Getting help and requesting features

When you need a hand or have an idea, three places have you covered.

• Tru: the assistant button on every screen — top right on a phone, bottom right on a computer. Ask a question in your own words.
• Support & Requests: send questions, report issues, and request features directly to the team.
• Release Notes: see what shipped recently, newest first, so you always know what changed.

Ask Tru

Tru is the assistant built into the app — not a character, just the help that is already here. Look for the star inside a speech bubble: on a phone it is at the top right of the header, and on a computer it sits in the bottom right corner. Ask in plain language: how do I start an investigation, what is this screen for, what is outstanding for me. Tru has read every one of these guides and answers from them — and it can read your organization’s own records too, so "how many observations came in last month" gets a real number, not a guess.

The same assistant is on our public website, where it answers questions about the platform, pricing and how we compare — useful if you are showing TruStar Connect to somebody who does not have a login yet. It cannot see anything about your organization there, because nobody is signed in.

• Tru can take you to the right screen instead of describing where it is.
• Tru can answer questions about your organization’s own data — investigations, observations, forms and inspections, corrective actions, training, equipment, toolbox talks, fleet and more. Ask for specific records ("what happened on the Smith site in June"), counts ("how many corrective actions are overdue"), or trends ("are observations going up this quarter").
• Tru can open a form with the details you gave it already filled in. You check it and press save yourself — Tru never saves anything for you.
• Tru only sees what you can see. It cannot show you records your role does not already give you, and every count it reports covers what your role covers.
• You can have the whole conversation emailed to yourself when you are done, so the steps are there later.

If you would rather read than ask, the panel also opens the guide for the screen you are on, which is where the old question-mark button used to take you.

The four tabs

• Home: a greeting, the conversation you were last in, and a few questions to start with.
• Messages: your conversations from the last 30 days. Open one to read it or carry it on, and a dot marks anything you have not read. The New chat button starts a fresh one — useful when your next question has nothing to do with your last.
• Help: search every guide and read it right there in the panel, without leaving the screen you are on.
• News: what shipped recently, newest first.

Opening Tru lands you on Home. The exception is when somebody from TruStar is in a conversation with you — then it opens straight into it, because that is the only reason you opened the panel.

Photos, files and talking

• The paperclip attaches photos and PDFs, up to 10 MB each. Tru looks at what you send — a screenshot of an error message or a photo of a damaged unit is something it can answer about.
• The microphone lets you talk instead of typing, which is the easier option with gloves on or standing beside a machine. The words appear as you speak, and you can edit them before sending.
• The sound-wave button starts a voice conversation: ask out loud, pause, and Tru answers out loud, then listens again — hands-free from start to finish. To cut in, just start talking over Tru (or tap the bar), and press End voice when you are done. The whole exchange is written into the chat as it happens.
• The small speaker button under a reply reads just that answer out loud, in English or French to match the reply. Press it again to stop. If you do not see the voice buttons, the voice is not set up on your deployment.
• Dots appear when somebody from TruStar is writing a reply, so you know an answer is coming.
• A quiet tone plays when a reply arrives. The speaker button at the top of the chat turns the sounds off, and your choice is remembered on that device.

When a chat closes

A conversation closes after 15 minutes with nothing happening in it. Two minutes before that the chat shows a countdown and a Keep it open button, and typing keeps it open on its own — you will not lose a conversation you are in the middle of.

• A closed conversation stays in Messages and can still be read. It just cannot be replied to.
• To carry on, press New chat. Your question then arrives on its own rather than underneath one from last week, which is what makes it answerable.
• A conversation waiting for a person never closes itself. If you asked for somebody and nobody has answered yet, the request stays open.

Talking to a real person

At the top of the chat panel you can see who from TruStar is online right now, with their name and photo beside Tru. At the bottom of the conversation there is an option to reach them. What it says depends on whether one of us is at a desk.

• Talk to a person: somebody is online. They join the same conversation and answer you live, with everything you and Tru already said in front of them.
• Leave a message: nobody is online. The conversation becomes a support request with the whole exchange attached, so you never have to explain it twice. We reply by email.

Replies arrive on their own — you never need to reload the page to see them. Their name appears above each message so you know who you are talking to. You can close the chat and carry on working: a dot on the assistant button tells you when somebody has answered.

The conversation is yours and it keeps going. Reload the page, come back an hour later, or open the app on another device, and opening Tru brings the same conversation back where you left it.

While one of us is in the conversation, the chat says so at the bottom and Tru stays quiet rather than answering over the top of a person. If the conversation goes quiet for ten minutes, Tru picks it up again and says so — and there is a "Back to Tru" button if you would rather not wait.

If you see "Account access paused"

That screen means the account you are signed in as has been turned off. It names the account, and that is worth reading before anything else: a browser that has autofilled an old account you had forgotten about looks exactly the same as the product being down.

1. 1
   Check which account it names

   The screen shows the email address you are actually signed in as. If it is not the one you meant to use, that is the whole problem.

2. 2
   Sign out and use the right one

   Choose Sign out and use a different account. It clears the session and takes you back to the login screen, where you can sign in as yourself.

3. 3
   If it is the right account, contact us

   Choose Contact TruStar. It opens a short form rather than your email client, so it works on a phone with no mail app set up, and it reaches us with the account you are signed in as already attached.

You can also email us directly at info@trustarsafety.com.