Migrating from atSpoke to Halp

Updated by Fletcher Richman

With the recent announcement of Okta's acquisition of atSpoke, many atSpoke customers are migrating to Halp. This guide will help you understand some of the key concepts of Halp, the steps to have a successful migration, and other frequently asked questions!

Background

First, let's start with some background on Halp and atSpoke.

  • Modern ticketing: Both products were focused on the shift that was happening in modern workplace and creating a better internal service experience.
  • Chat-first experience: Both products created a world class experience in Slack and Microsoft Teams as a key component of this modern internal service desk.
  • Ticketing + Knowledge: Both products focused on tying together the traditional concept of a ticketing service desk with internal knowledge and automating the categorization and resolution of common requests.
Different Product Experiences
  • Creating tickets: atSpoke's experience in Slack and Microsoft Teams was more of a "chat bot". Users message the atSpoke app directly, and the bot replies back to them. In Halp, tickets are created either by clicking a "create ticket" button, or by posting a message and using an emoji/action to make a ticket.
  • Ticketing <> Knowledge: While both products offer solutions for ticketing and knowledge, the approach is different. Halp encourages users to start out by setting up a simple ticketing system to manage requests. This allows for the easiest possible set up to improve the way requests are managed at your company. From there, as requests are made in Halp, Answers can be added to automate frequently asked questions. This is the reverse of how most customers implemented atSpoke, starting with creating a knowledge base and then adding ticketing workflows after.
  • Other Integrations: Halp integrates with Jira Service Management and Zendesk for teams that need more advanced capabilities (Asset Management, API, Incident Management, Complex Workflows, etc.). These integrations full two-way syncs - all comments, fields, statuses, will sync. Halp also integrates with Zapier to send tasks to other systems (PagerDuty, Asana, etc.). atSpoke had integrations with HRIS systems, asset management tools, and additional knowledge services.
  • Login/SSO: Halp login happens directly through Sign in with Slack or Microsoft Teams. If your organization uses SSO or SAML for those services, then logging in with Halp will also use SSO/SAML. With atSpoke, you had to enable SSO/SAML separately.

A few Halp concepts to understand

Before you think about migrating to Halp, there are a few key concepts to understand:

  • Queues and Triage Channels: Each team using Halp will set up a Queue. A queue is mapped to a Triage Channel in Slack or Microsoft Teams, which is a private channel with all the members of that team. All tickets created in that queue will show up in that channel for the team to manage and collaborate on. You can have a Queue for your IT, HR, Legal, Facilities, and any other teams in your org!
  • Request Channels for public requests: Requesters can open tickets in several different ways. You can add the Halp App to a request channel in Slack or Teams, and map that request channel to a Queue. Messages turned into tickets via either emojis or actions in that channel will create a thread that syncs with the ticket. If you want detailed information from requesters, you can require a form for tickets created in channels. See Triage Channels and Request Channels in Slack
  • App Home and Tabs for private requests: For private requests, users can go to the App Home in Slack or Tab in teams to open a ticket. This will present them a list of available request types and a form to fill out, and the ticket responses will be in a private DM. See Halp App Home and Using the Halp Tab in Microsoft Teams
  • Halp Answers, Auto-Respond and Auto Create: Halp Answers lets you take frequently asked questions and automatically resolve those requests. Here how to get started: Getting Started with Halp Answers. You can create answers from Slack messages, or add links to whatever knowledge base you already use. For the fully magical Halp experience, you can set up channels to automatically create tickets for any new message posted to those channels and then have responses post automatically to their questions. See Auto Answer Queues & Auto Create Channels
  • Recipes: Recipes are a flexible workflow engine to customize Halp to do whatever you want! Implement EmojiOps with recipes based on different emojis to assign, update, and transfer tickets. Send tickets in and out of different integrations. For more ideas see Powerful recipe suggestions.

Migration steps

Okay! Now that you understand the core concepts of Halp, you can start the process of migrating. It's a simple process:

  1. Start a free two-week trial at Halp.com. You can start it in a test instance of Slack if you want to play around in a sandbox first. Start to think about if you'd like to use Halp standalone or integrate it with JSM or Zendesk.
  2. Set up queues for the different teams that want to manage tickets, forms for each queue, and invite the Halp bot to any channels you want users to be able to submit requests.
  3. Pick your top 10 most used atSpoke knowledge articles, and create them as Answers in Halp.
  4. Work with a small group of users you know to test out Halp. Get feedback and ideas. The experience won't be exactly the same.
  5. Launch Halp! Announce it to your team and roll it out as your new way to provide delightful internal support.

Have questions? Want an extended trial or import of your atSpoke data into Halp? Join our weekly webinar or schedule a 1-1 demo with our team: halp.com/demo

Pricing

Halp and atSpoke have very different pricing models. atSpoke charges per employee, and Halp is per agent. See Halp Pricing & Billing FAQ. Halp recently lowered our prices, and in most scenarios will be cheaper than what you were paying for atSpoke.

What's next for Halp?

Since our acquisition by Atlassian in May of 2020, we've invested a lot of resources into Halp. We've more than tripled our engineering team, and we have big plans to improve the way that Halp works. This includes increased investment into Halp Answers, powerful new ticketing capabilities on the Halp web interface, and deeper integration with the Atlassian product suite.

How did we do?