Channels — How Tickets Arrive

Email, portal, chat/SMS/voice agents, web forms, and API/MCP — and how each becomes a ticket.

Channels — How Tickets Arrive

Tickets can enter the helpdesk from every channel Karmaflow.ai 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. When a person on your team texts that customer from a ticket, the SMS agent stops answering them while the ticket is open, and their texts go onto the ticket instead — see Replying by text.

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

A form endpoint on your website creates or updates the submitting contact; it does not open a ticket on its own, and there is no per-form "create ticket" switch in its settings today. To get a ticket from a web form:

• Through a workflow. Build an orchestration on the Form Endpoint Submission trigger, pick the form, and add a Task Agent step whose agent holds the helpdesk ticket tools (above). The agent opens the ticket for the submitting contact with the submission's fields in its context.
• Through the API or MCP. Your page, or a system behind it, can call create_ticket directly (see API and MCP below) and post the form to the endpoint as well, so the contact is kept in step.

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.