Getting Started

This guide walks you through setting up RapiDesq from first login to receiving your first customer conversation. You will configure your tenant, create a team with routing rules, invite agents, connect at least one channel, and set your business hours — everything you need to start handling customer conversations.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have the following:

Note — You do not need all channels ready on day one. Many teams start with just the chat widget and add email and web forms later. This guide covers all three so you can choose what fits your needs.

Step 1: Initial Login and Understanding Your Tenant

RapiDesq is a multi-tenant platform. When you create an account, your organization gets its own tenant — a fully isolated environment where all your data, users, teams, and configuration live. No other organization can see or access your tenant's data.

After verifying your email and logging in for the first time, you will land on the setup wizard. Here you will configure your tenant's foundational settings:

  1. Organization name — This appears throughout the platform and in customer-facing elements like email headers.
  2. Timezone — Sets the default timezone for your tenant. All timestamps are stored in UTC internally and converted to this timezone for display. Individual users can override this in their profile.
  3. Ticket ID prefix — An optional short prefix for ticket numbering. For example, setting this to "SUP" produces ticket IDs like SUP-0001, SUP-0002, etc. If you skip this, teams can set their own prefixes later.

As the first user, your account has the TENANT_OWNER role. This is the highest privilege level and includes full administrative access plus billing management. Your tenant also has an auto-generated message encryption key that secures conversation content at rest — this requires no configuration on your part.

Tip — Use a shared team email (e.g., admin@yourcompany.com) for the TENANT_OWNER account so that account access and billing are not tied to a single person's email. You can always transfer ownership later, but starting with a shared address is simpler.

Step 2: Setting Up Your First Team

Teams are the core unit of organization in RapiDesq. Every conversation is routed to a team, and agents must belong to at least one team to receive work. Create your first team before inviting anyone.

  1. Open the Admin panel from the left sidebar.
  2. Navigate to Admin > Teams and click Create Team.
  3. Fill in the basic details:
    • Name — A descriptive team name, e.g., "Customer Support" or "Sales Inquiries".
    • Description — A brief note about what this team handles. Visible to admins and supervisors.
    • Ticket Prefix — A short string for this team's ticket IDs. For example, entering "CS" produces IDs like CS-0001. This overrides the tenant-level prefix for tickets assigned to this team.
  4. Configure routing — this determines how incoming conversations are distributed to agents:
    • Agent Selection Strategy — How the system picks which agent gets the next conversation:
      • ROUND_ROBIN — Distributes conversations evenly across available agents in rotation. A good default for most teams.
      • FEWEST_ACTIVE — Assigns to the agent currently handling the fewest conversations. Best for balancing workload when conversation durations vary.
      • LONGEST_IDLE — Assigns to the agent who has been waiting the longest since their last assignment.
      • BROADCAST — Notifies all available agents and the first to accept takes the conversation. Useful for small teams or time-sensitive queues.
      • SKILL_MATCH — Routes based on agent skills. Requires skill configuration on agent profiles. Best for specialized support teams.
    • Ticket Selection Strategy — How queued tickets are prioritized when an agent becomes available:
      • FIFO — First in, first out. Simple and fair.
      • PRIORITY_FIFO — Higher priority tickets are served first, with FIFO as a tiebreaker.
      • SLA_BREACH — Tickets closest to breaching their SLA deadline are served first.
      • ROUND_ROBIN_CONTACTS — Distributes across contacts to prevent one customer from monopolizing the queue.
    • Max Concurrent Per Agent (maxConcurrentPerAgent) — The maximum number of active conversations an agent on this team can handle simultaneously. Set this to 3–5 for chat-heavy teams, or 1 if agents handle complex issues that require full attention.
  5. Click Save to create the team.
Tip — If you are unsure which routing strategy to choose, start with ROUND_ROBIN for agent selection and FIFO for ticket selection. These are the simplest to reason about and work well for most teams. You can switch to FEWEST_ACTIVE or PRIORITY_FIFO later as your volume grows and you need more nuanced distribution.
Note — You can create multiple teams for different functions (e.g., Sales, Billing, Technical Support). Each team has its own routing configuration, channels, business hours, and ticket prefix. Many organizations start with one team and split later once patterns emerge.

Step 3: Inviting Team Members

With your team created, invite the people who will use the platform. Navigate to Admin > Users and click Invite User.

For each user you invite, you will need to:

  1. Enter their email address.
  2. Assign a role that determines their base level of access.
  3. Add them to one or more teams so they can receive routed conversations.
  4. Click Send Invite. The user receives an email with a link to set their password and log in.

Understanding Roles

RapiDesq has five built-in roles. Choose the one that matches each person's responsibilities:

Role Access Level When to Use
TENANT_OWNER Full administrative access including billing, subscription management, and all platform settings. Reserved for the primary account holder or a small number of senior admins who manage billing.
TENANT_ADMIN Full administrative access to all platform settings except billing. IT leads, operations managers, or anyone who needs to configure teams, channels, and workflows without billing access.
SUPERVISOR Team management, reporting, and monitoring. Can view team performance and manage agents within their assigned teams. Team leads who need to monitor queues, reassign conversations, and view reports but should not change system-wide settings.
AGENT Handle conversations, manage tickets, and interact with contacts within their assigned teams. Front-line support staff who respond to customer conversations and resolve tickets.
INTERNAL_USER Access to the internal service desk portal and team chat only. Cannot handle external customer conversations. Employees who submit internal requests or participate in team chat but do not interact with external customers.
Important — Access control in RapiDesq is permission-based, not role-based. Roles provide a starting set of permissions, but you can fine-tune access per user using resource:action pairs such as users:create, tickets:edit, teams:view, and reports:export. Always verify that each user has only the permissions they need for their work.
Tip — Start with 2-3 agents on your first team to validate your routing and workflows before scaling up. You can always invite more team members and adjust permissions later.

Step 4: Configure Agent Statuses

Agent statuses control whether the routing engine assigns new conversations to an agent. Every agent has a functional status that drives routing decisions:

To make statuses more meaningful for your team, you can create custom display labels that map to these functional statuses. Navigate to Admin > Agent Statuses to configure them. For example:

Agents select from these display labels when setting their status. The routing engine only sees the underlying functional status, so your agents get friendly labels while the system maintains consistent routing behavior.

Step 5: Connect Your First Channel

Channels are how customers reach your team. RapiDesq supports three channel types, all feeding into a unified inbox so agents never need to switch between tools. Set up at least one to start receiving conversations.

Option A: Chat Widget

The chat widget is the fastest channel to set up and gives you real-time conversations with website visitors.

  1. Go to Admin > Channels > Chat Widgets and click Create Widget.
  2. Configure the widget:
    • Name — An internal label, e.g., "Main Website Widget". Not visible to customers.
    • Team — Select the team that will receive conversations from this widget.
    • Conversation Flow (optional) — Attach a flow to automate greetings, collect visitor information, or route to sub-teams before a live agent is connected. You can skip this for now and add one later.
  3. Customize the appearance — these settings control what your visitors see:
    • primaryColor — The widget's accent color. Use your brand color (hex value, e.g., #2563EB).
    • position — Where the widget button appears: bottom-right or bottom-left.
    • headerText — The title shown at the top of the chat window, e.g., "Chat with Support".
    • welcomeMessage — The first message visitors see when they open the widget, e.g., "Hi! How can we help you today?"
    • offlineMessage — Displayed when no agents are available (outside business hours or all agents offline), e.g., "We're currently offline. Leave a message and we'll get back to you."
  4. Configure security:
    • allowedDomains — A list of domains where the widget is permitted to load, e.g., ["yourcompany.com", "support.yourcompany.com"]. The widget will not render on any domain not in this list. Leave empty during testing to allow all domains, then restrict before going live.
  5. Click Save. RapiDesq generates an embed snippet with your widget's unique ID.
  6. Copy the snippet and paste it into your website's HTML, just before the closing </body> tag:

Embed Snippet

<script
  src="https://widget.rapidesq.com/loader.js"
  data-widget-id="wgt_a1b2c3d4e5f6"
  async>
</script>

Replace the data-widget-id value with the actual ID shown on your widget's configuration page. The script loads asynchronously and will not block your page rendering.

  1. Deploy the updated HTML and open your site in a browser. The chat widget button should appear in the corner you configured.
  2. Click it and send a test message. It will appear in your RapiDesq inbox, confirming the widget is live.
Important — Before going to production, always configure allowedDomains to restrict your widget to your actual domains. Without domain whitelisting, anyone could embed your widget on their site and generate conversations that consume your team's capacity.

Option B: Email Channel

Connect a Gmail or Outlook inbox so that inbound emails automatically create tickets and route to a team.

  1. Navigate to Admin > Channels > Email and click Add Email Channel.
  2. Choose your email provider: Gmail or Outlook.
  3. Click Authorize. You will be redirected to Google's or Microsoft's OAuth consent screen. Sign in with the email account you want to connect (e.g., support@yourcompany.com) and grant the requested permissions.
  4. After authorization, you will be redirected back to RapiDesq. Select the target team that should receive conversations from this inbox.
  5. Click Save. The channel is now active.

How email sync works:

When an agent replies to a ticket that originated from email, the response is sent back through the same email address, maintaining a seamless thread for the customer.

Tip — Use a dedicated support email address (e.g., support@yourcompany.com) rather than a personal inbox. This keeps customer communications separate and makes it easier to manage access if team members change.

Option C: Web Forms

Web forms let you collect structured information from customers and create tickets from the submissions.

  1. Go to Admin > Channels > Web Forms and click Create Form.
  2. Name the form (e.g., "Contact Us" or "Bug Report") and select the target team or conversation flow that submissions should route to.
  3. Add fields to the form. Each field has these properties:
    • Type — The input type: TEXT, EMAIL, PHONE, TEXTAREA, SELECT, or NUMBER.
    • Label — The field label shown to the user, e.g., "Your Email Address".
    • Required — Whether the field must be filled before submission.
    • Placeholder — Hint text inside the empty field, e.g., "name@company.com".
    • Validation Pattern — An optional regex pattern for custom validation, e.g., ^[A-Z]{2,4}-\d+$ for a ticket reference format.
    • Help Text — A description shown below the field to guide the user.
  4. Click Save.

A basic contact form might include these fields:

Field Label Type Required
Full Name TEXT Yes
Email Address EMAIL Yes
Phone Number PHONE No
How can we help? TEXTAREA Yes
Priority SELECT No

Once saved, RapiDesq provides an embeddable form URL and an embed code snippet you can place on your website. Form submissions automatically create tickets in the target team's queue with the submitted field data attached.

Note — Web forms are a good complement to the chat widget. Use the widget for real-time conversations and forms for structured requests that do not require immediate back-and-forth, such as bug reports, feature requests, or general inquiries.

Step 6: Configure Business Hours

Business hours determine when your team is considered "online." They affect chat widget behavior (showing the online vs. offline message), routing availability, and SLA calculations.

  1. Navigate to Admin > Business Hours.
  2. Select a timezone for this schedule (e.g., America/New_York or Europe/London).
  3. For each day of the week, set the operating window. For example:
    • Monday through Friday: 09:00 – 18:00
    • Saturday: 10:00 – 14:00
    • Sunday: Closed
  4. Add exception dates for holidays or special closures. Exceptions override the regular day-of-week schedule. For example, mark December 25 as closed even if it falls on a weekday.
  5. Click Save.

When a customer contacts you outside business hours:

Tip — If your team operates across multiple timezones, you can create separate teams with their own business hours and route conversations to the team that is currently online. This enables follow-the-sun coverage without complex scheduling.

Step 7: Receive Your First Conversation

With your team, agents, and at least one channel configured, you are ready to handle a real conversation. Here is how to verify everything works end to end:

  1. Set your status to Available — Log in as an agent (or your admin account, if it is assigned to the team). Click your avatar in the top-right corner and set your status to Available (or whichever custom label maps to AVAILABLE).
  2. Trigger a test conversation:
    • Chat widget: Open your website in an incognito browser window, click the chat widget, and send a message.
    • Email: Send an email to your connected support inbox from a personal email account.
    • Web form: Fill out and submit the form from your website.
  3. Check your inbox — Switch back to the RapiDesq app. The conversation should appear in your inbox within seconds. If your routing strategy is ROUND_ROBIN or FEWEST_ACTIVE, it will be automatically assigned to you (assuming you are the only available agent).
  4. Reply to the conversation — Type a response and send it. Verify the customer-facing side receives it:
    • For chat, the reply appears instantly in the widget.
    • For email, the reply is delivered to the sender's inbox.
    • For web forms, the ticket is created and the customer receives a confirmation email if configured.
  5. Resolve the conversation — Once the exchange is complete, mark the ticket as resolved. This frees up your concurrent conversation slot for the next incoming request.
Note — If the conversation does not appear, verify the following: (1) The agent is set to AVAILABLE status, (2) the agent is assigned to the team the channel is routed to, (3) the agent has not reached their maxConcurrentPerAgent limit, and (4) business hours are currently active.

Next Steps

Your service desk is live and handling conversations. Here are the recommended next steps to get the most out of RapiDesq: