryH3lp. Curious? Check out our pricing page for details and an instant estimate, or email support and we'll be happy to set you up with a 30-day trial.

For quite a while now, we've offered proactive texting within 3mail. Now we're excited to announce that we're also offering the same feature directly within chat if you're using the webclient for staffing. 

If you have opted to include the SMS add-on with your subscription, operators can hover over the texting queue in the webclient for staffing to find the "SEND SMS" button.

Hover over your queue in the webclient for staffing

The "SEND SMS" button launches a window that asks for a phone number for the guest and a message. 

Add a phone number for your guest and a message to send

Finally, click "SEND" and you're all set. You'll see a chat with that guest appear. You can then close the chat window by clicking the X in the top, left corner or send additional messages if desired.

IMPORTANT for US customers: In order to comply with US regulations related to proactively initiating text messages to guests, you are required (if you haven't already) to email us information and supporting evidence which describes how guests will opt into receiving text messages from your organization. Typical SMS use that is already covered under your agreement with us is for responding to texts initiated by guests.

Don't have the add-on? Our text messaging add-on module is backed by Bandwidth and Twilio, two robust providers of SMS infrastructure for applications. With the add-on, you receive a standard 10-digit phone number or you can port an existing number into LibraryH3lp. Incoming text messages are handled like all other chats within the webclient interface and can be transferred, transcripts saved if desired, along with many other great features.

The add-on is available in the US and Canada. For countries outside the US and Canada, email us for availability. If texting sounds like something you might want to add to your subscription, let us know by email. We're happy to set you up with a no risk trial.

We've added a handy new indicator to each guests's chat window that lets you know at a glance how long a guest has been waiting. The indicator appears at the bottom of chats when an operator has yet to answer.

Guest wait time indicator

Webclient Preferences -> Chat Window Settings

At the beginning of the year, we blogged about how you can opt folks out of their staffing assignments in order to effectively remove them from chat should they forget to log out. And now we've made it even easier to force a webclient user to log out if they've forgotten to do so!

On the users management page of the admin dashboard (US, CA, EU, SG), local LibraryH3lp administrators can use the "Force Logout" button for a webclient user. That's it! Easy peasy.

One recommended follow-up after using "force logout" is meet with the user later and see if enabling the auto-logout feature in the webclient for staffing would be beneficial.

However if a user does not use the webclient for staffing and instead uses an external chat client like (like Pidgin, Adium, or a mobile app) then "force logout" will do no good because those chat clients have built-in reconnect logic which is difficult to overcome. In this case, the thing to do is go to the administrative dashboard and opt that user out of their staffing assignments on the users management page like we covered in that blog post earlier this year. That way, even though the user remains online, their availability does not affect the queue's overall availability for chat.

It is simple to craft a URL to whisk your guests directly to your chat box with a single click. You just need three bits of information - the LibraryH3lp server for your subscription, your queue's name, and the ID for your chat skin. The format for the direct URL that uses these three bits of information looks like this:

https://{server}/chat/{queue}@chat.{server}?skin={id}

where {server} is the LibraryH3lp server for your subscription, {queue} is your queue's name, and {id} is the ID for your chat skin. 

For example, below is the URL we use for LibraryH3lp support crafted using the formula above. Our server is the main, US server, libraryh3lp.com. Our queue name is libraryh3lp-support. And our chat skin ID is 29566.

https://libraryh3lp.com/chat/libraryh3lp-support@chat.libraryh3lp.com?skin=29566

For help crafting your chat URL, check out our docs.

** An extra bit of integration for Facebook

If you have a Facebook Page, not only can you include your chat URL in posts, you can also include it as a "Contact us" call to action button on the Page. Pretty slick, right? You can see this integration in action on our Facebook Page.

Group chats help teams move fast. Instead of scheduling yet another meeting or digging through emails, you can drop a quick question in chat and get an answer in seconds. Need feedback on a guest's question? Want to share an update? It’s all right there in one place, keeping work flowing without unnecessary delays.

But it’s not just about efficiency—group chats can help you feel more connected. When folks can easily share ideas, troubleshoot problems together, and celebrate wins, work feels more like a team effort. And let’s not forget the little things—like sharing funny memes, weekend plans, or just checking in with coworkers. Those moments help build real relationships, even if you’re not in the same physical space.