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Chapter 3

Set up Customer Support

Answer doctors’ emails and portal messages from one Inbox, from your own address, with templates and response targets.

Growth and up · seatLabs with a support or front-office team
Contents
3.1

Inbox and conversations

A conversation is you talking with a customer. Doctors write in by email and from the Customer Portal, and every message lands in the Inbox, linked to the customer and the case. Nothing gets lost in someone’s personal mailbox.

Before you start

  • Who’ll answer doctors, and how you’d split their work: for example cases, billing and shipping.

What to set up

  1. 1Inboxes: groups of conversations by your own split, like Cases, Billing or Shipping, each with its members.
  2. 2Routing: a workflow that sends each new conversation to the right inbox. Without one, they land in Unassigned. Start from the Route new conversations template. → Workflows
  3. 3Messages and notes. Messages go to the customer, by email and in their portal. Internal notes stay with your team.
  4. 4Logged conversations, for phone calls and anything else that didn’t come in by email.
  5. 5Linked tasks, for when a conversation turns into work. “Get the shade from Dr. Lee” is a task, and the emails with the office are its conversation. → Non-production tasks

The Customer Portal messenger

Doctors with a portal login can message you from the portal. Those messages land in the same Inbox, and your replies reach them in the portal as well as by email.

You're done when: Your team works from the Inbox, and every open conversation sits in an inbox or with a person.

3.2

Your email

Until you add your own address, Pilot sends your emails from noreply@pilotlms.com. Add your lab’s address, like support@yourlab.com, so doctors see emails from you, trust them, and find them in their inbox instead of spam.

Before you start

  • Access to your domain’s DNS, at GoDaddy, Cloudflare, Route 53 or wherever it’s managed, or someone who has it.
  • Admin access to your email, such as Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

What to set up

  1. 1Your address, with the display name doctors will see as the sender.
  2. 2Your domain: add the DNS records Pilot gives you at your DNS provider. They sit on a pilot-mail subdomain, so your normal email keeps working as before. DNS changes can take up to 48 hours.
  3. 3Forwarding: have the mailbox doctors already write to, like info@yourlab.com, forward a copy of every email to Pilot. This needs no DNS changes. Some Microsoft 365 setups block forwarding until IT allows it.
  4. 4A test: send the verification email and check that it shows up as a conversation.

No access to your DNS?

Ask whoever manages your website or IT to add the records. Send them the records exactly as Pilot shows them.

You're done when: Emails go out from your lab’s address, and emails to your lab show up as conversations.

3.3
Growth and up

Email templates and HIPAA

Pilot emails your customers when things happen: a case ships, an invoice goes out, a payment comes in, a statement is ready. Email templates decide what those emails say, so they sound like your lab every time.

What to set up

  1. 1The templates you use most, in your own words. Variables like the patient name, case number or amount due fill themselves in.
  2. 2Who sends what: each template can come from its own address, like accounting@yourlab.com for statements.
  3. 3A test send of each one, read the way a doctor would.
  4. 4Secure messages for anything with patient details. The doctor gets a “You have a secure message” email, and reads the message in the Customer Portal, so they need a portal login.

Patient details in email

Only put variables like the patient name in templates you mean to send by email. Use secure messages for anything else that mentions a patient.

You're done when: Every template you use reads the way your lab would write it.

3.4

SLAs

An SLA is how fast your team promises to answer. You set targets on each inbox, and Pilot times every conversation in it, so the ones closest to missing come first.

Before you start

  • How fast you want to answer: the first reply, later replies, and getting a conversation resolved.

What to set up

  1. 1Targets on each inbox: first response, next response, time to resolve, and time to receive a response from the customer. Leave any of them blank to skip it.
  2. 2Inbox shifts, so the clocks only run during working hours. A message that arrives on Friday night isn’t late on Saturday morning.
  3. 3Task targets on each task template: a total turnaround time, and how long a task may sit in each state. → Non-production tasks

Reading the badge

A countdown shows the time left on the most urgent target, and turns orange in the last 30 minutes. Green means every target was met, red means one was missed, and grey means nothing is waiting on your team.

You're done when: New conversations arrive with an SLA badge, and your team works the red ones first.

Stuck on a step?

Message the Pilot team from inside Pilot during business hours, on every plan. Or let us run the setup with you.

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2. Start billing out of PilotPrevious chapter4. Set up Work TrackingNext chapter

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