The challenge
The makers of a secure collaboration app wanted to answer their own website visitors from inside their own product. Most companies in that position bolt on a website support ticket widget from a helpdesk vendor. That means another tool, another login and another inbox where a visitor's question can sit unnoticed.
This team already spent its working day in the collaboration app. Support belonged there too. The brief was simple to state and fiddly to build: a visitor on the company's website should be able to ask for help, and that request should reach the right person inside the app, on whatever device they happened to be using.
We had worked with the same company before, adding encrypted video calls to its collaboration app. This project was a separate module: customer support.
What we built: a website support ticket widget wired into the app
We added a customer support module to the existing collaboration app, with three connected parts.
The widget. A support widget sits on the company's website. A visitor fills it in to raise a request while still on the site.
The ticket. Each request lands inside the collaboration app as a ticket, next to the team's other work.
The support workflow. Inside the app, support staff can:
assign a new ticket to a team member;
reassign an existing ticket when someone is busy or a different skill is needed;
reply from the app on the web, on Android or on iOS;
sort and find tickets with the app's existing filters.
Reusing the filters was a deliberate choice. Staff did not have to learn a new way to search; tickets behave like everything else they already manage in the app.
How it works day to day
Picture the person who leads support that week. A visitor on the company's website types a question into the widget. It appears in the collaboration app as a new ticket.
The support lead assigns it to a colleague who knows the topic. That colleague is away from their desk, so they open the ticket on their phone and reply from the Android or iOS app. If the question turns out to need someone else, the ticket is reassigned inside the app rather than forwarded by email.
At any point the lead can filter the app's view to see open tickets and who owns each one. There is no second system to check and no copying of messages between tools.
The result
Website visitors now reach the support team straight from the site. The team handles every request inside its own collaboration app, on desktop or phone, and ownership of each ticket is visible to everyone who needs it.
For a company that sells collaboration software, it also means the support team works the way it asks its own customers to work: in one app.
What the research says
Another tool adds to the noise. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index found that, among its most message-heavy users, employees are interrupted every two minutes during core hours, 275 times a day, by meetings, emails or chats (software vendor research by Microsoft). Keeping support inside the app the team already watches avoids adding one more inbox to that list.
One slow answer can cost a customer. In Zendesk's CX Trends 2025 survey of about 5,100 consumers, 63% said they would switch to a competitor after just one bad experience (software vendor research by Zendesk).
People want to know who they are talking to. Salesforce's seventh State of the Connected Customer study found 72% of customers think it is important to know when they are dealing with an AI agent (software vendor research by Salesforce). That matters for any AI added to a support flow later.
Where AI fits next
Nothing below has been built; each is an option the ticket history would support. A model could suggest replies drawn from past answers, for a support person to edit and send.
It could tag each new ticket by topic and propose an assignee, and summarize long threads when someone picks up a colleague's ticket. Any reply drafted by AI should be clearly labeled as such, as the research above suggests.
Planning something similar?
Before you add a support widget to your own product, it helps to answer four questions:
Should requests become tickets, live chats or both?
Who assigns new tickets, and how is work moved when someone is busy?
Which devices must your support team answer from?
Is the widget only for your own website, or something your customers will want too?
If chat is on your list too, start with our guide to planning a customer support chatbot. For product teams, we also cover SaaS development and web application builds in more depth.
More of this kind of work sits under our software products and SaaS page.
