In a small team, how do you manage a shared inbox? i.e. hello@your-awesome-company.com
Richard Shepherd
9 replies
Hey,
Come across loads of ticketing, support desk, shared inbox solutions for teams of say 20+, I'm just curious to see what tools you like to use for sharing inboxes in a small team?
Where do they go wrong? What do they get right?
What do you want to achieve using a shared inbox?
Thanks :-)
Replies
Dom@dqmonn1
At MentorCruise, we take care of customer service in a team of two using Helpwise. There's an info@ catch-all address and then our personal ones. Usually, we get to inbox zero within every given day, so we can split new inquiries and take ownership of them.
This is a solution that works perfectly, but there may be a few things to do better:
- Balance between ticketing system and email. Helpwise is more on the email side. A ticket can't be closed forever. If a customer replies to an email thread a year later, it will be in the same thread, assigned to the same person.
- Getting rid of spam and non-actionables automatically. 50% of our inbox does not require action
- Better cross-collaboration, e.g. getting input from someone else on a thread that is owned by yourself
Share
You just should install a ticketing system. E.g. osticket. Other than that, if you connect via imap, everyone is able to get all email and see all threads (if an email was replied or not)
@andrey_mi makes a lot of sense. Thanks Andrey. Is it just me or does Osticket look incredibly complex? I wonder whether half these features ever get used. What software do you use?
@richardesigns It depends on your goals. You can ignore all of the complicated features and use the list of tickets only.
I have found that evolves a lot, mostly driven by increased volumes. To start, usually is internal emailing saying "I got this one". But that scales TERRIBLY. So then it may be days on and days off. Eventually then full time role / automatic ticketing assignment. But you defintiely don't need that to start unless you get maybe >10 messages / day.
@jdgusz @dqmonn1 @andrey_mi Hey Dan, Dom, Andrey. Thanks for your comments on small team shared inboxes. I genuinely find all this fascinating, guess that makes me a bit of an email nerd! Anyway, I took a moment to share how we do shared inbox and stuck it on a quick blog post if you're interested.
https://plummail.co/blog/using-p...
It would be interesting to discuss these ideas further.
A shared inbox (https://www.proprofsdesk.com/sha...) is a great feature to manage multiple customer-facing email inboxes such as hello@, info@, sales@, contact@, etc. All team members can access the relevant shared inboxes and collaborate to resolve customer issues or queries faster.
While there are many such tools in the market, I would suggest you go for the ProProfs Help Desk (https://www.proprofsdesk.com/). The tool offers the most easy-to-use, intuitive, and Gmail-like interface that does not require any heavy training. Your team can get started in a matter of minutes and work together using collaboration features such as agent collision detection, automated ticket routing, internal notes, parent-child ticketing, and more.