Support requests your customers can trust
Your customers open and follow their requests on a portal that carries your name. Their messages and files, and your team's answers, are encrypted at rest in a Vault your company chooses. A reply by email joins a request only when it comes from the customer the request belongs to.
Your portal: https://acme.help.sv
Where a request lives, and who can open it
A request is a conversation between one customer and your team. Its messages and files are kept in your own Vault.
| Part | What happens | What to know |
|---|---|---|
| The portal | Customers open and follow requests at your organization's address on help.sv, named by the handle you set in Company Settings. |
You can also serve it on a subdomain of your own, such as support.acme.com, by publishing the records the console shows. Your emails then link to it and are sent from that domain. |
| Messages and files | Every message, internal note and attachment is sealed as its own Ingot in the Vault your company picks when it turns the help desk on. | Subjects and previews are encrypted in the ticket list as well. Attachments count against your account's storage like any other file. |
| Who opens it | The help desk service opens that content on your company's behalf, so your team and your customers can read it in the browser. It is encrypted at rest, not end-to-end. | You approve that access by presenting the Vault Master Key when you turn the help desk on. The access covers the whole Vault you choose, including files already in it, so give the help desk a Vault of its own. Turn the help desk off and the access ends. |
| Email replies | Each update reaches the customer by email with a Reply button, and they can answer from their inbox. | A reply by email joins the request only when it is sent from the customer's own address and passes sender authentication. A message that claims that address but fails the check waits for your team to review it. |
| Teams and routing | Rules send a new request to a team by the customer's email domain or by keywords in its subject and message. | Rules run in order when a request arrives and the first match wins. A team can claim requests by hand, or have each one assigned to the available operator with the fewest open. |
| Your team's names | You choose how operators appear to customers: first name and last initial (the default), full name, or one shared label such as Support Agent, and whether their auth.sv photo shows. | Every page and email a customer sees uses the same choice, and an operator's email address never reaches a customer. |
Customers sign in without a password
When your company runs Secure Identity, customers sign in through it with a passkey, a one-time code or any other method your Identity settings offer. Without it, they sign in with a code emailed to them.
See secure identity- With Secure Identity
- The portal keeps no session of its own: every request carries the customer's auth.sv sign-in, which the help desk checks each time and never stores. A sign-in revoked at auth.sv stops working when its token expires, 15 minutes by default, a lifetime your Identity settings can set from one minute to an hour. Customer sign-ins count as logins on your Identity plan, the same as any other sign-in through it.
- With an emailed code
- A six-digit code, good for 10 minutes and five tries. The sign-in it opens lasts 30 days from the last visit, and 90 days at most. The console tells your team whenever the desk runs on emailed codes.
- Blocking a customer
- Block a customer at the desk and their next request is refused, however they signed in.
- Their own requests
- A customer sees only their own requests, and in them only the conversation: never internal notes, who is assigned or how the request was routed.
Email that reads like the conversation
Each reply or status change arrives as one email: the update itself, up to three earlier ones, a link to the full history and a Reply button. Updates made within a minute of each other arrive together.
The headers of an update, as the customer's mail app shows them
From: "Maya R. from Acme" <support@acme.help.sv>
Reply-To: support+k7m2qxd4wn5rj3tz6bv2cyh7pa@acme.help.sv
Subject: Export to CSV stops at row 1000 [#1042]The reply address carries a token that belongs to this request alone. The sender's address never decides where a reply goes.
- Notice only
- Turn off content in email, and customers get a notice to sign in and read the update instead.
- Muting
- A customer can mute the updates for one request from the email itself, without signing in.
- Attachments
- An update email never carries a file. Customers open attachments on the portal, from your Vault.
- File types
- Programs, scripts, disk images, shortcuts, web pages, SVG and XML files and macro-enabled Office documents are refused. Our servers check the name of every file, and the first bytes of every file that arrives by email. The portal and the console check a file's first bytes before they upload it. Files uploaded on the portal are labelled as not scanned for viruses.
What it costs
See the pricingThe help desk is $99 per month. Its messages, attachments and email count against your account's pooled storage and bandwidth, the same as any other Vault content.
Answering requests takes a Full License seat. View Only members can read them.
Open your help desk
Set your organization's handle, give the help desk a Vault of its own, approve its access with that Vault's Master Key, and share your portal address with your customers.