One console, one ticket, one timer
Lavawall®’s Smart Helpdesk closes the loop between the device data you already have and the customer-facing work you’re doing on it. When you connect to a managed device for remote support, a ticket is created automatically. When you reply, our placeholders fill in the customer’s name, the device hostname, and any per-client variables you’ve defined. When you stop the session, the elapsed time is on the ticket as billable minutes — with the chat transcript, screenshots, and your notes attached.
Below is a feature-by-feature tour. If you’d rather just try it, you can skip to the bottom.
Tickets
The ticket view is what your technicians live in all day. We built it to be fast on a laptop with a hundred Chrome tabs open, not pretty in a screenshot.
Recent tickets bar
Every ticket you open shows up as a tab at the top of the page. Click to switch. Drafts in the reply field are preserved per-ticket. Closing the tab takes one click.
Saved views
Filter by status, priority, assignee, company, tag, due date — whatever combination matters to your team. Pin views as “My open”, “Unassigned escalations”, “Past due” and they reload as the data changes.
Linked to devices
Tickets carry the device GUID when they originate from a remote-support session, so the right side panel shows current device health, patch status, last reboot, and disk space — without leaving the ticket.
Public & internal comments
Reply to the customer, leave an internal note, or both in the same thread. Internal comments are clearly demarcated and never end up in customer email by accident.
@mentions & assignments
@-mention a teammate inside an internal comment to ping them. Assigned-ticket counts and due-soon indicators surface in the navigation so nothing gets buried.
Templates
Common ticket types — password reset, hardware order, onboarding — can be saved as templates with subject, body, default priority, and pre-filled custom fields.
Kanban & swim lane views
Some teams work in lists. Some teams need to see the whole board at once. Lavawall® gives you both, and you can switch between them per-saved-view without losing your filters.
Kanban board
Drag tickets across status columns — New, In Progress, Pending Customer, Resolved — and the underlying status updates instantly. Card density is configurable so you can fit thirty tickets per column without squinting.
Swim lanes by anything
Group the board by assignee, priority, client, category, or due date and the columns become swim lanes. Spotting bottlenecks — one technician overloaded, one client’s tickets piling up — takes a glance, not a query.
Filters apply everywhere
Whatever filter you set in list view carries over to kanban and back. Saved views work the same way regardless of layout, so you can save one view that shows you what matters and pick the layout that suits the moment.
WIP-style limits
Set a maximum number of tickets per column or per assignee and the board flags overflow. Useful for preventing “I’ll get to it later” ticket sprawl on a small team.
Knowledge base suggestions
Most tickets aren’t novel. Someone’s asked about VPN reconnection a hundred times before, and the answer is already in your KB. Lavawall® reads the incoming ticket and suggests the relevant articles to your technician before they start typing.
Live suggestions as you read
Open a ticket and a side panel surfaces the three most relevant KB articles based on the subject and description. Updates as the conversation evolves — new comments refine the match.
One-click insert
Click an article to insert a public-facing link into the reply, or copy the article body into the ticket as a starting point for a personalized response. Either way the article’s view counter goes up so you know what’s actually useful.
Gap detection
If the same ticket subject keeps appearing without any KB article ever matching, Lavawall® flags it as a knowledge-base gap. Your team sees a dashboard of “questions we keep getting that we have no documented answer for” — ready to write up.
Multi-source search
The suggestion engine searches across articles imported from ZenDesk, articles you’ve written natively in Lavawall®, and any markdown documentation you’ve attached to client orgs. One query, all your knowledge.
AI-analyzed tasks & scheduling
Tickets that turn into multi-step work — an onboarding, a server migration, a security incident response — live or die on whether the right work happens at the right time. Lavawall® analyzes each ticket and proposes the task breakdown, the schedule, and the right technician for each step.
Auto task breakdown
For tickets above a complexity threshold, Lavawall® suggests a checklist: “1. Confirm Microsoft 365 license. 2. Create AD account. 3. Enroll laptop. 4. Send welcome email” — ready to accept or edit. You stop building the same checklist by hand for the same recurring work.
Suggested scheduling
Each task gets a proposed start time, duration, and assigned technician based on team availability, skill match (from past ticket-resolution patterns), and SLA pressure. Drag to adjust — the rest of the schedule re-flows around your change.
Priority & SLA inference
If a ticket says “our entire office is offline,” Lavawall® flags it as critical even if the user submitted it as “normal” priority. Sentiment, urgency phrases, and impact scope all factor in — the technician sees the recommendation and accepts or overrides.
Recurring detection
The same customer asking the same thing every Tuesday morning? Lavawall® spots the pattern and offers to create a recurring task or schedule a proactive check-in — the kind of work that pays for itself in retention.
Reply drafting
For straightforward tickets, Lavawall® can draft a reply that pulls from your KB and matches the customer’s tone. The technician reviews, edits, and sends — faster than starting from a blank box, with full control over what actually goes out.
Workload balancing
The scheduler watches per-technician utilization and warns before someone’s queue gets unworkable. Surfacing the imbalance is half the battle — one click reassigns to the underutilized teammate.
The AI features run on the data already in your tenant — nothing is sent to third-party model providers without your explicit configuration. Suggestions are always reviewed by a human before any action is taken.
Canned responses
The fastest reply is one you don’t have to type. Lavawall® canned responses combine rich-text bodies with personalized placeholders so “here’s how to reset your VPN” lands in the customer’s inbox addressed to them, with their company’s portal link, and signed by the technician who sent it.
Slash shortcuts
Type /restart in any reply field and the response is filtered live as you type. Hit Enter to insert. Works inside the rich-text editor, in tickets, in remote-support session notes — anywhere a TinyMCE editor lives.
Inline images & screenshots
Paste a screenshot directly into the editor — up to 10 MB per image. Stored as base64 inside the response body so they ride along in outgoing emails without auth-protected URLs that break for end users.
Personal & shared
Each technician can keep private templates the rest of the team can’t see — or contribute shared ones to the team library. Both kinds work the same way at the keyboard.
Group restrictions
Limit a canned response to a specific agent group. Useful for sensitive content like billing escalations or security incident communications.
Preview as a contact
Hit Preview in the editor and pick any contact to see how the response will render for them — with their name, email, company, and any per-company variables substituted in. Catch typos in placeholders before they hit a customer.
Categories
Organize a hundred canned responses with category tags — Billing, Onboarding, Password Resets, Hardware. Filter the list view by category to find what you need.
Placeholders & variables
Lavawall® ships with a complete set of built-in placeholders for ticket and contact context, plus custom variables you can define for your MSP and override per child company.
Built-in placeholders
Available in any canned response or ticket reply:
| Category | Placeholders |
|---|---|
| Requester |
first_name
last_name
full_name
email
phone
mobile
job_title
|
| Company |
company_name
|
| Ticket |
ticket_number
ticket_subject
ticket_status
ticket_url
ticket_priority
ticket_due_date
ticket_created_at
ticket_updated_at
ticket_description
|
| Assignee |
assignee_first_name
assignee_last_name
assignee_full_name
assignee_email
|
| Current agent |
agent_first_name
agent_last_name
agent_full_name
agent_email
agent_phone
agent_signature
agent_job_title
|
| System |
msp_name
date
time
datetime
|
Custom variables
Define your own placeholders — portal_url, support_phone, vpn_endpoint, whatever you need. Every variable has an MSP-wide default value, but you can override it for any individual child company. So portal_url can resolve to https://acme.lavawall.com in a ticket for Acme Corp and https://contoso.lavawall.com in a ticket for Contoso. Set the value once, and every canned response that mentions it stays accurate.
Remote support, integrated
This is the part most other helpdesk tools don’t have. Lavawall®’s remote-support agent runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux endpoints under your management. Connecting to a device from the helpdesk creates a ticket automatically and starts a timer. Disconnecting closes the session and writes everything to the ticket.
Pick a device, click Connect
Either from the device list or from a ticket that’s already linked to a device. The session window opens, consent prompt fires on the user’s side if you’ve configured it, and the screen view starts streaming.
Ticket created, timer starts
Lavawall® identifies the most likely end-user from the device’s logged-in account and the company’s Microsoft 365 directory, then opens a ticket with the right requester pre-filled. The session timer starts on the right panel.
Take notes, paste screenshots
The session-notes editor accepts pasted screen captures up to 10 MB each. Notes autosave to the ticket every two seconds. Chat with the user, run scripts, transfer files — everything is logged.
Stop — everything filed
The timer stops, billable minutes go on the ticket, your notes and chat transcript are appended as a comment, and the ticket status updates to whatever you chose (Resolved, Pending, In progress, etc.).
Reconnect → same ticket
If the same device reconnects within the post-session window, the work continues on the existing ticket. New segment, new time entry, but no new ticket clutter. Different device? Fresh ticket as you’d expect.
Post-session notes
The notes editor stays open after disconnect so you can finish writing up the work, paste the screenshots you took during the session, and have everything attach to the just-ended ticket. No racing to write notes before the session times out.
Time tracking & billable hours
Time entries belong to tickets. Tickets belong to companies. So pulling billable hours by client for a given month is a single report, not a CSV-juggling exercise.
- Automatic from remote support. Every session creates a time entry pegged to the resolved end-user and company.
- Manual entries. Add time directly to any ticket for work done outside Lavawall® — on-site visits, phone support, scripting.
- Billable vs non-billable flag. Mark internal work, training, or warranty fixes as non-billable; they still count for your team’s utilization metrics but stay off the customer invoice.
- After-hours rate detection. Time entries automatically flag whether they fell outside business hours, ready for premium-rate billing.
- Resume sums correctly. If a session is interrupted and resumed, the ticket’s total billable minutes accumulate across all time entries instead of overwriting.
- Export. Per-customer monthly time reports as CSV or PDF, ready for invoicing.
Integrations
The Smart Helpdesk works on its own, but it’s much better connected to the rest of your stack.
ZenDesk import
Bring your existing tickets, contacts, knowledge base, macros, and dynamic content variables into Lavawall®. Read the ZenDesk integration page for the full picture.
HubSpot sync
Companies, deals, contacts, notes, meetings, calls, quotes, and marketing assets flow in from HubSpot so your CRM context is one click from any ticket. Read the HubSpot integration page for the full picture.
Email-to-ticket
Forward your support inbox in. New emails become tickets, replies are threaded onto the right one, attachments come along for the ride.
Lavawall® agent
Device health, patch status, security posture, AV alerts, and remote-support are all native to the same console — no separate RMM bolted on the side.
Pricing
The Smart Helpdesk — including ticketing, canned responses, time tracking, KB search, and remote-support session integration — is included with all Lavawall® MSP plans. No per-agent ticketing fees, no add-ons. See pricing.
Try it
Start a free Lavawall® trial and the helpdesk is in the menu — pre-populated with sensible defaults, ready to handle real tickets the day you turn it on.