What Is A Shared Inbox?

When you first start your business, a Gmail or Outlook inbox is enough to manage communication with your customers. You do not have that many of them as you are just getting started, and generally it is just one person replying to those emails. 

But as you grow, so does your need to have more people helping answer emails from customers. Have you ever tried to work with a teammate in the same Gmail or Outlook inbox at the same time? You have no idea what email they might be replying to, no way to easily get help with an email or ask a question to your team, and could very easily end up sending more than one reply to the same customer email.

That’s where a shared inbox can become a requirement. 

Most folks have email that is powered by either Google (Gmail) or Outlook (Microsoft 365). Using Help Scout will not change who hosts your email, but rather all email sent to the address you use to communicate with your customers will flow right into the inbox in the app. From there, anyone on your team who needs to communicate with your customers can be given a login to your Help Scout account, and all work together in the same inbox at the same time.

We ourselves have had more than 50 people all working in the same inbox at once to help customers, here’s a few tools we have built into Help Scout to solve that problem you would have of more than one teammate working in Gmail or Outlook.

The biggest issue with more than one person working in a Gmail or Outlook inbox is that you are not able to see what your other teammates are working on. What email are they currently answering? Are you actually working on the same one and are unaware? Is the customer about to receive email from two different members of your team at the same time? 

In Help Scout we have a feature called Collision Detection, which allows you to see where all of your teammates are working within the inbox at any given moment. See that from the main inbox view, or if you happen to open an email and a teammate is viewing it or replying to it, you can see that as well. Never waste time working on an email that someone else is already dealing with, and never accidentally send a customer duplicate replies from more than one person.

Ever wanted to leave information on an email, but had nowhere to leave that? Or wanted to collaborate on an email with a teammate, but have to leave your email app and find another way to communicate with that person internally to get the answers you need? 

The shared inbox in Help Scout has a dedicated notes feature, which allows you collaborate with your teammates on individual email conversations, without your customer knowing. You can even @ mention teammates within notes, and they’ll be notified that you are needing their attention on that email. 

When you are answering an email from a customer in Gmail or Outlook, you have no context into what they might have needed from you in the past. You could run a search on their name or email address, but that takes quite a few clicks, and the results can be strangely out of order and confusing. 

When you are viewing an email inside Help Scout, you are always going to have all of the context you need about the customer by seeing every single interaction you have had with them in the past on the right hand side of that email. See previous emails, chats (if you offer live chat), Instagram or Facebook messages, even any phone call notes anyone on your team might have left about a customer. As you are reading through the customer’s current email in to you, any interactions you have had with them in the past are just one click away to give you as much context as you need to help them. 

With emails coming in from customers, in Gmail and Outlook it’s really hard to know what frequency they are coming in, how many emails each member of the team is answering, and what types of questions you’re receiving. This makes it hard to learn from what your customers need, when you might need to hire, and what your team’s overall contributions to the business are.

Every email you or your team answer in your shared inbox within Help Scout can give you multiple data points within the app’s built in reporting. Easily see the types of questions you are receiving (when combined with tags or custom fields) in the Email report, quickly see individual performance across your entire team in the Company report, and a high level overview of everything that is going on in the All Channels report.