Set up Your Help Desk App » History » Revision 12
Revision 11 (Thomas Carney, 06/18/2015 12:46 PM) → Revision 12/59 (Thomas Carney, 06/18/2015 12:54 PM)
# Set up Your CRM & Helpdesk App in 8 minutes
The CRM & Helpdesk will help you provide better customer service. It brings all your customer interactions into one place, so you'll have an overview of every interaction. It's tightly integrated with email, so your customers can use email to talk with you, but every email appears as a ticket in Planio.
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## What can Planio’s CRM & Helpdesk do for you?
1. You can work on customer questions at one central location, so your entire team can work together to give answers to customers’ questions.
2. You’ll be able to answer customers faster, thanks to templated responses to commonly asked questions, auto-replies and customized messaging context.
3. You can ensure that customers always get consistent answers to the same questions.
4. You can reduce the amount of support emails using FAQs
5. Customers will be happier because they’ll be able to track their questions.
6. Best of all, your support team can work with customers anywhere in the world.
## Create a Project for the Helpdesk
Sign into your Planio account and create a project for customer support.
We recommend that you create a project just for customer support. If you provide support in several languages, it's best to create a separate project for each language.
## Activate the CRM & Helpdesk App
Go to Apps tab and install the CRM & Helpdesk app if it isn’t already installed.
Once the CRM & Helpdesk App is installed, we need to set up the support email address.
Go to the Setting tab, and click on CRM & Helpdesk.
You can specify your support email address for the project here. It can be any email you own. For example, at Planio we use support@plan.io.
Now, you’ll have to set up email forwarding for this address. Any emails sent to the address in this box need to forward to the unique Planio dropbox email address.
Here are links to tutorials on how to do this for Google Apps and some of the big domain registrars such as Godaddy or ENOM below:
1. [Google Apps](https://support.google.com/a/answer/2685650)
2. "Godaddy": https://support.godaddy.com/help/article/7598/setting-up-forwarding-accounts-in-the-workspace-control-center
3. "ENOM": http://www.enom.com/pop-email/faq-emailforwarding.aspx
4. "Hover": https://help.hover.com/entries/21247566-How-to-Set-up-email-forwarding
5. [1&1](https://help.1and1.com/e-mail-and-office-c37589/1and1-mail-basic-c37590/using-the-product-c85088/create-a-forwarding-e-mail-address-a594930.html)
It can take a few minutes once you’ve set up the email forwarding before it will be active.
## Send an Email to the Support Email Address
Now, you can send a test email to the support email, and it will show up as an issue in the support project.
You can see the issue by clicking on the Issues tab. The subject line is set as the subject and the body of the email is set as the description.
 
If you use an email address that isn’t registered in Planio, that email address will be added as a new customer in the Customers tab, so you’ll be able to track all correspondence with that person. This means you can manage all customer relations from within Planio automatically.
Planio also sends an automatic email confirming receipt of the email to the customer.
## Start replying to customer’s emails
Click edit and scroll down to the notes section. Select the customer notes option, and write your email.
Note: You don’t have to write Hi John or conclude the email. Those parts are automatically included via header and footer templates. We’ll see how we can update them later on.
Click submit to send the response to the customer.
They’ll receive an email with your message along with a greeting and a email signature.
An added bonus is that your customer will have a link, so they can track the progress of the request. This is particularly useful if the issue can’t be resolved right away.
For instance, you could keep them updated and they can see the various updates all here on one page.
## Create custom headers, footers and autoreply templates
Now, let’s dive into the more advanced features of Planio’s CRM and Helpdesk App.
Click on the Settings tab and then on the CRM & Helpdesk tab.
You’ll see the CRM templates section on the right. Here, you can update the existing templates for the header and footer.
For example, let’s update our footer. Click on edit beside it.
You’ll see “Best regards”, and the weird looking current_user.name insight of curly braces.
This means that the name here will depend on the person answering.
You can make any changes you want to the text, and there are a list of variables you can choose from.
For example, you could put the project name after the name.
You can create a templated answer to frequently asked questions. You'll be able to access these templates in a dropdown menu when you're replying to customers in the issues section. These will appear in a dropdown menu when you’re replying to customer emails.
## Start an FAQ Section
If you fill out the FAQ Question, the email will be added under that question to your customer support FAQ section, so customers can quickly find answers to commonly asked questions themselves. You can also include a link to your top most commonly asked questions in the email sent automatically when customers submit a support request.
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