Start here
Three routes, depending on what you need. The first is usually fastest.
Ask our own assistant
Desert Desk runs on Desert Desk. The widget in the corner of the admin portal is our own product, configured against our own documentation — it can answer most “how do I…” questions immediately, at any hour.
Look for the chat bubble once you're signed inEmail support
For anything the assistant can't resolve, anything account-specific, and anything you'd rather explain at length. A person reads every message.
support@desertdesk.app →Security reports
Suspected vulnerabilities, compromised accounts, or anything indicating exposed data. This route is monitored more aggressively than general support.
security@desertdesk.app →What we can promise
Read this before the table below it.
Desert Desk is operated by a very small team. We do not offer a contractual service level agreement — no guaranteed response time, no uptime commitment, no service credits. The targets below are goals we work to and generally meet, not promises you could enforce.
If your business requires a contractual SLA with financial remedies, we're not the right fit today.
Severity and response targets
Tell us the impact and we'll work to these. When in doubt, describe what's happening and let us classify it.
The service is down or unusable for your customers
The widget won't load, conversations aren't reaching agents, no one can log in, or data appears to be exposed. Anything where your customers are actively unable to get help. Put “URGENT” in the subject line.
A core feature is broken with no workaround
Handoffs failing, billing not processing, the knowledge base not updating, an integration silently dropping data. The product works, but something important doesn't.
Something's wrong but you can work around it
A defect with a workaround, a configuration question, unexpected behaviour, help interpreting your data. Most requests land here.
Questions, feedback, and requests
Feature requests, general questions, documentation gaps, “is this how it's meant to work?” We read all of it, and feature requests genuinely do shape the roadmap.
Business days are Monday to Friday, excluding United States federal holidays. These are targets for a first meaningful response — not for resolution, which depends entirely on what's wrong.
Escalating
If a response target passes, or you're not getting the help you need.
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Reply on the existing thread
Say plainly that the impact is higher than first understood, or that the answer didn't resolve it. Keeping it on one thread means the history stays together — a new email starts from scratch.
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Flag it as an escalation
Put “ESCALATION” in the subject line and state the business impact: who is affected, what they can't do, and since when. Concrete impact changes how we prioritise far more than urgency alone.
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Email the founder
edison@desertdesk.app
Availability. There is no 24/7 on-call rotation. The four-hour target for critical issues applies to reasonable waking hours; outside them we'll be as fast as we can.
What's in scope
Where the line falls between our job and yours.
We'll help with
In scope- Anything broken in the platform, including things that turn out to be your configuration rather than our defect.
- Getting set up — embedding the widget, structuring a knowledge base, configuring routing and business hours.
- Understanding your data — what a dashboard number means, why a conversation was billed, how retention behaves.
- Billing questions, including disputed charges and refund requests.
- Integration setup for the destinations we support, up to the point where data leaves our system.
- Data requests — exports, deletions, and helping you respond to your own customers' privacy requests.
- Security questionnaires and procurement reviews, answered honestly and including the awkward questions.
- Accessibility barriers, treated as defects rather than feature requests.
Outside what we can do
Out of scope- Writing your knowledge base or your agent's instructions. We'll advise on structure and tell you what's working; the content is yours.
- Debugging your website. We'll confirm the widget is loading correctly and help you place the snippet, but we can't troubleshoot the rest of your site.
- Configuring third-party systems on the other side of an integration. We'll get data to their door correctly.
- Answering your customers on your behalf, or acting as agents in your helpdesk.
- Legal or compliance advice. We'll describe accurately what the product does; whether that satisfies your obligations is a question for your counsel.
- Custom development or bespoke features for a single account.
- Recovering deleted data. Deletion and retention-based anonymisation are irreversible by design — including for us.
Helping us help you
What you can do to help us provide a rapid resolution.
Name the impact
“Handoffs have been failing since 9am and twelve customers are stuck in the queue” is more useful than “the helpdesk isn't working”.
Include specifics
Roughly when it started, which account, which page, and what you'd expected instead. A conversation identifier or a screenshot often saves an entire round trip.
Say what you've tried
Knowing you already tried a rebuild or a fresh browser stops us suggesting it and losing a day.
Don't send secrets
Never email passwords, API tokens, or webhook signing secrets — not even to us. If we need to see something sensitive, we'll arrange a secure way.
Status and known issues
How you'll we'll let you know.
During an incident
We don't publish an external status page, but for general bugs or outages we will post an incident banner in the Desert Desk web app and our AI agent in the chat widget will be briefed on the situation (the same Desert Desk feature that is available to you in the app). For security or data incidents specifically, our Incident Response page sets out exactly what we commit to and when — including telling you before the investigation is finished.