Many teams run more than one support address — support@, billing@, shipping@, one per branch or region — with a small group of agents looking after each. IntelliDesk handles this with help desks: one workspace, as many desks as you need, each with its own mailbox, team and queue.
There's no limit on the number of desks or mailboxes, and they don't change your price — you pay for agents, not addresses.
The model: one desk per address
A help desk is a queue with its own:
- Mailbox — mail sent to the connected address becomes a ticket on that desk, and replies go back out from the same address. Each desk has one connected mailbox; connecting a different one replaces it.
- Members — the agents who work that queue.
- Settings — auto-assignment, notifications, signatures and so on.
So if you have 8 support addresses, create 8 desks. If one team looks after two addresses, either create a desk for each address and add the same people to both, or have your email provider forward the second address into the first mailbox so both arrive on one desk (replies then go out from the first address). See Connecting a mailbox: Gmail, Outlook, and IMAP.
Step 1 — Invite your agents to the workspace
Go to Settings → Team and invite everyone who will work tickets. People need to be in the workspace before you can add them to a desk.
Step 2 — Create a desk for each address
- Go to Settings → Help Desks and click Add desk.
- Give it a name your team will recognise (e.g. Karachi Support, Billing) and enter its public email address.
- You'll be prompted to connect a mailbox straight away. You can also do it later from the desk's Channels tab.
Whoever creates a desk is added to it as a manager automatically.
Step 3 — Connect the mailbox
On the desk's Channels tab, connect the address using Gmail, Outlook / Office 365, or IMAP/SMTP. Full instructions are in Connecting a mailbox: Gmail, Outlook, and IMAP.
Step 4 — Add the team to the desk
Open the desk's Members tab, click Add member, and pick a role:
- Agent — works the desk's tickets: reply, assign, change status, tag.
- Manager — everything an agent can do, plus the desk's settings and members.
- Observer — read-only.
The same person can be a member of several desks, with a different role on each.
Who sees what
People only see the desks they're a member of. An agent on Billing won't see Shipping tickets in their inbox, and new-ticket notifications only go to that desk's members.
If a supervisor or head of support needs to see every queue, add them to each desk — as a manager, or as an observer if they only need to watch.
When a customer emails two of your desks at once
Customers sometimes send one email to two of your addresses, or write to one and cc another. IntelliDesk makes one ticket, not one per desk, so two teams don't answer the same email.
- The desk the email was sent To gets the ticket. If the customer wrote to
support@and cc'dbilling@, the ticket belongs to Support. - Mailboxes are checked every few minutes, so the cc'd desk's copy is sometimes picked up first. The ticket then starts on that desk and moves to the To desk when its copy arrives, with a note on the ticket saying so. It only moves while nobody has replied, added a note or assigned it by hand; after that it stays where the team is working it. If the ticket was already assigned to someone who isn't on the new desk, the new desk's auto-assignment picks someone instead.
- If the email was sent To both desks, the ticket stays on whichever desk received it first, with a note that the other desk got it too.
- When the customer replies to everyone, the reply is added to the same ticket, and the ticket stays on its desk.
- If the cc'd desk has acknowledgement emails switched on, the customer may already have had its acknowledgement before the ticket moved.
Your replies go out from the ticket's desk address. The other desk's address stays in cc when the customer copied it, so both addresses keep seeing the conversation.
Step 5 — Turn on auto-assignment (optional)
In the desk's Settings tab, switch on Auto-assignment to share new tickets out automatically instead of agents picking from the queue. You can also set a preferred-agent order for that desk. How it chooses who gets each ticket is explained in Assigning tickets and team workflow.
Reporting across desks
Reports covers all your desks together, and every report can be filtered down to a single desk — so you can compare teams or look at one address on its own. See Reports and analytics: response times, resolution and volume.
If you have a desk you don't want counted (for example an internal or test desk), turn on Hide from dashboards & counters in that desk's settings.
Example: 8 addresses, 16 agents
- 8 desks, each with its own mailbox connected.
- 2 agents added to each desk, with auto-assignment on so new tickets alternate between them.
- A head of support added to all 8 desks as a manager.
- Reports used weekly, filtered per desk, to compare first response and resolution times across teams.