Turn your support inbox into tickets, and answer without leaving Hey Customer
Customers email the support address you already use — support@yourcompany.com, or whatever you've given out — and every message becomes a ticket. Your replies and theirs stay on that ticket.
How it works
You choose the address. It lives on a domain your organization controls, so customers write to a name they recognize and nothing about your existing address has to change. You point that address at Hey Customer by adding a forwarding rule in your own mail provider.
Before anything is processed, you confirm the forwarding actually works. Hey Customer emails a test message to your address; if your rule is set up, it arrives back and the address verifies itself. There's nothing to click — the delivery is the proof.
Once it's verified and switched on, a message arriving there creates a ticket using the subject as the title and the body as the description. Hey Customer looks up the sender among your contacts. If it finds a match, the ticket is filed against that person; if not, a new contact is created from their name and address, so you're never left with an anonymous ticket. The sender gets an automatic acknowledgement telling them it's been received.
From there it's an ordinary ticket. You reply from inside Hey Customer, the customer replies to the email they received, and their reply lands back on the same ticket as a note.
Set up your support address
There are two inbound addresses you can set up, each with its own switch: the support email, which creates tickets, and the email dropbox, which quietly logs correspondence against your contacts without creating anything. They're separate, and you can run one without the other.
Select Configurations in the left sidebar, then Email Integration.
Under Support email, select Add new email address.
Enter the address customers should write to, such as support@yourcompany.com.
Copy the forwarding address shown underneath. This is where your mail provider needs to deliver the messages.
In your own mail provider — Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or whoever hosts your email — add a forwarding rule that sends everything arriving at your support address on to that forwarding address. Do this before the next step, so the test message has somewhere to go.
Select Save and send test message.
Wait for the address to show Verified, then turn on the switch beside Support email.
After you save, the address shows Awaiting test message. When our test message completes the round trip it changes to Verified, usually within a few seconds. If it's still waiting after a couple of minutes, the forwarding rule most likely isn't in place yet, or it rewrites the recipient — fix it and select Resend test message.
Both things have to be true before anything is processed: the address verified, and the switch on. A verified address with the switch off is ignored, and so is a switched-on route whose address hasn't been verified.
Set the defaults for email tickets
A customer sending an email can't choose a type, status or priority, so you choose on their behalf — once — and every emailed ticket arrives set up that way.
Select Configurations, then Tickets, then the Email Settings tab.
Choose a Default Ticket Type.
Choose a Default Ticket Status. Most teams pick New so emailed work is obvious in the queue.
Choose a Default Ticket Priority.
Select Save changes.
If you leave any of these unset, Hey Customer falls back to the first type on your list, the first status classified as Open, and the first priority.
Send email tickets to the right account
Matching the sender to a person is automatic. Matching them to the business they work for is something you set up once per account, by claiming their email domain.
Select Accounts in the left sidebar and open the account.
On Account details, scroll to Ticket matching domains.
Select Add domain and enter the company's email domain, such as acme.com. Leave off the @ and any https://.
Select Save changes.
From then on, anyone writing in from that domain gets their ticket filed against the account, even if you've never spoken to them before. New contacts created this way are added to the account too.
Read a ticket that came in by email
Emailed tickets sit in your normal ticket list. Open one and you'll see the sender as the contact, their company as the account if a domain matched, and their message as the description — with the quoted thread from any earlier back-and-forth stripped out, so you're reading what they actually wrote this time.
Files the customer attached come across with the message and appear under Attachments. The Emails section keeps a copy of the correspondence for the record.
Reply to the customer
There's no separate compose box on a ticket. You reply by writing a note and telling Hey Customer to send it.
Open the ticket and select Notes in the list down the left.
Type your reply.
Turn on Notify customer and display note in support portal.
Select Add note.
Leave that toggle off and the note is internal — your team can read it, the customer never sees it. Notes that did go out are marked External, so you can always tell at a glance which parts of a thread the customer has seen.
What happens when they reply
Every email Hey Customer sends about a ticket carries a reply address unique to that ticket. When the customer replies, their message is added to the ticket as a note — visible to your team and to them — rather than opening a second ticket. Any files they attach come with it.
Changing a ticket's status emails them as well, so closing a ticket lets the customer know it's resolved without anyone writing a message.
When a message isn't processed
If Hey Customer receives something it won't turn into a ticket, it says so instead of letting the message disappear. At the bottom of Email Integration, Recently declined lists what arrived, who it was from, and why it was turned away — a switch that's off, an address that hasn't been verified, or a message that wasn't addressed to your verified address. Entries are kept for 30 days.
It's the first place to look if a customer says they emailed you and nothing showed up.
Block a sender
If a ticket is junk, you can shut off the sender and clear the ticket in one step.
Open the ticket and select Ticket details.
Scroll to Actions and select Mark sender as spam.
Confirm.
The ticket is deleted permanently and future emails from that address are ignored without creating anything. The button only appears on tickets that arrived by email and have a contact attached. To let that sender through again later, find them on your Contacts page — filter for spam-flagged contacts to bring them into view — and remove the flag.
Good to know
Your address has to be on a domain your organization controls. Addresses at personal email providers such as Gmail, Outlook.com or Yahoo aren't accepted, because anyone can create one.
An address can only be connected to one Hey Customer workspace. If you're told it's already in use, it's connected somewhere else and has to be removed there first.
Changing the address starts verification over. The switch stays as you left it, but nothing is processed again until the new address is verified.
A verification code is good for 24 hours. After that, select Resend test message for a fresh one.
Only mail actually addressed to your verified address is accepted, so someone who discovers the forwarding address can't use it to push messages into your workspace.
Out-of-office replies and other automatic messages are recognized and left alone, so they never turn into tickets.
The email dropbox is set up the same way and does something different: CC or BCC it on an ordinary email and the message is logged against the matching contacts, without creating a ticket. Because a BCC is invisible, a blind-copied message is only accepted when it comes from someone on your team.
Attachments can be up to 10MB each, and only PDF, JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP files come through. Anything else is left behind without stopping the ticket from being created.
Sender matching is an exact match on the email address, ignoring capitals. Someone writing in from a second address you don't have on file will come through as a new contact.
Each email domain can be claimed by only one account in your organization. If a domain is already taken, remove it from the other account first.
Replies only join a ticket when they come from someone connected to it — the contact on the ticket, a contact or team member following it, or their support portal login. A reply from anyone else opens a fresh ticket instead, so nothing is lost and nobody sees a conversation they shouldn't. Messages that fail their sender checks are turned away the same way.
The Notify customer toggle needs somewhere to send the reply. It stays switched off and unavailable until the ticket has a contact or an account.
Replies and status updates go to the contacts following the ticket. Adding a contact as a follower brings them into the conversation; removing them stops their emails.
Emailed tickets aren't assigned to anyone automatically. If you want them routed to a person or a queue, build an automation to do it.
Customer emails come from noreply@mailer.heycustomer.com under your organization's name. Replies go to the ticket, not to that address.
If your mail provider delivers the same message twice, Hey Customer recognizes it and won't raise a duplicate ticket.
The acknowledgement sent to a customer who emailed in isn't logged in the ticket's Emails section — their original message is already there, and the automatic reply would only get in the way.
