topic Re: How to set up Inbox Channels and Service Tickets with aliases in Tickets & Conversations

How to set up Inbox Channels and Service Tickets with aliases

MM3 — Tue, 09 Mar 2021 18:00:41 GMT

Hi everyone, so I've delved into the knowledge base and experimented around a bit on this topic and just have not been able to find a good answer for how to set up HubSpot for my specific use case. I'm wondering if anyone does something similar or has any ideas.

Basically, the context is I'm trying to set up a customer support system for my company that allows customers to send e-mails to a shared inbox via different aliases which logically group the requests types, and I'd like HubSpot to be able to handle those e-mails, create tickets for each, and manage replies and the overall ticket management for each using separate signatures and reply-to e-mail addresses.

My current setup is that I have a shared generic Gmail account mycompany@gmail.com. I set up the aliases on my internet domain/hosting provider that forward e-mail to the shared gmail account inbox: support@mycompany.com and info@mycompany.com. In Gmail, I have set it up to be able to send e-mail back via these aliases as well as have specific signatures, so the customer basically never sees an e-mail from the generic mycompany@gmail.com account. This results in a nice "smoke and mirrors" solution to never get that unprofessional mycompany@gmail.com e-mail reply.

I'd like to be able to essentially set up HubSpot in a similar manner and use it to respond to e-mails/tickets via these aliases e.g. info@mycompany.com rather than from the generic mycompany@gmail.com e-mail address. I've managed to set up the mycompany@gmail.com e-mail channel in HubSpot just fine, but all e-mails that come in, whether by alias or directly are created in the inbox as"Conversation created from email via mycompany@gmail.com ", so it doesn't pick up that the e-mail was sent to an alias.

In the knowledge base, I saw some information that for aliases I could create a hosted e-mail channel for my aliases. So I tried this for the info@mycompany.com alias, but this didn't really change anything. E-mails still come in via mycompany@gmail.com which makes sense since the info@mycompany alias isn't a hosted e-mail account; it is just an alias.

Do I have any hope here? Is there any way to virtually separate out e-mails coming in via aliases and be able to respond to those from that alias e-mail in HubSpot? Or do these actually have to be different accounts, not aliases.

Re: How to set up Inbox Channels and Service Tickets with aliases

TitiCuisset — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 10:06:01 GMT

Hi @MM3

Thank you for reaching out and the detailed use case.

I want to tag some of our experts on this - @MichaelC @Mike_Eastwood @Josh do you have any thoughts on this?

Thank you

Best

Tiphaine

Re: How to set up Inbox Channels and Service Tickets with aliases

Mike_Eastwood — Thu, 11 Mar 2021 21:23:21 GMT

Hi @MM3

We've got a client with a similar setup. Aliases are tricky because you technically can't set up a Conversation Inbox (to manage tickets and emails) with an alias. So you will need to set up HubSpot using the Gmail account e.g. my-help-email@gmail.com and set the Sender address (when you reply) as your domain's help email address e.g. support@mycompany.com

It is possible, but it's not ideal – and worth testing thoroughly.

Also, we've found if you reply from Gmail the thread doesn't attach to the Ticket in HubSpot. And, if you reply from HubSpot it doesn't appear in your sent items in Gmail. So, I recommend you decide which way you want to handle it and set a rule for your team.

Have fun

Mike

Re: How to set up Inbox Channels and Service Tickets with aliases

MM3 — Sun, 14 Mar 2021 21:51:06 GMT

First off thanks a lot @Mike_Eastwood and @TitiCuisset for the help here.

I guess this will have to do. I agree it is a little wonky like you say, but I'll test it to see if it'll meet our needs. Here is what I have observed so far:

When I convert a conversation into a ticket and compose an e-mail reply from the ticket in the Tickets hub, the various aliases I have already configured in Gmail do appear in the From dropdown alongside all the "hosted email" accounts I've added. So for example, since I sent up an info@mycompany.com forwarding/hosted connected channel account in Hubspot, and Gmail has this alias configured in its system as well, two entries for info@mycompany.com show up in the dropdown. Fortunately, the alias in Gmail is identified as such so at least there is a way to distinguish between the two. However, when trying to actually send using one of these Gmail-configured aliases, I get a message not delivered error, presumably since these aliases are configured in Gmail with username and passwords and SMTP servers to send mail, but Hubspot can't access that info so can't send. This just makes it a little prone to error from the process side, since picking the wrong From address could be a fairly easy human error to make if you gloss over the note about one being an alias.
- The open question I have here is: is there a way to hide these Gmail aliases appearing in the From drop down on compose e-mail box for tickets in the Ticket hub? This would clean this up a bit.
From the Conversations Inbox, e-mails that arrive that are sent to one of the aliases basically don't acknowledge that the alias the e-mail was sent to should be the From address, and thus e-mails replies made in the Conversations section default to being From my mycompany@gmail.com account and To the original sender AND the alias (aka, info@mycompany.com). This is what I mentioned in my original post. So basically I have to manually remove this alias account from the To section, and change the From drop down to pick my info@mycompany.com hosted account that I added. Naturally this too could lead to potential human errors.
- The open question I have here is: why do the Gmail aliases not show up here (not that I want them to...) but do in the Tickets e-mail composition pane? And is there any way to set the From address to be the same alias (now configured as a hosted email account in HubSpot) that an e-mail is sent to? I guess I don't expect this really to be possible since the alias just forwards e-mail to my mycompany@gmail.com account and HubSpot picks it up accordingly, so maybe this deep integration doesn't exist to enable this sort of thing.
Finally, even with the hosted e-mail accounts set up in HubSpot, e-mails that come into these alias accounts (e.g. info@mycompany.com) don't get automatically set up as tickets when the "Treat incoming conversations as support tickets" setting is set; only when this setting is set for the mycompany@gmail.com account. Probably due to the fact that HubSpot "sees" these e-mails as sent to mycompany@gmail.com not the alias/hosted e-mail account. I guess as expected, but thought I'd mention it.

Anyway, I get these are pretty specific case questions. But in the off chance anyone has come across or has an easy answer for these, that'd be great. The help and suggestions anyway have been much appreciated.

In the meantime, I'll keep testing and playing around with this and see if I can have any breakthroughs.

Thanks.