The collaborative benefits of using a shared inbox

It is a problem that most businesses face - overwhelming emails to clear. That is not necessarily a
bad thing though, this means your customers are initiating communication. What’s important is how
to deliver great support that customers will love.

According to Carleton University researchers, people now spend at least a third of their time at the
office – and half of the time they work at home – reading and answering emails. That’s 11.7 hours
spent at work and 5.3 hours at home — every week.

Just sometime ago, there was even talk about chat applications such as Slack replacing email. It
appears however, that the email inbox is here to stay.

Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages between people using
electronics. Email first entered substantial use in the 1960s and by the mid-1970s had taken the
form now recognized as email. This means that the Email is nearly 60 years old! So, what makes
email so irreplaceable in the world of internet technology?

Well, there are some reasons why we think email is still very much the flavour of the corporate
world:

1. Email is widespread – nearly everyone has access to email, so you don’t need to sell
customers on a new form of “communication”.

2. Email is simple. You don’t need to spend time to train your customers or your staff on using
email. Chances are, they have already used it in school and it’s really simple to set an inbox
up in minutes.

3. Email comes free (debatable, but well, there are free email providers). Anyone can sign up
for a Gmail, Yahoo or Outlook account and contact you at no cost.

4. Email is conversational. It’s a medium built for back and forth communication without time
pressures or technical barriers.

So, what would be the best way for corporations to keep track of the tonnes of email inquiries sent
by customers (and prospective customers)?

The simple answer? - A shared team inbox.

For corporations, a shared email inbox makes total sense. It is a great way for teams to collaborate
and allows for easy monitoring by a group of people. You can have multiple people working with
customers at once, through a single contact point such as a common email address like
info@company.com, help@company.com or sales@company.com for the sales team.

It works in the same way as your normal email account but is managed by several people in your
organization. They can share the responsibility of monitoring the mailbox and responding to emails.
There are many benefits of a shared mailbox:
- Easy organising and controlling all inbound and outbound mails
- Provides a clearly defined single, common email address for specific business purposes
- Improves productivity for different business teams and units
- Allows members who have recently joined the list to catch up with previous emails
- Brings clarity and transparency for members within each business team/unit

- Provides the option to setup different permissions for team members
- Lastly and most importantly, customers can easily find the right email address to direct their
queries to

With the advantages highlighted above, it is of no surprise that many organizations have adopted
the use of shared inboxes for each function/business unit such as sales, marketing, tech and
administrative support.

Taking sales department as an example, having a common go-to email address as a team mailbox
(such as sales@company.com) allows the department manager to have an overview of the number
of enquiries for a particular product or service. With a clearer understanding of the demand, sales
managers can better forecast and plan for the resources (such as manpower, time and effort)
required for product roll-outs in the future.

The use of a common, collaborative inbox allows knowledge to be easily shared within the team.
New team members can search for previous email threads and learn how similar customer cases
were handled by their predecessors. This will help drive peer learning among co-workers with the
shared email inbox serving as an information repository for the transfer of knowledge.

With a shared team inbox, helpdesk supervisors can better monitor the number of enquiries handled
by each helpdesk agent and the quality of response. It also helps to reduce the response time, allows
for another agent (or sometimes, supervisor) to step in when the situation calls for a more
experienced customer support officer’s intervention.

Most shared inbox solutions also provide a comprehensive access control back-end for
administrators to grant different level of permissions to different users. Document and folder
management also provide for easy organization of emails into different folders within the inbox.

As data analysis becomes a sought-after requirement for organizations, many of the current shared
inbox solutions providers offer extensive analysis of customer service metrics such as Customer
Request Volume, First Response Times, Average Reply Time and Resolution Rate for the
management to better understand the quality of customer service within the organization.

This allows the management to better develop or further refine their current customer relationship
management process and improve upon the existing client support and feedback system.
From the operations point of view, a dedicated, common inbox is the clear-cut solution to help with
reducing email clutter, improving overall efficiency without the pains of having to implement and
relearn a new channel for communicating with customers.

In short, adopting a shared email solution could be the organization’s fastest track to aligning
internal objectives while fostering a collaborative culture and supportive environment.