Is it possible to create a base for a helpdesk with back and forth emailing between tech and customer?

[Chris_Parker]

I’m really liking Airtable thus far but I don’t know how to enable my current killer scenario which is to replace Zendesk. I run a tiny helpdesk and just need the ability to email back and forth between myself (paid user) and my customers (unauthenticated users).

Is this possible?

I suspect I will need to write some integrations through Zapier or Logic Apps (or whatever) but how would I manage the conversations on the tickets?

[Michael_White1]

Ahhh, that’s an awesome idea!

+1 for me too!

[Julian_Kirkness]

I have exactly this set up in my customer / project base (I do database consultancy). I have two Zaps (now I would probably use Integromat) looking at my Inbox and Sent Items and matching email from / to addresses respectively against my Airtable base - and if a match is found storing the text of the email into an Activities record linked to the person. I also store a link to the email (they’re in Office 365 but you could do the same with Gmail).

[Chris_Parker]

I need to revisit this. I abandoned it because of other higher priority tasks and not having a clear path forward.

Do you also put a ticket/task ID in the subject? Otherwise, how do you make sure you don’t match emails from a customer that aren’t related to a ticket/task?

We also use Office 365.

[Julian_Kirkness]

Hi Chris

My needs don’t include needing to link an email to a support ticket - but it would be possible if a ticket no (probably simplest to use the Airtable record ID) were in the subject or body of the email.

[Barry_Voltz]

Any chance of posting this example or sharing how you did this?
with this need, I also have a need to create a “form” that staff would use to send to the customer for approval for the custom design we did.

[Chris_Parker]

I didn’t end up implementing anything because I didn’t have the technical chops to do it at the time (the email parsing specifically)… but you could probably accomplish this with an email parsing service. There are many out there. I would use Azure Logic Apps (or Zapier) to act as the glue between Airtable and the email parsing service.

As to the form, I don’t know if Airtable can pre-load a form with data from a record. If it can do that you could make all the fields read-only except for the approval question and maybe a comments box.

Hope this helps.