Channels — How Tickets Arrive

Tickets can enter the helpdesk from every channel KarmaFlow supports. This article covers how each one works and what to configure. You don't need them all — pick the ones your customers use.

Email

Email is the fastest channel to launch and the most common way customers reach support.

How it works

Your tenant has a helpdesk inbound address. Mail sent to it becomes a ticket:

• A new email opens a new ticket, with the sender resolved to a CRM contact (created if needed) and their company associated by email domain.
• A reply to an existing ticket's notification threads back onto that ticket automatically, matched by the email's References / In-Reply-To headers, with the ticket number ([#1042]) in the subject as a fallback.
• An AI pre-filter (the same spam/relevance gate used elsewhere) can drop junk before it becomes a ticket.

Set it up

1. In Helpdesk Settings, set the support email local part (the name before the @) — e.g. support or help.
2. Point your public support address at the helpdesk inbound address (typically by forwarding support@yourcompany.com to it, or using it directly).
3. Outbound ticket emails set a Reply-To back at the inbound address, so any plain email reply the customer sends threads onto the ticket — no portal required.

Group Inboxes are a separate, unrelated feature (a shared team mailbox). The helpdesk email channel is its own thing.

Customer Portal

Customers who sign in to your portal can open and track tickets directly. This is the richest experience — full history, status, expected response time, and self-service. See Customer Portal for setup, and Getting Started to enable it.

Chat, SMS, and Voice Agents

Your existing AI agents can open and update tickets mid-conversation:

• A chat agent can create a ticket when a website visitor reports an issue that needs follow-up, and an escalation/handoff can auto-create one.
• An SMS agent or voice agent can do the same during a text thread or phone call.

To enable this, the agent needs the helpdesk ticket tools (create_ticket, update_ticket, add_ticket_reply, get_ticket, list_tickets) in its tool list. Every ticket an agent opens is stamped with the originating chat session, call, or SMS session, so the ticket links straight back to the conversation.

A common pattern: an orchestration watches for a call or chat that ends escalated or needs human review, and creates a ticket with the transcript summary so a human can pick it up.

Web Forms

Turn any web form into a "submit a ticket" form:

1. Open the form endpoint's settings and enable Create ticket.
2. Map which fields become the ticket subject and description, and set a default type, priority, and team.

Each processed submission opens a ticket for the submitting contact.

API and MCP

• API — create and manage tickets programmatically from your own systems.
• MCP tools — the same five ticket tools are exposed over the Model Context Protocol, so any connected AI agent (including external ones) can file and update tickets.

Origin Traceability

Whatever the channel, each ticket records where it came from — the chat session, call, SMS session, email thread, form submission, orchestration, or the staff member who opened it — and surfaces those links in the ticket's Origin panel. This is how a ticket stays connected to the conversation that created it.