Keeping: Helpdesk functionality right from your Gmail inbox

Streamlining your toolbox

If your business is online, chances are you receive customer inquiries, complaints, and compliments. Large businesses use their helpdesk to address such correspondence, but this can be costly for smaller businesses.

Businesses without helpdesks are left addressing correspondence themselves, wasting time and resources that could be better spent elsewhere, or risking some of your customers’ messages slipping through the cracks due to lack of time to address them properly. Now, there is another simple option for Gmail users.

Keeping is a Gmail extension that adds helpdesk functionalities to any Gmail or Google App email account. It allows you and your team to manage customer support more efficiently, directly from your current mailbox without the need for an external helpdesk. Without a helpdesk, or similar programs, you type the same replies over and over to customers.

Keeping automatically suggests possible responses based on previous answers. If it cannot find a match, your response can be saved and the next time a similar questions is received, Keeping will suggest it, saving you time.

Keeping also adds collaboration to your inbox

This allows your entire team to be involved in the customer service responses, or your can just assign a few team members to this task. When you receive a customer support message at your designated email address, everyone you’ve given access to can see the message in their own mailboxes. All support emails get organized in a new section of your mailbox and are separated from your regular emails.

When one of your team members responds, it is automatically removed and synchronized, so other team members can see it has been answered and move on to any additional messages. This ensures everyone is in the loop, but not answering and re-answering the same messages from the same customers.

This also allows anyone to quickly review a message, if needed, because they are threaded in your “answered” box. You can also assign a specific message to a specific team member, allowing you to easily pass messages on the the right person, even if they are not available when the message is received.

Add a dash of metrics

Keeping also gives you important metrics so that you can measure and improve how well you assist customers over time. This will tell you how many support inquiries you’ve received and how quickly you’ve responded.: a good starting place for monitoring your team’s performance.

If you are currently without a helpdesk program, or are just looking for something fairly simple, Keeping may be worth a look. I am curious to see if it works as promised without duplicating messages between team members, since I have not tried it for myself yet. If it consistently works as promised, this is a great solution for Gmail users looking for an easy helpdesk option.