Startup ops · Ops automation
An inbox that triages itself
A seed-stage SaaS was drowning in mixed support and sales mail. We built an agent that sorted, drafted, and logged before anyone opened the thread.
Humans only touch the threads that need a human.
The miss
Three people shared one support alias and a sales alias that looked the same in Gmail. Pricing questions sat next to bug reports. Nobody trusted labels. By the time someone replied, the lead had cooled or the customer had tweeted. They didn't need another helpdesk seat. They needed the queue to stop being a guessing game.
What we did
- 01
We mapped the last two weeks of real mail into buckets the team already used verbally: bug, billing, feature ask, sales, noise.
- 02
The agent classified on arrival, drafted a first reply in their voice, and only paged Slack when confidence was low or the account was high-value.
- 03
Everything that mattered got written back to the CRM so the next human didn't start from an empty thread.
What shipped
- Classifier tuned on their actual inbox, not a generic support model
- Draft replies that cite product docs instead of inventing policy
- CRM notes and stage updates without a second form
- Slack escalation with the draft attached so review is one tap
After
Morning inbox stopped being a two-hour ritual. Sales replies went out same-day. Support kept the weird edge cases and stopped rewriting the same billing FAQ.
