What if you could manage your entire helpdesk without ever opening a browser tab? Check on open tickets while you're coding. Reply to a customer in the middle of a debugging session. Write a knowledge base article without switching context. That's what Bancroft's new MCP integration makes possible.
Today we're launching a built-in MCP server for Bancroft. If you use Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf, or any AI tool that supports the Model Context Protocol, you can now connect it directly to your helpdesk and manage everything through natural language.
What is MCP?
The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that lets AI assistants interact with external services through "tools." Instead of copy-pasting ticket IDs between tabs, you just tell your AI assistant what you want: "show me all open high-priority tickets" or "reply to ticket #42 saying we've deployed the fix."
Your AI assistant calls Bancroft's MCP server behind the scenes, executes the operation, and shows you the result. It's like having a support agent co-pilot sitting inside your development environment.
What You Can Do
Bancroft's MCP server exposes 18 tools covering everything you'd normally do in the helpdesk dashboard:
Tickets — list, view, create, update, assign, close, reply, and add internal notes. You can filter by status, priority, or assignee, and search across your entire ticket history.
Knowledge Base — list categories, browse and search articles, create new articles, and update existing ones. Write documentation without leaving your editor.
AI Features — ask Bancroft to categorize a ticket, suggest a reply, or summarize a long conversation thread. These use the same AI capabilities available in the dashboard.
Admin — list your agents and search customers. Useful for quickly looking up who's handling what.
Setting It Up
Setup takes about 30 seconds. There are two options:
The fastest way is with an API key. Go to your Bancroft dashboard, grab a server key (bnc_sv_*), and add this to your MCP client config:
In Claude Code, add this to your ~/.claude.json or project .mcp.json: set type to "url", url to "https://api.bancrofthq.com/mcp/", and include your API key in the headers as X-API-Key.
If you'd rather not manage API keys, Bancroft also supports OAuth login. Just point your MCP client at the URL without any headers. It'll open a browser window, you log in, approve the connection, and you're done. No keys to copy-paste.
Real Workflows
Here are some things we've been doing with MCP in our own workflow:
Morning triage from the terminal — "show me all unassigned tickets from the last 24 hours" gives you a quick snapshot before you even open the dashboard. Assign them to the right people without switching apps.
Replying while debugging — a customer reports a bug, you find and fix it, and while you're still in the code: "reply to ticket #87 saying we identified a race condition in the payment flow and the fix is going out in the next deploy." The customer gets a fast, technical, accurate response.
Writing docs from context — you just built a new feature and the code is fresh in your mind. "Create a knowledge base article titled 'Setting up webhooks' explaining how to configure webhook endpoints, with examples for ticket.created and message.created events." The article is drafted before you forget the details.
AI-assisted queue management — "summarize ticket #203" gives you a quick digest of a long thread. "Suggest a reply for ticket #156" drafts a response using your knowledge base. "Categorize ticket #89" suggests priority and tags so you can triage faster.
Why We Built This
Support doesn't happen in a vacuum. For many teams — especially at startups — the people answering tickets are the same people writing code, shipping features, and fixing bugs. Forcing them to context-switch between their editor and a helpdesk dashboard costs time and focus.
MCP lets support flow into the tools your team already lives in. It doesn't replace the Bancroft dashboard — that's still the best experience for dedicated support agents. But for developers, founders, and technical team members who handle support alongside other work, MCP is a faster way to stay on top of things.
Getting Started
If you're already a Bancroft customer, you can connect right now — the MCP server is live for all plans. Check out our MCP docs for the full setup guide and tool reference.
If you're not using Bancroft yet, start free at bancrofthq.com/register. Once you're in, grab an API key and connect your AI assistant. The whole process takes less than five minutes.