Customer Support Requests

Question

Hi there,

I'm a web designer and biz consultant. Once a website has been published, my clients go onto a support plan where they can request updates to a website. I'd love to use Trello for this, but I'm not sure how because I need:

a. the customer to be able to submit a request via email and have it turn into a card (Zapier...)

b. the customer to be able to see the Trello card, but not the whole board (e.g: I don't want the customer to see other customer support requests).

c. the customer to see the card being moved across the lists as progress is made.

Any way to do this?

THANKS!

Lullu

https://www.luluwebdesign.com

marc -Collabello--Phase Locked- · Answer

Hi @Lulu White,

within Trello there's a partial solution available:

a. the customer to be able to submit a request via email and have it turn into a card (Zapier...)

Each board has an email address, where you can send an email and a card gets created.  I recommend to set up an email at your domain like "requests@mydomain.com" and then forward this to your Trello board.  For docs, see https://help.trello.com/article/809-creating-cards-by-email .

> b. the customer to be able to see the Trello card, but not the whole board (e.g: I don't want the customer to see other customer support requests).

> c. the customer to see the card being moved across the lists as progress is made.

Actually I'm working on this.  Would be very interested to talk to you about this.  You can contact me through the link in my profile.

Lulu White · Answer

Thanks lain! I checked out Benko Board but I don't use Gmail so don't think that will work. I guess for now I'll just manually add support requests from email into Trello. I'm a very small business so need to keep things simple.

I appreciate your response all the same!

Lulu

Iain Dooley · Answer

@Lulu White there's no way for a customer to be able to see a card but not the rest of the board.

If you're converting the cards to email, then probably the customer can just review their request in email right? You just need a good way of emailing from Trello. I create this integration that does just this:

https://trello.com/integrations/#benkoboard

There's also kind of a hack for it that allows you to use it with a team to do shared emails in place of something like HelpScout.

You can also use HelpScout + the HelpScout powerup and create cards for new conversations with Zapier, however the combination of Zapier's pro tier and HelpScout can get super pricey per month.

I wrote a Zapier thing once that used a JavaScript action to extract the conversation URL from emails, then forwarded all HelpScout emails to the Zapier Email parser so that I didn't have to wait 5 minutes for Zaps to run, but I always ran out of zaps because I got a tonne of emails, so the combination of HelpScout and Zapier was hundreds of dollars per month, where as if I use a combination of Benko Board and Trellinator there's no ongoing costs at all :)