Once you have signed up for a Freshservice account, the first thing you probably want to do is start taking requests from your employees. The most common way to do this would be to setup a support email address where your users can send in issues and service requests.
By default, your Freshservice account comes with a default address which looks like [email protected]. Any email sent to this address gets converted into a ticket inside Freshservice automatically.
You can setup your own vanity email (for e.g. [email protected]) as your primary support email, and even add dedicated email addresses for specific groups. If you're a Managed Service Provider, you can switch to MSP mode and add separate email addresses for companies.
To do this, you will need access to your company’s contact email and a few minutes to set things up with Freshservice.
Quick guide to setting up your support email:
1. Setup your support mailbox in Freshservice
Login to your Freshservice account.
Under the Admin tab, click on the Email icon.
Under Global Support Emails, click Edit*.
Give your support email a name (like MyCompany Helpdesk). This will be the “From” name that your customers see in your reply emails.
Enter your support email address. This will also be the reply-to address for the emails you send from your service desk.
Save your new email configuration.
*If you'd like to add multiple email addresses, click on New Helpdesk Email.
2. Verify your email and setting up forward rules
You would have received an email from your help desk to the email id you entered.
Click on the verification link in the email to confirm your email. You can also copy-paste the link into your browser.
Create a rule in your mailbox to forward incoming emails to your Freshservice specified email id ([email protected])
3. Create an SPF record to improve deliverability
Sometimes your receiver's mail servers might mark the emails you send through Freshservice as SPAM. This happens because you have not yet "authorized" freshservice.com to send emails on your behalf. To ensure that your emails get delivered right, you should create an SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record in your DNS servers.
Create an SPF record in your DNS Zone file to include email.freshservice.com. You can learn more about SPF records here.
Adding BCC email
The top-level management might want to know what's going on in your support without being added as agents. You can add these email addresses as BCC while setting up the the support mailbox.
Quick guide on setting up BCC
- Login to your support portal as an Administrator.
- Click on the Email icon.
- Click on the Add BCC link above the support emails listed.
- Type in all the email addresses you want to add as BCC, separated by commas.
- Click Save and the BCC email addresses will be added right away.
Forwarding emails from a private inbox to your support portal
Occasionally, your customers might email your support agents directly or you might have a mailbox full of emails that need to be converted to support tickets. This can be done by just forwarding them to your support email address. Tickets that are forwarded from a verified agent's email address will be created in the name of the customer who sent the email to the agent. But when you forward existing emails from a mailbox (where this mailbox is not associated with an agent), the requester will be the mailbox and the time stamp of the ticket will be the time the email was forwarded.
PS : Please do not use a Group Email for converting emails to tickets. Gmail and a few other providers suppress email notifications when an email is sent to group emails. Sometimes tickets will not be created and we will have no log of this.
Also, whenever an email is sent from one of the mailboxes you configured in Freshservice to another (or if the one of the configured mailboxes is in the CC), ticket will not be generated. This has been done to prevent email looping. So it's always a better idea to forward emails to support to create tickets.
For Exchange/Office 365 Customers
Microsoft rules state that the emails will be ‘redirected’ to the other contact.
Check the properties of the shared mailbox, under Mailbox Features you must click on Mail Flow settings. This has an option to Enable forwarding. You must enable this and select the internal mailbox/contact to forward to.
Hope it helped. Here's a video showing the email setup process: