Quickstart — your first ticket in 10 minutes
Sign up, connect your email, invite a teammate, and reply to your first customer — all in under 10 minutes.
This guide gets you from zero to your first customer reply inside Protodesk in under 10 minutes. No engineering required.
What you’ll need
- A work email address
- Either a support email (support@yourcompany.com) you can forward, or a WhatsApp Business number
- 10 minutes
1. Create your workspace
Head to protodesk.io/login and sign up with your work email. We create your workspace, start your 7-day Pro trial on top of Free (no credit card), and open the onboarding wizard.
The wizard asks for:
- Your industry — determines which canned responses and labels we pre-load
- Your team size
- Which channel you want to connect first
Pick an industry even if nothing matches exactly; you can tune everything later.
2. Connect your first channel
You have three options for email, two for WhatsApp. See the dedicated guides:
- Connect your email — via email forwarding or Gmail
- Connect WhatsApp — via official WhatsApp API or QR scan
The fastest path: Gmail forwarding for email. It’s a one-minute setup with zero DNS changes.
3. Send a test message
Once a channel is connected:
- Send yourself an email to your support address (or a WhatsApp message)
- Wait 5–10 seconds
- Refresh Protodesk
You should see a new ticket in the inbox with AI triage already applied — a label, a priority, a suggested team. Click in to see the AI’s reasoning trace.
4. Reply
Type in the reply box. Either:
- Write free-form — the reply goes via the original channel
- Type
/to pull up canned responses, then pick one and hit Tab to insert variables - Hit Suggest in the composer to generate a starter reply from Ticket Context and your knowledge base
Send. The customer receives your reply via the channel they wrote from.
5. Invite your team
Settings → Members → Invite. Enter email addresses, pick a role:
- Owner — full control including billing
- Admin — everything except billing and workspace deletion
- Agent — reply, assign, resolve tickets (can’t change settings)
- Viewer — read-only (unlimited on every plan)
Invitees get an email with a signup link.
What’s next
- Set up AI auto-resolve — let AI handle routine questions
- Understand AI credits — how your monthly allocation works
- Webhooks and API — for custom integrations
Summary
- Sign up at protodesk.io/login with email (no credit card)
- Connect email or WhatsApp via the onboarding wizard
- Send a test message, see AI triage in action
- Reply, invite your team, iterate
