Collaborate with Your Team in the Inbox

For support teams, responding to customers who write into your support queue is often a collaborative task. Navigating a shared support mailbox means paying attention to what you’re doing, while also being aware of your teammates who are working alongside you. Being able to do so smoothly and efficiently will help you and your colleagues manage your support conversations and provide your customers with the help that they need.

How do we avoid running into each other in the inbox?

If you’re new to using a shared inbox, you might be concerned with how your support team will be able to work in the same space at the same time. How do you ensure that your team isn’t getting into one another’s way? How do you avoid doubling up on the same work and replying to the same conversations?

The good news is that a shared inbox doesn’t have to be clunky! The inbox list view offers hints that allow you to see at a glance if a team member is already working with a customer.

A yellow indicator lets you know another user already has a conversation open. It will turn red when the user is actively typing and responding.

You can even hover over the icon to see which teammate is working on that conversation.

This helpful cue lets you know that someone is already helping that customer, and you may move on to the next question.

If you miss the visual indicators from the list view, not to worry! You will see similar indicators when you open up the conversation.

If teammate has clicked into the same conversation that you are on, you’ll see one another’s profile pictures appear at the top of the conversation — your visual cue that someone else is peeking in! The profile picture of the teammate who is actively replying will include a red border, and their drafted reply will be visible for the other teammate to see. In Help Scout, we call this feature Collision Detection and it’s another way to clearly know that someone else on your team is already handling a conversation.

What if I need help on a conversation?

Not all questions can be answered by on your own! There will likely be times when you need to bring in extra eyes. Perhaps there’s a particularly tricky technical question that you could use help with, or you’ve encountered a situation that requires a manager’s opinion.

Notes provide your team a way to collaborate asynchronously on the same conversation, and you can quickly loop in others as needed. They are also a useful way to document your team’s thinking for future reference. Colleagues who view the conversation later on will be able to see and learn from these notes. Notes are fully internal and cannot be seen by your customers.

In order to make notes as simple and clear as possible, you may find it useful to standardize how your team structures their notes. Create internal templates, which are called Saved Replies in Help Scout, that your team can easily insert into a note. The user leaving the note will benefit from having ready-to-go guidelines that they can fill in, and the user reading the note will start off with a helpful overview.

It’s also possible to assign conversations or mention a particular teammate in a note. This is another helpful way to ensure that the proper team members are alerted to your conversation and you can get the extra assistance that you need to continue troubleshooting.

What if we need to work on conversations with people outside of our support team?

You might need to collaborate with a colleague who is not on your support team and doesn’t need overall access to your support inbox. For example, you may want to share customer feedback with your product team, or get more information about a payment issue from your finance team.

In Help Scout, we offer a user role called light users. This user role is most useful for colleagues who aren’t directly working with customers and only need limited privileges within Help Scout, such as reading a conversation or writing a note.
You might prefer to not bring in other colleagues into Help Scout at all. In this case, you can forward the conversation outside of Help Scout in order to get it in front of the necessary teammates.

Lastly, a shared inbox doesn’t have to be just for those in Support! Are there any other teams within your company who would also benefit from working in a collaborative, open space? Perhaps your Sales Team has a general sales email that potential customers reach out to. In Help Scout, you can add multiple inboxes, and easily move conversations from one inbox to another. Consider adding other colleagues as users to your account!