Customer replies and your inbox
What happens when a customer hits Reply on a quote, booking confirmation, or invoice email.
The short version
Every customer-facing email from TradesOps is sent from your per-trader address (your-slug@tradesops.uk) with the same address as the reply-to. When a customer taps Reply, their message comes back to TradesOps, gets matched to the enquiry it belongs to by the customer's email address, and appears on that enquiry's page in your dashboard.
You never need to give the customer your personal email. And you keep a full thread of every reply in one place.
Where replies appear
Open /dashboard/enquiries/[id] — the customer's reply appears as a Customer replies section near the top of the enquiry, with:
- Their name (extracted from the From header) and email address
- The subject line
- The plain-text body (up to a reasonable size)
- The date and time it landed
Multiple replies show as a thread, oldest at the top.
Replying back
Currently, you reply from your own email client. Open the customer's message in your Gmail (or wherever) and hit Reply — the response comes from your email address, not from TradesOps. That works fine for one-off responses but means the customer now sees two different senders in their inbox.
Reply-from-TradesOps (so the reply also comes from your-slug@tradesops.uk) is a fast-follow on the roadmap. Email help@tradesops.uk if this is important to you.
What if the customer replies from a different email address?
The reply is matched to the enquiry by the customer's From address. If they submitted the enquiry as dave@example.com but reply from dave@example.co.uk, TradesOps can't link the two — so instead of dropping the message, it creates a fresh enquiry from the new address and pings your Telegram. You'll see two enquiry rows for the same person; a quick edit lets you merge in your head.
Uncommon but not impossible — happens most often when the customer's original enquiry came through a form on their partner's account.
What if the customer forwards the email?
The forward looks like a fresh email from a different sender. TradesOps treats it as a new enquiry — parses the body for the customer's name / email / phone / postcode, creates a dashboard row, and pings Telegram. Same behaviour as the website-form forwarding flow.
If a forward really is just a customer showing a spouse and you don't want the extra row, archive or delete it from /dashboard/enquiries.
Sending outbound emails to a customer
TradesOps sends emails to the customer at three points in the flow:
- Booking invite — when you Approve an enquiry.
- Booking confirmation — when you Confirm a booking.
- Quote — when you Approve and send a quote.
- Job booked — when you set the work date after Accept.
- Stage invoice — each time you Raise a stage.
- Review request — automatically when the final stage is paid.
You never write any of them by hand. IntelliQuote drafts what needs drafting; you approve.