Using Keeping in Gmail

Everything you need to know to understand the basics of using Keeping inside Gmail.

Your Keeping Inbox

After successfully joining an organization and logging in to the Keeping Browser Extension, you'll find your new Keeping features in the left sidebar of Gmail.

Keeping in Gmail's left sidebar.

See Your Tickets

In your left sidebar, click Keeping to see all the open tickets across your shared mailboxes. Click Unassigned, Mine, or Assigned to further filter your Keeping inbox. If your organization has multiple shared mailboxes, you'll also see those in this menu.

We highly recommend that you use Keeping with Conversation View enabled. Conversation View (or email threading) groups emails for the same conversation.

Every Keeping ticket is an email that arrives in your Gmail archived and marked as Open. Keeping uses Gmail's search functionality to display these open tickets in the Keeping toolbar when you access it.

Keeping will warn you if you try to delete (move to trash) an Open or Pending ticket. If you must delete a Keeping ticket, set its status to Closed first, but know that it will only be deleted in your Gmail inbox, not everyone else's.

Filter Your Tickets

In the Keeping view of your Gmail inbox, you can refine your search using detailed filters. These filters allow you to sort tickets by specific tags, priority levels, assignees, or statuses (open or pending).

Good to know: These filters are unavailable when viewing your Closed tickets inside Gmail. If you'd like to see Closed tickets for a particular agent, tag, or priority, please use the web portal.

Filter your Keeping inbox

Viewing a Ticket

Let's take a look at an individual ticket and what you can do.

An open ticket in Keeping

Ticket ID and Editing Recipients

Every Keeping ticket is assigned a unique ticket ID, which can be found in the upper right corner when the sidebar is open. When a ticket is created in Keeping, the customer's name and email address are displayed in the right sidebar.

If you want to change the recipient of your reply or add additional CCs, click the blue edit link near the customer's name in the right sidebar. When you reply to a Keeping ticket from your personal or work Gmail account, the email will be sent from your support mailbox email address and look like a normal email.

When replying to an email in Keeping, you'll see a funny-looking email address as the recipient (e.g., [e-mail]). This email address ensures that your reply comes from your support mailbox email address and that all of your fellow agents are included in your reply.

Assigning, Prioritizing, and Changing Ticket Status

When you open a Keeping ticket in Gmail, you'll see a new sidebar on the right. Use this sidebar to assign a ticket to yourself or a teammate, set the priority, or change the ticket status. To unassign a ticket, hover over a name and click the "x" that appears.

Keeping automatically assigns the ticket to you and changes the ticket status to closed when you reply. If your customer replies, the ticket is reopened. Check your mailbox settings to adjust this default.

Assign, prioritize, and change the status of a ticket.

Creating and Adding Tags

You can assign one or more tags to organize your support tickets better. Before you do, you'll need to create your tag in your Keeping settings. You can also access this page via the "edit" link next to the tag menu in Gmail.

Add a new tag via the edit link.

Good to know: If you don't see an edit link here, you likely don't have admin privileges. Only admins can edit, add, and delete tags.

Using tags

Viewing and Creating Notes

Notes are only viewable by your team and offer a way to provide more context or information about the request. Enter a new note in the text box to add to the conversation. You can trigger a notification using the @ symbol and a teammate's name so the ticket is brought to their attention.

Activity Log

The "Activity" Tab shows a complete history of a Keeping ticket since it was created. Use this to understand better what happened (and when) to the support request.

Replying to a Ticket

Reply to a Keeping ticket just like you would a normal email. When you hit Reply in Gmail, you'll see a funny-looking email address in the To field. Your reply will be routed through Keeping before it gets forwarded to your customer. Keeping also syncs a copy of your reply to each of your agents.

For Keeping to work properly, you mustn't change the email address in the "to" field or add any additional recipients to the message (including the "cc" field).

Replying to a Keeping ticket in Gmail.

After you have composed your reply, you can hit Gmail's default "Send" button, or click the Keeping K logo to send the message and change the status at the same time. By default, Keeping will set the status to "Closed" when you reply (you can change this in your mailbox settings).

Insert a Knowledge Base Answer

Click the "Lighting Bolt" icon to bring up your library of Knowledge Base answers. After you choose an answer you can quickly insert it in to your reply.

The Knowledge Base is a great way to save time by creating a database of commonly asked questions and responses.

See more about how to use the Knowledge Base in our dedicated help article below.

Using Templates

Creating a New Ticket

Use the "New ticket" button on the left sidebar to create a ticket and email your customer from your support mailbox. By default, when you create a new ticket its status is "Pending". You can adjust this default in your Mailbox settings.

The New Ticket button in Keeping

Make sure you don't edit anything above the --- DO NOT EDIT THE "TO" FIELD AND WHAT'S ABOVE THIS LINE --- marker or change the "to" email address. Feel free to change or edit the subject.

After you hit "Send', Keeping will email your customer from your support mailbox and sync the new ticket with your team. If your customer replies, the ticket status will be changed to an "Open" status.

Moving a Ticket to Another Mailbox

You can move the ticket to another mailbox if multiple mailboxes are connected to Keeping. Click the mailbox name in the right sidebar, then choose the destination for the new mailbox.

Move a Ticket in Keeping

Share a Ticket

If you want to share a conversation with someone outside of Keeping, click the Share button to generate a share link for the ticket. This will create a read-only version of the conversation that anyone with the link can view.

Create a share link for a ticket

Those are the basics of using Keeping in Gmail. Feel free to dive in or keep moving on to the next section if you want to learn more about Keeping in-depth.