Support routines for Claude: triage the inbox, find the gaps in your help pages
Two templates cover the repeat work in a support team. One labels each new thread in a shared mailbox and drafts replies that wait for your approval. The other groups the questions customers keep asking and checks whether your help pages answer them. Both start report-only. Free (MIT). Needs a paid Claude plan.
The job: triage the inbox and find the gaps
A support person reads every new thread, decides what it is, and writes a reply. Once a week someone also asks which questions keep coming back and whether the help pages cover them.
That is reading, sorting and drafting on a regular rhythm. The scenario below is an example built only from what the two templates do.
An example week with both routines
This is an example built from the real templates, not a customer story. It carries no results, numbers or quotes. Say a small team turns on both templates for its shared support mailbox and help desk.
- Sunday to Thursday, 22:00 and 04:00 UTC: inbox triage runsIt reads threads that arrived inside the look-back window (12 hours by default). It gives each thread one label from your list (the defaults are needs-reply, fyi, billing, sales and suspect) and a short factual summary. For threads labelled needs-reply it drafts a reply in your house reply style.
- You approve, edit or decline each draftDrafts wait behind an email gate that times out after 24 hours. On a later run, only drafts you approved are sent. The first run is report-only and sends nothing.
- You correct what it got wrongYou open the Desk and keep, edit or drop what you see. The routine learns from those choices and suggests setting changes. Nothing applies until you say yes. For example, a sender domain whose mail you keep dropping can come up as a suggestion.
- Thursday, 21:00 UTC: support gap digest runsIt reads the past seven days of ticket questions with customer details removed, groups questions by a normalised form, and counts each group. Groups that repeat at least three times by default are checked against the help pages you list.
- You read the gapsEach repeated question is marked answered or not by the model, so confirm before you close a gap. The grouping is literal: two wordings of one question land in two groups.
The support templates
Inbox triage
Labels new mail threads, drafts replies in your style, and sends a reply only after a person approves it.
Support gap digest
Each week, groups repeated support questions and flags the ones your help pages do not answer yet.
What it never does
These come from the template prompts. They are rules the prompt forbids and the checks around it. They are not a promise about every possible run.
- The prompt forbids deleting, archiving or moving mail in inbox triage.
- The prompt forbids sending anything in inbox triage until a person has approved that draft on its gate.
- The prompt forbids replying to a ticket, closing one or editing a help page in support gap digest.
- Inbox triage stores the sender's domain, subject and a short summary, not full bodies or addresses. Check that is acceptable where you work.
Where to go from here
Read the inbox triage page for install steps and settings, or the support gap digest page. See the other teams on all use cases, read how approvals and learning work, or check the honest limits.
Install inbox triage first
Run it report-only, read the first report, then add the weekly gap digest.