For the final day of our Launch Week, we’re shipping two quality of life features: improved inactivity skipping and a new app header.

Improved inactivity skipping

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Session recordings are incredibly useful when you’re helping your customers or trying to understand how they use your product. However, finding the relevant moments can often feel like a wild goose chase.

We’re working to narrow down the key moments by more actively weeding out the irrelevant moments. To that end, we’ve released improvements to inactivity skipping: inactive periods

• show up on the progress bar as lighter grey color
• show a “Skipping inactivity” overlay
• have a variable speed increase so that they will never last longer than 3 seconds of playback time

New app header

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We’ve updated our app header to make it easier to know where you are in our app and harder to inadvertently trigger a search. We’ve also added a help menu to make it easier to get support (which also allowed us to remove the chat widget bubble from the screen so that it doesn’t get in the way of different parts of the app).

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For Day 4 of Launch Week, we’re releasing a feature that’s consistently been one of our highest demand features: Forward an email.

Forwarding emails

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Sometimes you need to collaborate with people outside of your team to solve a ticket. You can now get them up to speed quickly by forwarding them a ticket using the “Forward with sidebar” function. This takes the ticket’s message history up to that point and puts it into a new sidebar message that you can send to your collaborators. Keep in mind that they won’t see your internal ticket activity (eg, ticket assignments, associated Linear/Jira issues, etc.).

For Day 3 of Launch Week, we’ve enabled New Reports and Filters so you can understand your help center, session recordings, and agent performance better than ever.

Let’s dig in.

New reports

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We’ve added additional reports to better help you understand how your customers are using your product:

• Ticket tag reporting showing you which tags you’re using and how often. You can see a chart for individual tags as well tag groups.
• Help center reporting showing you how much your articles are being viewed (Article views, Article view details), your customers’ search terms (Searched term details), and the number of tickets deflected by your help center (Tickets deflected).
• Session recording reporting showing you where your customers are located (Sessions by country) how often they are using your product (Sessions used).
• Chatbot reporting showing you how often your chatbot workflows are being invoked and completed (Chatbot usage), how far customers make it through each workflow (Chatbot usage flow), and how long your customers typically spend in workflows (Chatbot usage details).
• CSAT reporting showing you how your customers are rating the quality of your service as a company (CSAT distribution), per agent (CSAT per agent), and reviews from customers (CSAT responses).

Saved filters

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Getting the filters just right for your reports can take a bit of work. And going through that same routine day after day is work you never wanted to do.

You can now save the hassle with our new Saved filters feature. Simply update the filters on a report as you’d like them and click “Save filter view” on the right side of the screen.

Filtering on custom fields

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Company metrics are like snowflakes: every one is special and unique in their own way. Your reporting should reflect that, and now it can by filtering on custom fields. Simply select the custom field and the value of that field and your reports will reflect those filters.

For Day 2 of Launch week, we’re releasing Info Pane Customizations so you can choose exactly what you see and where you see it in your Info Pane.

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Customizable panes

You can now change the order and visibility (shown/hidden) of cards in your Info Pane on the Inbox and Customer Timeline. You can also enable Customer and Account level notes from your Info Pane > Pane settings section as well.

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Customizable cards

In addition to changing which cards are present in your Info Pane, you can now also change which fields are shown in those cards, when they are shown, and the order in which they are shown. You can now show fields always, only when they are populated, in the additional fields section, or hide them altogether.

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Bonus: New session recording cards

Finally, we’re now showing you more summary information about your sessions in the Info Pane within session recordings to help you know what happened in a recording (eg, network calls and errors), any tickets that are associated with the recording, and a list of the pages that were visited during the session.

We’ve been building a lot over the last month and wanted to give share some of the exciting new features we’re shipping sooner rather than later. This week, we’re going to ship a new feature each day.

For Day 1, we’re announcing our Failed Delivery Notifications to help you know when a message hasn’t made it to your customer.

Let’s get into the explanations below

Failed deliveries

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Messages can fail to be delivered for quite a few reasons (we’ve counted 36, but I’m sure there are more), from invalid email address to firewall rules and beyond. We previously let you know this on an individual message delivery status basis, but we wanted to surface these messages in a more urgent and visible way so you can deal with them expeditiously.

To this end, we’ve add a new inbox that is visible if you have any failed message deliveries. Each message that failed to be delivered is marked with a failed delivery icon (⚠️) in the inbox as well as the ticket header row in the customer profile.

We’ll also notify the message sender and assignee via email of any message that fails to send.

You can find out more details for the particular failure reason by going to the message and hovering over the delivery status below the message. Once you’ve remedied the issue (eg, updated the customer’s email address, contacted them about a firewall issue, etc.), you can resend the message using the “Resend” action below the message.

This week we’ve glammed up a few areas of Atlas that we felt needed some TLC. Specifically:

• ticket creation
• session player
• the chat widget

New ticket modal

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In addition to a much cleaner UI, we’ve also made it easier to move through ticket creation with your keyboard and focus on only showing you the key pieces of information needed to create a ticket. The hotkey to create a ticket is N from the inbox

Session player revamp

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We’ve completely overhauled the session recordings list and session player to make it easier to know what a session is about before watching it and to understand the details better when you are watching a session.

In the sessions list, we now show a preview of the session in the info pane; a summary giving the number of network calls, console errors, and sentry errors; and a list of the pages that were visited in that session.

In the session player, we’ve now hidden the chatty details (user actions, network traffic, custom events, etc.) in developer tools to give you a more streamlined summary of information in the info pane. We’ve added a card for associated tickets so that you can quickly jump to any tickets that were created from this session.

We’ve cleaned up the time scrub so that you can more easily jump to times where event badges exist.

Finally, we’ve cleaned up the developer tools section so that it’s much more readable. We’ll be adding more data support in this section next quarter to help you get deeper insights into customer sessions.

Hide/show chat widget with SDK

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We love our chat widget and hope you do too. But we’re also realistic and realize that there are times when you may not want the chat widget to show up unless a button somewhere (eg “Chat with us”) is pressed.

We’ve now made it easy to setup the chat widget so that the chat bubble doesn’t show up unless programmatically triggered by setting the hideBubble parameter in the widget startup code.

At Atlas, it’s always been our policy that you own your data. Now we’re making it easier for you to get access to your data in Atlas and share it when you need.

This week, we’ve launched three features to help you do this:

• Export to CSV
• Save ticket as PDF
• Share drafts

Export to CSV

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Ever feel like doing a spreadsheet analysis of your ticket data? Me neither. But sometimes you need to do one, and getting a hold of your ticket data is the first step. Until now, this has required using our API to pull the data.

Now, you can export your ticket data to CSV by simply doing a search (/), adding the relevant filters, and clicking the download button next to the results. The results will be emailed to you as a CSV.

The same thing works for customers as well.

Share drafts

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Want to preview another teammate’s response to a customer before they send it (eg, for new or junior teammates)? You can now collaborate with your teammates by enabling draft sharing. With draft sharing enabled, any time you or a teammate start a draft response to a customer, you can view and edit the draft in the ticket’s composer.

Save ticket as PDF

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Occasionally, you need to document individual tickets for external purposes. You can now export any ticket to a PDF to do this easily.

We’re shipping three features this week that we’ve really enjoyed internally and are excited to share with you.

• Preview Linear issues linked to tickets
• Auto-close tickets after a certain amount of time in an inbox
• Images in emails can now be shown inline

Revamped Linear activity

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You can now preview Linear issues linked to tickets by hovering over the Linear chip (in the inbox, Info Pane, or ticket header). We’ve also cleaned up Linear issue activities in the ticket timeline to give you more information at a glance.

Auto-close tickets

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We’ve added an automation (App Config > Ticket Management > Automations) so that you can keep your inboxes tidy by automatically closing tickets that haven’t had activity in a certain amount of time. You can use any filters that you would normally use to create an inbox (eg, status, channel, assignee, etc.) to specify tickets that should automatically close.

Inline images in emails

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Emails in Atlas should look like emails in your favorite email client. To that end, we’ve now made it possible to view inline images… inline. 🙂

The theme of this release is increased visibility and flexibility. We’ve done this by adding:

• agent typing notifications
• session recording previews
• pending status

Agent typing notifications

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You can now see when another agent is typing a response to a customer in the composer to prevent accidental double-responses or collisions.

Session recording previews

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Session recordings in the customer timeline now show previews as gifs to make it easier to know whether to watch the full session.

Pending status

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It’s useful at times to put tickets into an indefinite holding state (eg, if you’d like to have them automatically closed after a period of inactivity). We’ve created the Pending status for this.

When tickets are placed into the Pending status, they’ll automatically move to the Pending folder and remain there until they’ve been closed or moved back to Open status.

We’ve made a grip of changes to make sending messages more robust. You can now:

• add multiple emails and phone numbers to send messages to your customers
• add email signatures
• switch the channel of a message within a ticket
• add alternative phone numbers and emails to a customer’s profile

Multiple senders

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You can now add multiple senders (emails or phone numbers) from App Config > Email and App Config > SMS. If you want to set a single name for the sender regardless of who is sending a message, enable the custom sender name.

You can change the sender from the top of the composer. The default sender for new outbound responses is set in sender properties.

Email signatures

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For each sender, you can create an associated signature either from formatted text or HTML. You can also use variables within signatures to customize them on a per agent basis.

Switch channels

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When you’re talking with a customer, you can now switch to a different channel with them. The default channel is the last channel that you spoke to the customer on.

Alternative phone numbers and emails

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Sometimes a customer has multiple numbers and emails they use to reach out to you. You can now add those to their customer profile so that emails and SMS messages are correctly associated with them.

This week we’re releasing some quality of life improvements related to the Info Pane and Slack.

Expandable Info Pane

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There are times when it’s helpful to see a little more context in the Info Pane (eg, internal tools, event payloads, etc.). You can now expand the Info Pane by clicking and grabbing the edge of the Info Pane.

If you want to quickly maximize/minimize the pane, you can also use the hotkey ].

Multi-select custom fields

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You can now create custom fields with multiple selections from a list of choices on tickets, customers, and accounts. You can also search and filter reporting on the same fields and filter by any subset of the fields.

Slack improvements

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We’ve made our Slack integration more robust now with three changes:

• Closing tickets with required fields will now take you to Atlas app to fill in fields
• You can allow your customers to see that status of tickets created in Slack
• You can send @mentions in Slack from Atlas

Happy holidays! Our Christmas release this year is chock-full of improvements:

• 🔥 SLA improvements: view SLA status on tickets directly in your inbox
• 📱 Mobile responsive: we’ve made it much easier to use Atlas on mobile with improved inbox and customer timeline views
• 📚 Help center improvements: you can now customize your favicon, use rectangular logos in the help center header, and enjoy improved SEO
• 🔍 Account search: search by various account properties (search by account properties — screenshot of account search by name, by number of sessions)

SLA status

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SLAs are a great way of keeping track of which tickets need a response most urgently. We’ve now made it even easier to know which tickets to respond to first in your inbox by adding an SLA urgency icon to each ticket that is near or overdue its SLA policy.

Look for the 🔥 in grey (monitor), yellow (urgent), and red (overdue) for increasing urgency.

If you haven’t setup SLA policies yet, you can do so here.

Mobile responsive UI

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We’ve spent a lot of time over the last two quarters upgrading the look, feel, and performance of the parts of Atlas where you spend most of your time: the inbox and customer timeline.

Now those improvements have made their way to mobile, so if you’re on the move and need to take a look at your inbox or check out a customer’s timeline, it’s a considerably better experience.

More improvements to come here including a mobile app in 2024 — let us know what you think!

Help center improvements

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We’ve made a slew of SEO upgrades related to page metadata, most of which you’ll get without any work on your end.

You can now also customize your favicon and use rectangular logos in the help center header.

Account search

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We’ve enabled searching by account properties now as well as some customer health metrics including metrics like the number of tickets over the last week (NumTicketsT7) or month (NumTicketsT30), number of sessions (NumSessionsT7, NumSessionsT30), and average CSAT (AvgCSAT).

We’ve got three major releases to highlight:

• Private help centers allow you to gate your help center content behind a login wall
• Tag reports help you understand trends in your ticket topics
• Plain email formatting option for the minimalists out there

Private help centers

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Have top secret intel hidden that you don’t want to leak to competitors? Or just want to keep nosy browsers out of the innards of your app? We’ve got you covered.

You can now choose who you want to allow to view your help center using your customer segments (eg, Customers, VIPs, etc.).

If you want to get more granular and lockdown or segment only a specific category or article, let me know and we can get that setup for you as well.

Tag reports

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This small but mighty feature gives you insights into the trends of your business as perceived by your customers.

You can view your tickets by topic using tag groups or individual tags and see how they’ve trended over time to diagnose bug, knowledge based, feature request, manual task, or any other category-related issues that are important to you.

Plain email formatting

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Why am I writing a paragraph to tell you about plain text? I don’t know. But it’s now an option you can enable if you want your customers to have a more barebone experience. Enjoy!

We’ll be pushing a few other email formats soon, so let me know if there’s a template or format that you especially want (now is the time! 🙏).

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A couple more bonus nuggets that went out in this release:

• faster session recording loading — more than 10x faster, actually
• updated our tab titles to be more useful — instead of “Atlas” for everything, we’ll now show you… the actual page title 🙃

This week we’re releasing a new version of the customer timeline. Here are some of the major changes:

• faster loading
• updated ticket formatting
• improved readability

Faster loading

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One of the biggest improvements in the new customer timeline are improved load times. We’ve sped up the initial page load times and timeline jumps by 10x.

Additionally, we’ve changed the animations when jumping to different tickets in the timeline so they’re smoother (or instantaneous if the jump is far enough).

New ticketing format

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In the new version of the customer timeline, we wanted to make it easier to find ticket vitals and to know which ticket was in scope.

To that end, we added ticket vitals to the top of each ticket so they’re easy to find as you’re scrolling through the timeline (and able to be changed directly at the top of the ticket or top of your screen if you’ve moved past the top of the ticket).

Additionally, the composer is now anchored to the bottom of each ticket so you know exactly to which ticket you’re responding. And when a ticket is closed, you need to proactively click “Reply” to open the composer so that you don’t accidentally open a ticket.

Better readability

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To make it easier to quickly grok your customer’s history, we:

• changed agent message background to blue to make it easier to identify which messages are from your team vs. customers
• widened messages by 20% so that you can see more messages within a single screen
• improved delivery statuses below messages so you know who messages are being delivered to and can see more detail

We’re gearing up for Thanksgiving here at Atlas and wanted to share a wide spread of improvements with you this week.

First off, for any of you who have gone through the SOC 2 process, you’ll appreciate the pains it took for us to get newly minted with this little guy:

Next up, here’s our horn of plenty updates:

1. CSAT in WhatsApp
2. customize your fallback logic
3. customer-generated tickets in Slack Connect

CSAT in WhatsApp

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This one is pretty straightforward: if you’re using WhatsApp, you can now enable CSAT surveys to be sent after you close conversations. Your customers will be sent to a web form where they can rate your support and give you feedback.

Customized fallback logic

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In your fallback channel settings (App Config > Chat), you can now specify how long you would like to wait before sending a fallback message in addition to setting the channels and the order to which you’d like messages sent if a customer is offline or hasn’t read a chat message.

Customer-generated tickets in Slack Connect

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You can now enable your customers to create tickets in Slack Connect channels on their own as well as set priority on those tickets (App Config > Slack).

This week we’re announcing changes to our chatbots:

• new branching logic: Some of our most in-demand features recently have been improvements to chatbot workflows. This week, we’re releasing a batch of improvements:
• ability to specify ticket channel
• map fields

New branching logic

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We’ve added two new types of branching for chatbot workflows: branch by URL and branch by customer segment.

Branch by URL allows you to create a different path of your workflow depending on the page a user is on. For instance, you can now suggest more specific articles depending on which page a user is on or tag the resulting ticket with a more relevant tag.

Branch by customer segment allows you to create paths for any group of customers you have. This gives you the ability to create a bespoke experience for your customers using the information you already have for them (eg, you could give your VIP customers the ability to chat with support in the chat widget vs. emailing support).

Specify ticket channel

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You can now specify the channel on which a ticket will be created (previously, all tickets were chat tickets). When you create email tickets, you can follow-up with a message letting your customers know your expected response timeline.

Map fields

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You can now use the responses your customers give you to fill in their profile information (including custom fields). This can be especially helpful if you’re missing a field or want to keep customer data fresh and contextual.

This week we’re announcing 5 integrations that they’ve recently released:

• CRM integrations: Salesforce, HubSpot, and Close
• Phone integrations: Dialpad and Aircall

CRM Integrations

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We now support integrations with three CRMs: Salesforce, HubSpot, and Close. With each integration you can:

• import and sync customers and accounts
• sync activities (such as meetings, calls, notes, and tasks) from the CRM to Atlas
• sync tickets and notes from Atlas to the CRM

One important note: due to API throttling from the CRMs, it can take up to 24 hours for the initial sync of your CRM data into Atlas, depending on how many contacts and accounts you have in your CRM.

Phone integrations

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We now support integrations with two phone apps: Dialpad and Aircall. With these integrations you can:

• start calls from Atlas (click on the phone icon in the contact card at the top right of the info pane)
• see all call activity in your customer timeline (calls in and calls out)
• view transcription and call recordings in timeline events when available

This week we’re rolling out a raft of features to improve emails, search, and reporting:

• Email subjects and CCs
• Improved email formatting
• Search for CSAT and tag groups
• New report filters

Ticket subjects and CCs

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It can be helpful to get a quick understanding of a ticket’s topic by glancing at the title of the ticket. While this has always been present for email tickets, we’ve now introduced subjects for all tickets. It’s empty by default and can be manually edited from the Ticket information card in the info pane.

Additionally, for email tickets, you can now CC other people (customers, visitors, or any person at all) by clicking “+ Add CC” in the Ticket information card in the info pane and typing an email address.

Search for CSAT, tag groups, browser, and OS

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You can now triangulate tickets even faster with four new filters we’ve added to the universal search: tag group (in addition to ticket tags which were already available), CSAT, browser, and OS.

If you aren’t already using tag groups, you can set them up in App Config > Tags. If you’re not sure which groups to use, we’d recommend you start with 🐞 Bugs, 📚 User education, 🙋 Feature request, and 💪 Manual tasks. (More on that here.)

New report filters

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We’ve revamped our report filtering options and added lots of different filters, including:

• status
• priority
• assignee
• tags
• customer
• account
• channels

You can also specify the date range more easily and dynamically now in the same filter section.

For certain types of tickets, you need to have a conversation with someone outside of your support team (eg, customer success, eng, legal, HR, a vendor, etc.) and it’s incredibly helpful to keep those conversations within the scope of a customer ticket. We’ve created sidebars to handle this scenario.

To start a sidebar:

• click on the actions menu (”…”) on a ticket and select “Start a sidebar”
• set the subject and to fields, type your message, and send the email
• responses to sidebars will show up in your inbox
• new sidebar messages will also show up as activities within the associated ticket

This week we’ve pushed updates so you control in order in which see the customer contex.

We created the info pane as a fundamental component in Atlas to give you quick access to relevant contextual information when you’re talking to customers. In that same spirit, we wanted to give you the ability to customize the ordering of the blocks shown in the info pane.

To change the order, go to App Config > Info Pane.

This week we’ve pushed updates to Slack updates and improved our SLA functionality to help you make your SLAs more actionable. Let’s jump in.

Ticket statuses in Slack

Several of our early stage customers have told us that they respond to the majority of their tickets directly from Slack. With that in mind, we wanted to make it easier to know what’s happening in regards to a given ticket from Slack, so we added a few things to make it easier to do so:

• ticket status: all tickets are now prepended by either 📥 (open), ✅ (closed), or 💤 (snoozed)
• page: the page your customer was on when they submitted this ticket (only works for chat)
• SLA time: if applicable, you’ll see the SLA policy and time that you have to respond to the ticket to keep the policy

We’ve also made a handful of fixes and upgrades to our Slack integration:

• better support for emojis across all channels
• support for attachments sent from Slack
• messages not sent with @Atlas at the beginning are recorded as internal notes

SLA improvements

We’ve updated the Reports page to now include tabs for different types of reports, including SLAs. On this tab, you can currently see the number of tickets that are outside of your pre-determined SLA policies as well as the percentage of your tickets that are outside of your SLA policies.

You can also download the list of underlying tickets in case you want to do an analysis on individual tickets.

In addition to SLA repots, we’ve also added SLA notifications so that you can know whenever a ticket breaches an SLA, you get an alert about it immediately in Slack.

Today we’re adding WhatsApp as a channel available to all Atlas users. You can now reach your customers in one of the most pervasive and convenient channels available. Let’s review how WhatsApp works as a channel in Atlas, the use case restrictions, and how to get it setup for your account.

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Talk to your customers through WhatsApp

You can now talk to your customers via WhatsApp. Once enabled, your customers can contact you at your WhatsApp business number and you’ll receive messages just like you would through any other channel. You can respond freely within 24 hours (afterwards, you’re required to use templates — see the next section for more details).

If you’re a B2C startup or located outside of the US, there’s a good chance that this will have the highest response rate from your customers.

WhatsApp Templates

When you send a message to a customer more than 24 hours since their last response, WhatsApp requires you to use a pre-approved template.

Templates can be any message with variables in them labeled as curly braces with the variable number inside, starting at 1 (ie,{{1}}, {{2}}, {{3}}, etc.). Here are the official guidelines for WhatsApp templates. For example,

Your appointment for {{1}} is scheduled for {{2}}. Need to reschedule? Tap below to reply.

To create a new template, just go to the App Config > Channels > WhatsApp page and create a new template using the above format. Templates are generally approved (or rejected) within 24 hours. If a template is rejected, we’ll let you know why and suggest a fix.

Whenever you are required to use a template, you’ll see a banner inside the composer along with an option to select from your list of approved templates. Once you’ve selected a template, update the placeholder value and you’re good to go.

Onboarding

Onboarding takes anywhere from 2-4 weeks due to processing times with Twilio and Meta.

If you’re interested in using WhatsApp as a channel, respond to this email (or ping us via chat, Slack, etc.) and we’ll start processing your application.

Happy chatting!

Composer, v2

This week we’re releasing our new Composer with changes that make it much more discoverable.

Here’s what we’ve changed.

Easier formatting

The top of the Composer is now the text formatting toolbar. From here, you can format text, insert code or quote blocks, add headers, and create lists.

Each formatting option has a hotkey. Here are a few of the most common ones:

• Bold (⌘B)
• Italicize (⌘I)
• Underline (⌘U)
• Strikethrough (⌘⇧X)
• Code (⌘E)
• Link (⌘K)

Hover over any of them to see their hotkey or just press ? from anywhere in Atlas to see the hotkeys guide. We also continue to support markdown directly within the composer. Some common, useful markdown, for instance:

• at the beginning of a line:
  • “- ” or “* ” will turn the line into a bulleted list
  • “1. “ will turn the line into a numbered list
  • “# ” and “## ” will turn the line into a heading or subheading line, respectively
• wrapping text with:
  • “*” will bold the text (eg, “text” → “text”)
  • “_” will italicize the text (eg, “text” → “text”)

Quick actions

The bottom of the Composer now allows you to insert articles, canned responses, tag teammates, add attachments, and insert variables.

We also continue to support quick action hotkeys:

• Insert snippet (type “#” in the Composer)
• Insert article (type “$” in the Composer)
• Tag teammate (type “@” in the Composer)
• Insert variable (type “{{” in the Composer)

Sending modes

The top tabs of the Composer allow you to clearly delineate whether you are sending a reply or writing an internal note.

Bonus: One Composer to rule them all

Finally, we’ve updated the Composer in all locations throughout the app (eg, canned responses, article editor, chatbot editor, etc.) so you’ll have the same capabilities no matter where you’re writing a message.

After last week’s update to our chat widget, we decided to follow-up with another beautification related update to our marketing site (which, until very recently, was kind of a landing page+).

Why are you getting this email? Because we thought you might care about a few of the things we posted. Namely:

• a mostly comprehensive catalog of our feature set on the pricing page
• a more detailed list of changes to our product on the changelog
• …and of course a little history about us

And now that we’ve grown up a little, 🙏 a shameless ask 🙏 : do you know someone who is still using a legacy support product that is ready to level up? Send us a referral and if they start using Atlas, we’ll give them and you 🎁 3 months for free 🎁.

Our mighty little chat widget served us well for the last year, but the time has finally come for some beautification and improvements. Here’s a quick summary with details to follow:

• widget menu: add a menu to preface the chat widget to give your customers some options prior chatting with your team
• inbox: separate unread, open, and closed tickets in the customer’s chat inbox view
• chat: streamlined design, improved form functionality, and better interactivity
• help center: preview help center articles, organize articles by category, and search functionality
• miscellaneous: better state management, gradient background support, light/dark font toggle, customizable widget shape

Now for the details.

Widget menu

Sometimes you want to nudge your customers to take some common actions to support themselves before reaching out to your team directly via chat. Enter the widget menu.

When you enable the widget menu, the chat widget icon is replaced by a “?” bubble which shows your widget menu options when opened. You can add three types of menu options:

• apps: chat (💬) allows your customers to talk with you via chat, inbox (📬) shows your customers the different tickets they have open with you, and help center (📚) lets your customers view your help center from the widget
• link: send your customers to the URL of your choice (eg, Talk to sales → calendly link)
• callback: trigger workflows on your page with a custom callback function (eg, What’s new? → opens release log tab from navbar)

Inbox

Prior to release, it was sometimes difficult for customers to keep which conversation was the most important for them to view. We’ve now made it much easier for your customers to know which conversations are the most important for them to view by clustering tickets as unread, open, and closed.

Chat

To make the chat experience more pleasant for your customers, we added some polish to the chat app via animations, a larger widget area, more informative message statuses, and a notification when an agent from your team is typing.

Help Center

There are times when you want your customers to have quick access to your help center so they are more likely to view the articles you’ve painstakingly written. To handle this, you can enable the chat widget and add the help center app.

Your customers will then see your top level help center categories and can navigate into them to see their constituent categories and articles as well as search for the contents of any article.

Miscellaneous

Finally, we added a handful of fixes to improve the overall customer experience:

• better state management: when a customer closes the widget and re-opens it, they’ll remain on the same page they were last viewing; going “back” within the widget will retain its since of directionality, going up and down in the view history stack
• gradient background support: you can now switch from a monotone background to whatever gradient and direction suits your heart’s desires
• light/dark font toggle: if you’ve got a light background, you can now switch to dark fonts to complement it
• customizable widget shape: get your customers’ attention with a shape that is a little different from the standard chat widget (or, if you’re feeling extra edgy, you can max out the variation and the widget will slowly and continually morph shapes)

We love how Slack Connect makes it super easy for customers to report bugs and give feedback. It’s a secret weapon for startups to offer a white glove experience to their customers.

But at some point, it can devolve pretty rapidly into more of a problem than a solution. When you’ve added enough customers, it’s hard to keep track of every message and thread: who responded from your team, which messages are the most important, what’s been solved, what needs urgent attention, etc. This is what ticketing systems were created to solve.

Atlas for Slack Connect solves this problem by letting you convert Slack threads into tickets and respond to tickets from any channel from within Slack. Here’s how it works

Convert threads to tickets

Add the 🎫 (”ticket”) emoji as a reaction to any message sent by a customer in one of your Slack Connect channels and it will be turned into a ticket. You’ll see the ticket in your designated support channel.

Respond from Slack

From the ticket thread in your support channel, you can now set the ticket’s priority, assign it to a teammate, talk with your teammates, and respond to the customer by adding @Atlas at the beginning of a message.

Bonus: this works for all channels

One last thing: you can setup Slack to receive new tickets from any channel. By default, all channels are enabled, but you can turn any channel off or on from the App Config > Slack page.

This week we’re releasing one of our most requested features in a while: CSAT.

CSAT

When you enable CSAT (short for “Customer Satisfaction”), your customers will be asked for feedback on how happy they were about the conversation that just ended. If you’d like additional feedback, you can enable comments and give your customers the ability to write a short-form response.

We support CSAT for all of our channels (chat, email, and SMS) as well.

You can check your progress in the Reporting tool

CSAT distribution over time

CSAT performance per agent

where the final chart is calculated as the total number of positive replies (🙂, 😁 or 👍) divided by the total number of replies x 100.

This week we’re announcing the release of three features that will make it easier for you to talk with your customers, no matter where they or you are.

International SMS

You can now add internationally formatted phone numbers with automatic country detection. If you’re using SMS, you can message both domestic and international customers (subject to your local laws and regulations; different rates may apply by locale — ping me if you’d like additional info).

Delivery statuses

You can now see the delivery status of each message you send in the customer timeline. Statuses are generally:

• Sending
• Sent
• Delivered
• Read (not available for SMS)
• Failed

In the event of a failed delivery, you can hover over the delivery status to get more information on the underlying cause (eg, customer contact info invalid).

Mobile SDKs

We now have mobile SDKs for React Native and Flutter that allow you to load the chat widget into your mobile app. Chat is fullscreen in mobile and requires you to configure a button to load it (ie, the chat widget launcher isn’t present in mobile), but otherwise you have access to the same commands you may be accustomed to with the Javascript SDK.

This week we're releasing a feature we've been very excited to build since our inception: Search.

Search is vital to finding the right customer or ticket. Unfortunately, simple lookups can sometimes be difficult if not impossible to do without a data analyst and custom SQL. With our new search functionality, we want to make it easy for you to answer questions like:

• what are the most important open tickets? (priority is one of urgent, high + status is open)
• who are all our customers who have downvoted an article? (event.description contains “Voted 👎”, view customers)
• are we responding quickly enough to our chats? (channel is chat, ticket.first_response_time < 5 mins)
• how many customers want us to build a Jira integration? (ticket.tag contains “feature request jira”, view customers)

In this update, we’ve got four items to cover:

• Quick search
• Advanced search
• Custom inboxes
• Custom segments

Let’s dive in.

Quick Search

When you need to quickly find a specific customer or ticket, try Quick Search via the command palette (Cmd+K). This will do a direct string search against customer names, account names, and ticket content.

Advanced Search

Advanced search can be accessed from any page in Atlas using the / key. You can use advanced search for simple queries (eg, “Jane Doe” to find all your Jane Doe customers, tickets, sessions, and events) or more complex queries (eg, the above examples).

By default, all queries join filters with an AND operator; you can change this to an OR operator by clicking on the “includes all filters” button.

Custom Inboxes

Custom Inboxes allow you to now organize your ticketing center however you’d like. Any search that yields tickets (ie, any direct search against tickets or customers with tickets, events with tickets, etc.) can be converted to a Custom Inbox.

To create a Custom Inbox, open Advanced Search, enter your search criteria (eg, priority is one of urgent, high + status is open) and run the search. Then go to the Tickets tab and click “Create Inbox” on the right hand side. From there, you can choose which of your teammates you’d like to see this newly created inbox.

Custom Segments

Custom Segments allow you to group your customers and accounts so that you can quickly filter by them in other places (eg, Custom Inboxes, Chatbots, Routing, SLA rules, etc.).

To create a Custom Segment, open Advanced Search, enter your search criteria (eg, Customer.favorite_fruit is mango) and run the search. Then go to the Customers tab and click “Create Segment” on the right hand side. From there, you can choose which of your teammates you’d like to see this newly created inbox.

Any searches you’d like to run but not sure how to write? Ping me and I’ll help you build it (or add any missing filters to our backlog if needed).

This week, we’ve got a raft of ticket management updates to help you keep tickets organized and to cover some of the more common edge cases you may be encountering. Here’s what’s on the docket:

1. routing
2. merging tickets
3. changing requester
4. manually creating tickets

Routing

Routing allows you to automatically take an action whenever a new ticket is created. For instance, if you’ve got a VIP account that should be set to a higher priority, or if you want to tag all tickets with billing related terms with “Billing,” or if you want to automatically respond to new tickets when they’re created, you can now do that.

To create a new routing rule, go to App Config > Ticket Management > Routing.

Tickets will be routed according to the first routing rule that applies to them (if any). You can change the order of the routing rules by dragging them up or down in the rules list.

Merging tickets

Duplicate tickets happen and can clog up your inbox with double-work. We’ve now introduced ticket merging through the ticket actions menu.

To merge a ticket, find the ticket you’d like to merge a ticket into, click on “…” in the ticket quick actions menu, and then select “Merge Ticket.” From there, you can search for the ticket you’d like to merge into the current ticket and then review the merge before finalizing it.

Changing requester

Sometimes your customers don’t know the right person on your team to contact for support and you need to forward an email from a teammate to your support inbox. This messes up the normal flow of things because now you have a ticket associated with a teammate rather than the appropriate customer.

You now have the ability to switch the customer associated with a ticket. To change the requester, click on “…” in the ticket quick actions menu, and then select “Switch Customer” and find the correct customer.

Manually creating tickets

Most support tickets are inbound from your customers. Occasionally, however, you need to be able to start a ticket from your side.

With the composer, you can create a new ticket for a customer directly from the inbox (click on the Compose button at the bottom of the screen or press N ) or from their customer profile.

This week we’re ringing the proverbial bell by releasing notifications for ticket updates.

As much as we would love you to be in Atlas all the time (j/k… 😅), we realize that there are times when you need to leave Atlas to do other things. We’ve built a few different modes for notifications to let you know when you should come back to Atlas to help out a customer.

There are now four different ways to be notified when important changes to tickets are made:

1. Slack notifications
2. email notifications
3. browser notifications
4. sound notifications

Setting up notifications

To adjust your notification settings, go to Settings > Notifications:

Slack notifications require connecting Atlas to Slack at which point you’ll receive notifications based off of your Slack notification settings.

Email notifications

Notifications sent to your email are formatted like the following:

If the update is related to a new message, you’ll see the message(s) marked as “New”. If the update is related to a ticket property changing (ie, changing the assigned agent, priority, or status), then you’ll see the update in the first line (eg, “Rahul assigned ticket #234 to you”).

Browser & Sound notifications

To setup browser and sound notifications, enable notifications at your OS level and browser level and then make sure Atlas is listed as an approved app at both levels. Here’s a quick guide for setting up both browser and sound notifications on Mac and Windows for Chrome.

We’ve officially reached the List Season in which you’re surely being inundated with top 10 lists like they’re going out of style. So, naturally, we thought you might also want to be able to see a list of your customers and accounts. 😃

This week, we’re introducing three new ways to enrich and view your customers’ info:

1. accounts let you associate a customer with a company
2. contact lists let you view customers and accounts in list form
3. notes lets you add internal notes for individual customers and tickets

Let’s dig in.

Accounts

You can associate customers with a single account by going to the Info Pane for the user and clicking on “Add Account.” If the account associated with them hasn’t been created yet, type the name and you will have the option to “Create Account” where you’ll be prompted to fill in some basic account info.

Once a customer is associated with an account, you’ll see the Account Information card show up in their Info Pane. You can edit the account properties here and can add custom fields for the account in App Config > Data > Custom Fields.

Custom & Account Lists

Customer and account lists live in the Contacts section of the app.

From here, you can get a quick understanding of which users are asking the most questions, how difficult their tickets are to solve, and how often and how long they use your app.

The account list lets you see all the customer associated with a given account as well as edit the associated account info.

Internal Notes

You can leave notes for your teammates that aren’t visible to your customers by adding internal notes, either on a per ticket basis where it will show up in the customer timeline on that particular ticket

or on a per customer basis where it will show up in the Info Pane for that customer.

Lastly, if you’ve got a bunch of accounts in another system (eg, your CRM), let me know — we’d be happy to help you migrate them over!

Context is a core principle to how we build Atlas. When you’re talking to your customers, it’s important to be able to see what other teams are working on for your customers. We’re introducing three more integrations this week to give you a richer understanding of your customers’ experience:

1. Sentry for viewing bugs,
2. Linear for viewing engineering and product issues, and
3. Segment for viewing custom events.

To illustrate, let’s walk through a scenario where we’ve received a ticket from a customer who is unable to checkout.

It’s not clear what the issue might be at this point, so let’s take a look at any related bugs.

Sentry

We’ve integrated with Sentry so that you can see the bugs that your customers are experiencing in their journey.

To integrate with Sentry, go to App Configuration > Integrations > Sentry (you can view documentation here for more details).

In this case, we can see that our customer is running into an error with the checkout button.

Next we need to tell engineering about this bug.

Linear

With our project management integrations (currently supporting Linear), you can now:

• associate a ticket in Atlas with an issue in your project management tool
• create a new issue in your project management tool (and associate it with a ticket in Atlas)
• view the current status of issues
• get notified whenever an issue associated with a ticket is marked complete or canceled

We can create bug ticket for our engineering team for the checkout error.

Finally, we want to check that our customer is able to checkout.

Segment & Custom Events

We added a Custom Events feature so that you can now add any events from your customers’ journey to the Customer Timeline and Session Recordings.

You can add these events via API or via Segment and customize which events show up where in App Config > Data > Custom Events.

We can see our customer has completed the checkout process.

If you’d like help determining which events are most important for your business, event tracking best practices, or help setting up Custom Events, reply to this email and we can schedule a time to chat.

Which integrations would you like to see next? Let us know!

We heard you were looking for some TPS reports. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. This week, we’re releasing reports and report scheduling to help you understand how well you’re responding to your customers.

Reports

You can find out how well you’ve been responding to our customers in our new Reporting section. Tickets created, resolved, response times, and more are here now.

Report Scheduling

Get reports delivered directly to your team’s inboxes daily, weekly, or monthly to keep them up to date with your latest trends.

Did we miss any reports you use regularly? Let us know!

This week we’re releasing a set of features to give you the ability to get access to and customize your data in Atlas.

Custom fields

You can set custom fields for Tickets, Customers, and Accounts in App Config > Custom Fields. For tickets, you can require certain custom fields to be filled in before the ticket is closed.

API

You can get your API key in App Config > API and read the docs in our API docs. You can access most of our core models via API: Conversations, Customers, Users, Tags, SLA Rules, Custom Fields, and Canned Responses.

Webhooks

You can setup webhooks in App Config > API for updates to Conversations, Accounts, and Customers.

Pro tip: User authentication

Last up, if you haven’t configure user authentication, now is a great time to do so. You want to do this to prevent user spoofing — especially important if you ever do or could divulge sensitive information to your customers.

You can set it up in App Config > Installation (and learn more about how it works under the hood in our documentation).

Finally, we’ve got 🙏 an ask 🙏 this week: we’re doing a revamp on the customer timeline and inbox and would love your feedback.

If there’s anything you’d like to see added, removed, or just general thoughts on the layout of either page, let me know.

Responding to your customers quickly with a small team can be incredibly difficult. To triage common customer questions and pre-qualify your customer conversations, we’re releasing Chatbots.

Chatbot basics

• 📝 Editor: create a chatbot from the chatbot editor in Chatbots.
• 🎬 Actions: can be taken by the chat widget to respond to customers (Messaging), open new tickets (Ticket), or to give suggestions for articles to read (Help Center).
• 🧩 Conditions: can be set for different paths within the chatbot workflow from the Send Form or Branching steps.

Chatbot scenarios

Send a customer to the correct agent/team:

Answer FAQ:

Qualifying leads:

What other actions or triggers would you like in the chatbot editor? Let us know!

When you transition from using a single Gmail inbox to multiplayer support, you’ve officially entered the territory of ticket management. We’ve added a handful of features to help you better keep track of your customers’ tickets.

SLA

Set your standard response times for different user types and ticket priority levels using SLA rules. As a rule of thumb, it’s a good idea to respond to emails within 1 hour and chats within 10 minutes.

Priority

Set the priority of your tickets to keep track of which tickets are most important and to have SLA’s take effect where relevant.

Snooze

Remove tickets from your active queue and schedule a time for them to return to your queue with snooze.

Tags

Organize tickets by topic with tags and tag groups. Not sure where to start with tag groups? Try Bugs, Knowledge Based, Feature Requests, and Manual Tasks.

Looking for any other features? Let us know!

When we created Atlas, one of our primary goals was to speed up your replies to customers and give support agents a modern experience. With our release this week, we’re aiming to help you do both.

📱 SMS

Send and receive messages to your customers via SMS by adding a line in App Config > SMS.

⌨️ Hotkeys

Navigate quickly between tickets, your inbox, app configuration, and products and take quick actions with hotkeys. Pull up the command bar with cmd+k.

✍️ Composer Improvements

You can now send more helpful messages utilizing links and code blocks. Also, you can adjust the default action of your composer as well as the default send hotkey in Settings > Composer.

🧩 Variables

Auto-fill customer fields in the composer (responding to messages and in canned responses) by using { in the composer.

🗣️ Mentions

Tag your teammates with @ in messages and internal notes to bring a ticket to their attention.

🗃 Slack improvements

Close, open, and assign tickets to teammates without leaving Slack.

🔐 User Authentication

Prevent user impersonation by enabling user authentication.

Have any ideas or suggestions for how we can make Atlas better? Let us know!

Before your customers reach out to talk to a human, most of them will look around on your page for any written documentation. Better, more easily accessible documentation means fewer questions for you and faster service for them. Win-win.

This week we’re excited to announce the release of one of our most requested features: Help Center.

Help Center editor

Here are the basics to get setup:

• 📁 Structure: the Help Center is organized as categories and articles, similar to your file system hierarchy. You can have any number of subcategories.
• 📝 Editor: articles are automatically saved when you make changes in the editor. Previewing an article lets you see exactly what your customers will see when you publish them.
• ⚙️ Customization: set the name, appearance, and custom domain for your Help Center in App Config > Help Center.

Public view of the Help Center

If you need help getting started, take a look at our Help Center Template or reach out and we’ll help you get started.

We've rolled out a handful of changes to help you respond faster and understand your customers better.

Let's jump in:

🥫 Canned responses

You can now respond quickly to common questions with Canned Responses. Add them to the composer with "#" and create new responses in App Configuration > Canned Responses.

💬 Chat widget updates

You can now see a preview of changes to the chat widget in App Config and customize your greetings emoji.

🧰 Internal dashboard

You can now link your Info Pane to your internal tools from App Configuration > Internal Dashboard. Here's a quick walkthrough for some common issues.

✨ Preview ✨

Next week, we'll be releasing our Help Center product. Ping us if you'd like to get migrated and we'll transfer all of your articles to your Atlas Help Center.

We rolled out a lot of optimizations this week that you and our other users requested to help you respond faster and better. Let's jump in:

• #️⃣ Reply in Slack by starting a message in a ticket thread with "@Atlas".

• 📝 Add internal notes by clicking the down arrow next to the send button in the composer and selecting "Add an internal note." These are only viewable by your team and are saved to the ticket that you have selected.

• ✨ Bonus ✨ ✏️ Support for lists and strikethrough added to composer, accessible by highlighting the text you want to format in the composer.

Let us know what you think!

The past week and a half has been challenging for us as half of our team is located in Ukraine and Russia. They've been incredibly resilient and optimistic despite the situation.

• 📼 Session recording improvements make it easier for you to find the important moments within session replays with event markers on the timeline and make it easier for you to share session recordings starting at a particular time.

• 💬 Chat improvements now show you when a user is typing so know whether or not you should stick around or if you can safely go to your next task and allow you to collect contact info for visitors so you don't lose a lead. (Set this up in App Config > Chat)

Instant user notifications via Slack ⚡️

We're releasing our Slack integration, chat widget notifications, and office hours

Really appreciate your feedback over the last couple of weeks! We got unanimous feedback that you didn't want to stare at an empty inbox all day waiting for messages from your users. Frankly, we didn't either. 😅

We've just released a few things to make your life a little easier here:

• 🔌 Slack integration can be setup in App Config > Integrations. New tickets and ticket updates (messages, open/closed, assigned, etc.) will go to whichever channel you choose.

• 🔔 Chat widget sounds are now enabled so your users hear a sound when you respond if they're looking at another tab/screen. (On by default; you can adjust here)

• 🕔 Business hours can be turned on in App Config > Chat. You can now set your hours of operation and the message users receive whenever you're not online so they aren't waiting for your response. (Coming soon: collect contact info for visitors when you're offline)

Let us know what you think!