The Customer Support Desk: Your Requests, Customers and Replies in One Triage Queue

The Customer Support Desk gives a team a working support desk in the time it takes to click Duplicate. It is a ready-made Sapience database: three linked tables — Customers, Requests and Responses — fifteen saved views that answer the questions a support team asks every day, and a Get help form that turns a customer's message into a new request in your triage queue. It comes filled with fictional example entries, so you can see how the whole thing works before you log a single real request.

This article is the complete guide. It starts with what the desk does for your team, then explains how to get your own copy, how the three tables connect, every saved view, the Get help form, and the everyday routines that keep a queue moving.

The Customer Support Desk is a template: read-only and shared with everyone in Sapience, so anyone can open it and look around without changing a thing. It is also listed in the Sapience AI Store catalogue under Help & Support. To get a copy you can work in, follow the steps below.

With Copy records too ticked, your copy arrives with the 31 example rows — 9 customers, 11 requests and 11 responses — and the 21 links between them. Without the records, you get the three tables, their links, the fifteen views and the form with no rows.

If you have not used a database template before, the Starting From a Database Template article covers templates in general.

Everything hangs off the request: who asked, and what the team said back.

You make each link once, by picking the customer on a request or the request on a response, and every table stays consistent. No names are copied between spreadsheets. Because Customer plan on a request is looked up from the customer, changing a customer's plan once changes it on every one of their requests. The same goes for Request priority on each response.

Two columns are plain text or pick-lists by design: Assigned team is a pick-list of teams and Responder is typed text. The template has no staff picker, so agree a naming convention for responders in your copy.

Each table opens on an "All" view, and the template adds views for the questions you ask most.

With the example entries, VIP customers shows Fixit Plumbing, Bluegum Books, Kestrel Health and Harbour Dental; Urgent and high, still open shows six requests, among them the double-charged September invoice, the login that fails after a password reset and the invite link that expired before a start date; Unassigned shows the expired invite link and the feature request that arrived through the form; and Invoice requests shows three billing requests.

Most views are sorted tables. Four use another layout, and in your copy they work the way they do across Sapience Databases:

In your copy you can change, add or delete any view. The Seeing Your Data Your Way: Board, Gallery, List, Calendar and Pivot Views article explains each layout, and Totals, Grouping And Pivot In Database Grids covers the subtotals and the quick sum of selected cells.

The template includes a form on the Requests table called Get help. Customers fill it in on a web page, on any device and with no Sapience account, and each response becomes a new request. Its introduction reads:

It asks for three things:

The button reads Send request, and after sending, the customer sees:

To put it to work:

The promise in the success message — a reply by email, usually within one business day — is yours to keep: change the form's wording in your copy if that is not what your team can deliver. The Collecting Responses With Database Forms article covers forms in full.

Keep Copy records too ticked and your copy arrives with 31 fictional entries, linked together the way a real support desk's records would be.

Every name, email address and phone number is made up — the email addresses use the reserved .example domain and the phone numbers use fictional ranges — and the dates fall in September and October 2026. Delete the examples when you are ready, or untick Copy records too when you duplicate and start empty.

Add a row to Customers with the name, email, phone, Plan, Country and the Customer since date, and tick VIP for accounts that need extra care. VIP customers lists them.

Add a row to Requests: type the subject, pick the Customer, add the contact email and the details, then choose the Kind, Priority, Status (New for a fresh request), Channel and Assigned team, and set the Opened on date. The request appears on the Request board and All requests straight away.

New arrivals from the Get help form show on All requests and Unassigned, but not yet on the Request board, because they have no status. Open the request, link the Customer, set the Kind, Priority and Assigned team, and set the Status to New or Open. It then leaves Unassigned and joins the board.

Open Urgent and high, still open. Work from the top, newest first. When a request is resolved, change its status and it drops off the list.

Reply to the customer from your own email, chat or phone, then add a row to Responses: pick the Request, set the Responded on date, type the Responder, choose the Channel, paste or summarise the Message and add the minutes spent. Tick Internal note if the entry is for the team only.

When you need an answer from the customer, set the request's Status to Waiting on customer. It stays on Urgent and high, still open if it is urgent or high priority, so it is not forgotten.

Enter the minutes in the request's Time spent cell. Time spent by channel adds them up by channel and priority. Minutes on each response are recorded separately, and the template does not total them into the request.

Set the Status to Resolved or Closed, and enter the customer's Satisfaction rating out of 5 if you have one. Satisfaction by kind averages the ratings on resolved and closed requests.

Open October calendar to see requests by the day they were opened. The view shows October 2026, so after you duplicate the template, change the date range in its filter to the month you want (see Good to Know).

Open Invoice requests to list every request with "invoice" in its subject. For all requests of kind Billing, add a view to your copy that filters on Kind.

Every Sapience database has its own Chat agent, opened with the green Chat button next to the database's name. It works on this one database and with your permissions. In your copy it can find and count entries and read your views. It can also add and change entries for you, asking before it deletes anything, and add columns, views and forms. If you only have read access to a database, it answers questions but changes nothing.

Things to try in your copy:

The Chatting With a Database article covers the Chat agent in full.

Every database can run automations, found under Actions ▸ Automations. An automation watches for an event — a row is added, a row enters a view, a row is updated, a form is submitted or a row is deleted — and then runs the database's agent with instructions you write. For example, when a request arrives through the Get help form, you could have the agent set a first kind and priority from the details and note which team it suggests.

A few things to know:

The Automating A Database With Its Agent article covers automations in full.

The Customer Support Desk gives a team one place for its customers, their requests and the replies it sent, linked so that every request tells its own story. Its saved views turn that data into the answers a support team needs every day: what is urgent, what has no owner, where requests come from, where the time goes and how customers feel. The Get help form brings new requests in as ready-made rows. Duplicate it, keep or drop the examples, and it is yours to shape.