Gmail-Native Help Desk for Small Teams Without Dedicated Support Software
Small teams (5-20 people) manage customer emails through shared Gmail inboxes with ad-hoc forwarding, CC chains, and password sharing. They know they need a help desk but Zendesk ($55/agent/month) and Freshdesk ($49/agent/month) are expensive and require training on a new interface. Keeping transforms Gmail into a help desk with assignment tracking, collision detection, shared notes, templates, and analytics, all inside the Gmail UI the team already uses. Starting at $12/user/month with SOC2 compliance, it targets the segment between 'no tool' and 'enterprise help desk.'
Problem Statement
A 12-person e-commerce company receives 200 customer emails per day through support@company.com. Three team members have access to the shared Gmail account. They open the same email simultaneously, write conflicting responses, and send duplicate replies. There is no way to assign an email to a specific person, mark it as in-progress, or track resolution time. When the founder asks 'how long does it take us to respond to customers?', nobody knows. They tried Zendesk but the team refused to check a separate tool — they live in Gmail. Keeping adds assignment, status tracking, and collision detection directly inside Gmail so the team never leaves their existing workflow.
The Idea
A Gmail Chrome extension that adds help desk functionality, ticket assignment, status tracking, collision detection, shared notes, templates, and response time analytics, directly inside the Gmail interface, eliminating the need for teams to learn and manage a separate support tool.
Why Now
Google Workspace has 3+ billion users, but Gmail's native collaboration features remain primitive: no assignment, no status tracking, no collision detection. Small teams outgrow shared inbox workflows around 500 support emails per month but cannot justify the cost and training overhead of Zendesk or Freshdesk. The Chrome extension architecture allows Keeping to inject help desk features into Gmail without requiring Google API approval for each new capability. SOC2 compliance (increasingly required by B2B customers) differentiates against lightweight alternatives that lack enterprise security certifications.
Target User
Small teams (5-20 people) using Google Workspace shared inboxes for customer support who have outgrown ad-hoc email management but are not ready for enterprise help desk software
Target Market
Lightweight help desk and shared inbox tools for Google Workspace teams
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