Customer service for a small business: tickets from email, step by step

Setting it up takes a morning:

1. Switch on the Helpdesk module.
2. Connect the company's support address (info@, for example) under Mailboxes. It must be a company mailbox, not someone's personal one.
3. Mark this mailbox as a support mailbox: from then on every incoming email opens a ticket or joins an existing conversation.
4. Set the promised reply time and resolution time for each priority.
5. Write the first few saved replies for the most common questions.

A few rules the system holds to by itself:

• One conversation has one live ticket, so a thread does not keep opening new tickets.
• If the customer replies to a ticket that was waiting on them or solved, it reopens.
• A [T-00042] in the subject joins that ticket only from its requester, so a stranger cannot add to someone else's conversation by guessing the number.

An SLA (service level agreement) is a promised level of service; in a helpdesk, usually how soon the first reply and the resolution arrive. Different deadlines per priority are common: an urgent fault gets a faster answer than a general question.

• The deadlines are stamped when a ticket opens, from your company's own table. Changing the table later does not rewrite promises already made.
• If a ticket's priority changes, its deadlines are counted again from when it opened, not from the moment of the change.
• Deadlines are in calendar hours, because that is what the customer checks against.
• When a deadline is missed, the owner is told once; if the ticket has no owner, the administrators are.

In a small company it is worth starting modestly: promise a time you can keep in a bad week too. A promise kept is worth more than an ambitious deadline missed regularly.

Every ticket has one owner, so four people do not answer the same one. You can pick the owner by hand, or set up a rota (Settings → Assignment, for administrators): in turn (round robin), or to whoever has the fewest open cases. The system only picks colleagues who still work at the company, and by default skips those on approved leave.

• Saved replies: write the text for common questions once, insert it in a ticket with one click, then adjust it.
• Internal notes: colleagues discuss inside the ticket, and the customer never sees it.
• Visibility: a ticket about a customer follows that contact's visibility, and is also visible to whoever it is assigned to.

If the info@ address gets not only support mail but quote requests and partner mail too, the Shared inbox module (paid module) shows these as conversations and lets you assign them; mail that became a ticket lives in the helpdesk.

A customer does not always send an email. In HelloCRM several channels go into the same queue, so the team watches one list:

• Customer portal (free): on a link, with no account, the customer sees their own tickets, opens new ones and replies, without the internal notes.
• Website chat: a chat from your published site is a ticket just like an email; if the visitor has left, the answer goes by email too.
• Forms: a form submission can open a ticket too.

AI is optional: with the AI assistant module (free) you can ask for a reply draft, a summary and a priority suggestion on a ticket. The draft goes into the reply box, and nothing is sent until you send it. Every AI request is metered, and the free plan has no AI.

Two things are worth measuring: whether you keep what you promised, and whether the customer is happy with the outcome. The first shows on the tickets: the system flags a ticket close to or past its deadline, so each week you can see where you slipped and why.

For the second there is the Surveys module (paid module): it sends NPS or satisfaction surveys, the answer lands on the contact, and the owner of a customer answering 0-6 is notified the same day. A customer does not get the same survey again within its quiet period (90 days by default). With the Automations module the question can go out by itself after a ticket is solved.

When you review, do not only look at the numbers: read a few closed tickets from start to finish each week. That shows which saved reply needs work, and which question would be better answered on the website.

For a small team the first three rows are often enough: the Helpdesk module and the two free ones. Switch the rest on when you really need it.

Every paid module can be tried for 3 days and bought one at a time. The free plan's limits: Users: 3; Contacts: 2,000; Emails / month: 500; Storage: 1 GB.