Connect First Six to your help desk
The most common objection we heard wasn't about what First Six does. It was "that's one more platform my team has to watch." So we built the answer: First Six can now feed a student's request straight into the tools your staff already live in.
What changed
- Help desk mirror (email-to-case). When a student raises a help request, First Six can also open a ticket in your existing help desk or CRM (ServiceNow, Salesforce, Jira Service Management, Zendesk, anything with email-to-case) by sending a structured email to a queue address you choose. Two separate lanes route general requests and crisis signals to the right team.
- Outbound webhooks. For institutions that run their own integration layer,
First Six now POSTs signed events (
help_request.created,.crisis,.updated,.resolved) to an endpoint you register. Every payload is HMAC-signed so you can verify it's genuinely us, delivered at-least-once with automatic retries. See webhooks for the contract and how to verify a signature. - One place to set it up. Both live under Settings → Integrations in the console, alongside crisis alerts and the events feed. Crisis destinations (Slack, SMS and the crisis help-desk queue) sit together under Crisis alerts, while the general everyday queue lives under Helpdesk mirror. A per-endpoint (and per-queue) Send test button lets you confirm the connection before you rely on it.
Two things that stay true
- The student's message never leaves First Six. Tickets and webhook payloads carry the request reference, category, priority, the student's identity and a secure link back, never the free-text they wrote. Staff open the request in First Six to read it, so sensitive detail stays inside First Six's access controls.
- First Six stays the first responder for crises. The mirror is additive. A crisis still fans out immediately through First Six's own channels (email, Slack, SMS to named responders); the external ticket is a copy, not the thing your on-call depends on.
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