Automated support email is where a small shop accidentally starts sounding like a bank.
"Your enquiry has been logged and assigned reference HELPIE-4471." Technically accurate, and nothing like how you would speak to someone who just told you their order arrived damaged.
Every email Helpie sends is yours to rewrite.
The seven
- Ticket confirmation, to the customer, when they raise one.
- Agent reply, to the customer, when you answer.
- Status update, to the customer, when a ticket moves. Off by default, because plenty of shops find it noise.
- New ticket notice, to you or your team, when something arrives.
- Assignment notice, to an agent when a ticket becomes theirs.
- Chat transcript, to a customer who asked for a copy of their conversation.
- Ticket lookup link, to someone who used the portal’s look-up form. It carries the ticket number and a fresh single-use link and nothing else, because that form is open to anyone and must not reveal a ticket’s subject to whoever typed the address.
Each has an editable subject and body.
Merge tags
The details drop in with tags, listed on the settings screen with click-to-copy so you are not memorising them: ticket number and subject, customer name and email, your site name, the message itself, the status, the agent’s name, a link into the ticket, and the magic-link button that gets the customer into their support portal.
Each template only lists the tags that make sense for it, so you are not scanning a list of twenty to find the four that apply.
Unknown tags are left as literal text rather than silently disappearing, so a typo is visible in the test email instead of producing a sentence with a hole in it.
Clearing a field restores the default
Empty a subject or body and Helpie goes back to its built-in wording.
The mechanism matters: defaults are never written into your database, they are used when your version is absent. That means the built-in copy keeps improving as Helpie updates, and you only override the ones you actually wanted to change.
Rewrite the customer confirmation because it is the one everybody reads, and leave the internal assignment notice alone. That is the normal pattern and it works.
Who gets the internal ones
New-ticket notices go to whichever addresses you nominate, comma-separated, falling back to the site administrator.
Assignment notices never notify you about your own action. Assigning a ticket to yourself does not email you about it, which sounds obvious and is the kind of thing that makes a system feel careless when it gets it wrong.
Sending
Helpie deliberately does not set the From address. It inherits it from your SMTP plugin so your domain authentication stays aligned and support mail reaches inboxes.
There is a test send button, so you can check the whole path works before a customer is the one finding out.
Sample data does not send
Tickets created by the seeder never trigger real email. You can populate a demo store, click around, and nobody receives anything.