For Walnut super admins
Guide for support admins.
Support admins set up departments and people, keep the settings right, and route requests that arrive without a department. Every Walnut super admin is a support admin.
Set up in six steps.
Check the departments. Eight are created on first start: Finance, Content, IT & Tech, Operations, Academics / Learning Design, Partnerships, Marketing & Sales and Grievance Cell. Rename, reorder, describe or switch off any of them in Support admin. Order in lists can be any number from 0; lower numbers come first.
Add shared inboxes. Each department can have one shared inbox. It receives every new-ticket email alongside the members. Leave it blank until Walnut has created the inbox; never enter a personal address you have not confirmed.
Add members. Enter the email of an active Walnut account. If the person has no account, add them in Admin, Users first, or ask them to sign in once. Tick lead for department leads. Give every department at least one member or a shared inbox; until it has one, its emails go to the super admins.
Staff the Grievance Cell. Its members are grievance officers in the system: they see every Grievance and receive Grievance escalations. Only one department can be the Grievance Cell.
Publish the grievance officer. In Settings, enter the officer's name, designation, email, phone and address as approved by Walnut. Every Grievance is emailed to the Grievance Cell and to the grievance officer email; if neither is set up, it goes to the super admins. Blank fields show "To be confirmed" on the grievance officer page.
Fill the names list. The names offered under "Who is this about?" on an Issue come from the directory. It holds a display name and an optional department only, never contact details.
Settings.
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Grievance officer name, designation, email, phone, address | Blank | Shown on the grievance officer page and in the app API. Blank shows "To be confirmed". The email also receives every Grievance. |
| Triage email | Blank | An extra inbox for requests marked Other. All super admins are always emailed too. |
| Auto-close days | 7 | A resolved ticket closes this many days after resolution if the submitter does nothing. A reminder goes the day before. |
| Reopen days | 30 | How long after closing a submitter can reopen. |
| Maximum tickets per day | 20 | Per email address, over the last 24 hours. Separate from the fixed limit of 10 an hour. |
| Target for each type | see below | First response and resolution targets. |
How to write a target.
A target is two numbers separated by a comma: first response in working days, then resolution. Add d to the resolution to count calendar days. Leave the resolution empty for best effort.
| Type | Default | Means |
|---|---|---|
| Issue | 2,7 | First response in 2 working days, resolved in 7 working days |
| Grievance | 3,30d | First response in 3 working days, resolved in 30 calendar days |
| Feedback, Suggestion, Requirement, Query | 5, | First response in 5 working days, best-effort resolution |
Working days are Monday to Friday; public holidays are not excluded. A new target applies to tickets raised after you save it. Keep the Grievance resolution at 30 days or less: the grievance policy states we aim to redress within one month.
Triage: requests marked Other.
When a submitter chooses Other, the ticket has no department. It goes to every super admin and the triage email, and appears in the Needs a department view. Open it and route it to the right department; it cannot be assigned until it is routed. The name the submitter typed is shown for context only; it is never used as an email address.
If the same name keeps appearing, consider adding a department for it.
Nothing is ever lost.
- If a department has no members and no shared inbox, its new-ticket emails go to the super admins instead.
- If the Grievance Cell has no members and no grievance officer email is set, Grievances go to the super admins.
- Escalations for a department without a lead go to the super admins.
- If an email fails, it is retried once and then recorded on the ticket as an internal event, so you can see it in the history. The ticket itself is always saved.
Statuses and reopening.
- Staff pages show Awaiting submitter when staff need information. The submitter sees the same status as "Awaiting your reply".
- If the submitter replies to a resolved ticket, it goes back to In progress.
- A reopened ticket gets fresh targets and can be escalated again.
Changing people and departments.
- Someone leaves: remove them from their departments. Disabling their Walnut account also stops emails to them.
- A department closes: switch it off. It disappears from the form; existing tickets keep their history. Route any open ones elsewhere first.
- Lead changes: toggle lead on the member row.
- Directory names: switch a name off rather than deleting it, so old tickets still show it.
Daily jobs.
Once a day the service sends auto-close reminders, closes resolved tickets that reached the auto-close day, and escalates tickets that missed a target. Operations details are in the support runbook in the project's docs folder.
Statistics and the audit log.
Support admin shows ticket counts by type and status. New tickets, staff actions on tickets, new and changed departments, added and removed members, and settings changes are recorded in the Walnut audit log.