EmpireVault can watch a dedicated support mailbox and turn each new email into a ticket, with the sender as the ticket's requester - linked to a CRM contact that is created on the spot if they are not in your CRM yet. Replies thread rather than pile up: an answer that keeps the ticket number tag (like [TK-1042]) in its subject, or that arrives as a normal reply to a ticket email, is added to the existing ticket as a comment, and a reply to a resolved ticket reopens it. Only mail that arrives after intake is switched on is ingested - existing mailbox history is never imported. Intake is currently set up by the EmpireVault team against a dedicated support mailbox rather than from a settings page; get in touch if you would like it enabled for your organization.
A customer who submits a ticket through the portal gets a confirmation email straight away, carrying the auto-responder message you set on the Auto-Responder card under Tickets > Settings. For tickets created from email intake, whether that confirmation goes out at all is governed by the card's Enable auto-responder checkbox.
A ticket sitting in waiting on customer does not need chasing by hand. Enable the Stale waiting_on_customer ticket - send reminder automation under CRM > Automations, in the Support category, and EmpireVault checks daily for tickets that have been waiting on the customer for a week, emails the requester a reminder, and repeats every three days until they respond. The ticket itself is left alone - no status change and no closing.
Separately, the Ticket Escalation card under Tickets > Settings holds your escalation window - the number of days a ticket can sit with no activity before it should be flagged with a follow-up task for its assignee. Setting it to 0 turns escalation off.
Add your own fields to tickets under Tickets > Custom Fields (an admin-only page). Click New Field, choose a type - text, number, dropdown, checkbox, or date - then decide whether the field applies to every ticket or only to a particular ticket type or category, and whether it is required. Active fields appear on the new ticket form, on the ticket's page once filled in, and under Additional details on the customer portal's submission form, so requesters can fill them in too. These are separate from the CRM's custom fields on contacts, companies, and deals - see Custom Fields.
Anyone on the team can follow a ticket without being assigned to it. The Watchers card on a ticket's page lists who is following along - pick a teammate under Add watcher... and click Add, or take someone off with Remove. Watchers get an email whenever the ticket's status changes and whenever the customer replies, which keeps stakeholders in the loop without putting the work on their plate.
Every email Tickets sends - confirmations, replies, assignment notices, and status updates - goes out from a single sender. By default that is your EmpireVault system address. To use your own support address instead, open the Email for Tickets card under Tickets > Settings, choose Use custom email, and fill in the address together with its SMTP host, port, username, and password. The custom sender takes over only once both the address and the SMTP host are saved - until then, mail keeps flowing through the default so nothing silently fails to send.
The New Ticket Notifications card on the same settings page lets you tick the team members who should get an email whenever a new ticket arrives, so the right people see new requests without copying the whole company.
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