Email, since 1971 has taken over every desktop screen and phone. No matter what social media platforms come in, emails remain a constant everywhere, whether it’s your personal time or professional life. You have a personal email address, an official one and then, in some cases, one for just fun which you made as a teen with some weird username.
This leads to enormous amounts of emails generated everywhere; this might even rival the size of the universe itself. In 2020, almost 306 billion emails were sent and received every single day.
Isn’t this too much? Now imagine running 10 projects with 5-10 team members on one official email channel. These single numbers cumulatively our overwhelming.
This is incredibly challenging when team members work on multiple projects simultaneously and manage messages from multiple clients or stakeholders.
The consequences of email overload can be severe. You can miss important feedback, deadline and there can be a general miscommunication among the team members every day. Your precious energy and time can significantly affect your performance and results.
We have a solution here, a shared mailbox for all your team members. The purpose of the shared mailbox is to provide a central location for all incoming messages, allowing team members to work together and avoid duplicate responses or missed emails.
A shared inbox is an email management system that allows multiple team members to access and work on a single email account.
This eliminates the need to forward emails or cc various team members in one email conversation. Everyone can view, reply, and collaborate on the same email platform. Customer support teams often use shared inboxes with a single email address to receive and respond to customer inquiries.
- Customer Support: A shared inbox can help manage incoming customer inquiries, complaints, and feedback. Multiple users can access the same email account, ensuring faster response times and better customer service.
- Sales: A shared mailbox can be used to manage incoming sales inquiries and leads. The sales team can use the shared inbox for the sales campaign and respond to leads and prospects in a timely manner.
- Project Management: A shared inbox is an amazing tool for people in Project Management and their team members, as it helps them collaborate effortlessly and makes sure everyone is up to date with any new communication.
- Marketing: A shared inbox can be used to manage incoming marketing inquiries, such as advertising and partnership requests. Marketing team members can work together to ensure timely and accurate responses to potential partners and customers.
- Human Resources: The tool can manage incoming job applications, employee inquiries, payroll, and other HR-related emails. HR team members can work collaboratively on the same email account, ensuring timely and accurate responses to potential hires and employees.
Consider the following benefits of adopting a shared inbox system for your team:
- Simplified Workflows: With centralized email management, your team can access all incoming messages in a single location from a team inbox, eliminating the need to forward or organize emails. The purpose of a shared mailbox allows for email assignments, automatic message sorting, email labeling, and tagging and provides access to collaboration tools all in one platform.
- Collaboration Tools: A shared inbox allows teams to handle requests, including real-time access to the queue, draft reply sharing for input, and adding comments to messages for discussion. Sales teams can set up notifications to avoid requests sitting idle for too long.
- Customizable Control over Data: Each agent can log in to the system with unique credentials and customize their dashboard and workspace. This ensures greater data security and privacy control, as permissions can be set for customers, teams, or documents. Additionally, a shared inbox system comes with a complete audit trail to review records and track changes made to the system.
- Real-Time Data Access and Integrity: Changes made within a shared inbox system are captured and available to everyone in real time. Agents can review work in progress and check the status of any request at any time. Cloud storage is often used for shared mailbox tools, enabling access to the platform from any location and the ability to maintain safe backups.
- Reporting and Metrics: A shared inbox system with a reporting feature allows real-time monitoring and evaluation of customer support efforts. Management can keep tabs on important metrics such as average first response time and the number of open tickets. With reporting for agents, teams, and labels, companies can access high-level data and granular reporting to monitor performance for different lines of business or support teams.
- Automation and Integration: A shared inbox system can automate certain functions using snippets and filters, saving time and organizing incoming messages. Integrating a shared inbox with tools like Slack, Trello, and Zapier allows seamless implementation without disrupting existing team workflows. A shared mailbox system with a knowledge base and customer portal gives customers multiple ways to access information and contact customer support.
- Transparency and Accountability: You can share and delegate emails to your team. Everyone can see the entire email chain and history, allowing for clear transparency. As a result, there are no more chasing coworkers for information as everything is easily accessible, and there’s a clear record of what’s already been sent, reducing the risk of missing an email or replying twice.
Adopting a shared inbox system offers numerous benefits to streamline workflows, enhance collaboration, provide greater control over data and customization, ensure real-time data access and integrity, improve reporting and metrics, and enable automation and integration with other tools.
