Sideline for client support desks
Support your clients, not the general public.
Help desks are built for thousands of tickets from people you have never met. If your support queue is a handful of clients you have contracts with, you need a different shape entirely.
Free concierge migration · No credit card
You bought a help desk and inherited the wrong assumptions
Client support looks like support, so agencies reach for support software. Then the mismatch starts. The tool wants to deflect requests with a knowledge base, but your clients pay for access to you. It measures time-to-resolution, but your requests take days and involve deliverables. It bills per agent, so adding the contractor who handles one account costs a full seat. And it has no idea what a billable hour is, because support software assumes support is a cost center.
Meanwhile the questions your business actually runs on go unanswered: how many hours did this account consume, is this covered by their plan, who owns this right now, and can the client see progress without emailing to ask.
Sideline is the same intake-and-queue shape, rebuilt on the assumption that the requester is a client you have a relationship with. Every request carries an owner, a deadline, files, and hours. Every client gets a page showing exactly where their work stands.
Support work, shaped for client relationships
The queue mechanics of a help desk, the economics of an agency.
Every request arrives with an owner already on it
Auto-assignment routes each client's incoming requests to the people who handle that account, notified and ready to start. No triage rotation, no support lead sorting a shared inbox each morning. For a small team covering many accounts, this is the difference between a support function and a support burden.
The queue staffs itself before anyone reads it.
Client settings
Auto-assign new requests to
Product photos, new colorways
No triage meeting, no forwarding, nothing waiting to be delegated.
Grace K. · email
can you refresh the homepage hero?
Refresh the homepage hero
#848 · notes.pdf · in the queue, not your inbox
Clients email you, exactly as they already do
No portal adoption campaign, no "please submit a ticket" reply that makes a paying client feel like a stranger. Their email becomes a tracked request with a status and an owner, and they can check the portal whenever they feel like it.
✦ Smart Focus
Product photos, new colorways
Client replied 2 hours ago and it's due today, so this is the one that moves first.
Homepage hero, spring refresh
Trade-show banner, print-ready
Ranked per person, and it tells you why. You choose what it weighs most.
Whoever opens first sees the right thing firstAI
Smart Focus ranks each person's queue by urgency, ownership, client, and how long something has been waiting, with the reason attached: "client replied 2 hours ago and it's due today." Instead of an SLA engine you configure and maintain, the queue simply tells everyone where to start.
New request
Lantern Studio · Alpine Supply Co.
What do you need?*
Details*
12 SKUs from the spring line. Same lighting setup as the winter shoot, white sweep, plus one lifestyle angle each.
Priority
Needed by
Attachments
Drop files or browse
Intake that ends the back-and-forth
Ask for the details up front: what broke, which environment, screenshots, urgency. Support requests fail on missing context more than anything else, and a form you shape yourself removes three round trips before the work even starts.
- Maya R. · Today2h 10m
- Dev P. · Yesterday1h 30m
Total on this request4h 25m
Support hours become billable hours
A timer on the request itself, per person and per client. Support work is the most commonly unbilled work in an agency because it arrives in fifteen-minute pieces; logged where it happens, those pieces become a number at the end of the month.
Your requests
ALPINE SUPPLY CO.- READY FOR REVIEWProduct photos, new colorwaysJul 25
- IN PROGRESSHomepage hero, spring refreshJul 30
Only their requests, never another client's. No password, a magic link.
One page instead of a status email
Clients see every request they have open, its status, and its history through a magic link. No account to create, no knowledge base to search first, no ticket number to quote back at anyone.
Insights · Alpine Supply Co.
2h 14m
avg first response
23
requests / month
214
completed all time
activity, last 6 months
Your client sees these numbers in their own portal, all year long.
Proof the support contract is worth it
The Insights report in each client's portal shows requests handled and completed, average first response time, and team activity, kept current all year. Support renewals are argued on responsiveness, and this is that argument in numbers rather than adjectives.
Response times become an asset instead of an anecdote.
Team member access
agency settingWhat Team Members can open
- hidden
Clients page
the full client list
- hidden
Team page
who else works here
- hidden
Reports
agency-wide numbers
Invite anyone without handing over your client list or your roster.
Add support staff without exposing the business
Bring in an overflow contractor for one account and decide exactly what they can open. Per-person visibility scopes them to their assigned work, and agency settings control whether they can see your client list or team roster at all, with the client list hidden by default.
Retainer · July
Tidewater Brewing26.5 of 40 hrs
Monthly retainers and prepaid hour blocks
Custom rules on every retainer
Rollover, alerts, and live balances
Your clients see their balance too, if you want them to.
Support retainers with hours against a cap
Support plans with hours tracked against them, monthly or prepaid, with custom rules per account. You can see when a client is burning through their allotment, and so can they. Support runs as a product, not a favor.
When a real help desk is the right answer
If your requesters are mostly anonymous end users at volume, you want the things Sideline deliberately does not have: a public knowledge base, ticket deflection, CSAT surveys, a formal SLA engine with breach escalation, and voice or live-chat channels. Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Help Scout are built for that and are good at it. Some agencies run both: a help desk for their client's end users, and Sideline for the work their client sends them directly.
Questions we hear from teams like yours
How is this different from Zendesk, Freshdesk, or Help Scout?
Those are built for high ticket volume from mostly-anonymous end users, where success means resolving fast and deflecting more. Sideline is built for a handful of named clients under contract, where the work has deadlines, files, and billable hours, and success means the relationship renews. Our full comparison is at sideline.io/compare/zendesk.
Do our clients need to create an account or learn a ticket system?
No. A magic link gets them into a page showing their own requests, statuses, and history. There is no password, no ticket number to quote, and no knowledge base to search before they are allowed to reach a human.
Can clients just email support like they do now?
Yes, and most do. Emailed requests become tracked queue items with an owner, a status, and a due date automatically. Nobody has to be trained out of the habit they already have.
Does Sideline have SLAs?
Not as a formal engine with breach escalation and policy tiers. Every request has a priority and a due date, urgent work is visibly marked, and Smart Focus ranks by urgency and waiting time with the reason stated. If your contracts require documented SLA policies and automated breach alerts, a dedicated help desk is the better fit and we will say so.
How do we track support hours against a client agreement?
Time tracking per request, per person, and per client is built in today, with reports for any period, and clients can see a real-time time log in their portal. Retainer plans with hours tracked against a cap and alerts before the cap is hit are the next major build.
Can we route requests by client automatically?
Yes. Each client carries a list of team members who are auto-assigned to every new request from that client, and they are notified immediately. That is per-client routing, not per-form routing, so an account with a dedicated support person always reaches them.
What about after-hours or overflow contractors?
Add them with the email they already have, no seat to provision anywhere else, and scope them to the accounts they cover. Agency settings decide whether they can see your client list or team roster at all. When the coverage period ends, deactivating is one reversible click.
Can several people on the client side submit requests?
Yes, and clients manage their own people: they invite colleagues and remove leavers without emailing you. Everyone on their side sees the same queue, which stops the same issue being reported three times by three people.
Do we get reporting on response times?
Yes. Average first response time over the last 90 days is one of the headline numbers in the Insights report, alongside requests handled and completed per month and team activity. Your client sees it in their own portal, continuously.
Can we keep internal troubleshooting notes off the client thread?
Internal notes sit inside the request thread but are team-only and visually unmistakable. The honest engineering assessment stays in your team while the client sees the professional update.
Does it handle a knowledge base or self-service deflection?
No, deliberately. Deflection is the core metric of consumer support and the opposite of what a client paying for access wants. If you need a public help center, keep one and use Sideline for the work that reaches your team.
Can our AI tools reach the support queue?
Yes. Sideline exposes an MCP server, so Claude, ChatGPT, Claude Code, Make, or Zapier can read the queue and answer questions in plain language, build a morning digest of everything sitting too long, or pull hours into a report. Included on every plan with no call limits, and any connection sees only what the person who authorized it can see.
What does it cost for a support team of five?
$49 per month flat on Studio, with 5 seats and unlimited clients and requests, then $9 per additional seat. Help desks price per agent, so a five-agent plan with AI features typically runs several times that.
How quickly can we switch?
Free concierge migration, usually within 24 hours of starting the trial: clients imported, intake form configured, team invited. Clients receive a magic link and keep emailing you exactly as before.
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Client support deserves better than a ticket
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