E-mail is the most popular and functional way to communicate professionally. But sometimes, individual e-mails and conversations are not the best way to manage communications. It’s where the shared inbox comes in. Shared inboxes are designed to enable people to communicate easily with businesses.
Contents
- Advantages of a Shared Mailbox
- 1. Distribute high volume messages
- 2. Delegation of expertise
- 3. Eliminate double efforts
- 4. Consolidation and review
- What are the Specifications of the Shared Inbox Software?
- 1. Group-based e-mail management
- 2. E-mail automation
- 3. Ticket allocation
- 4. Team discussions
- 5. Reports and evaluations
- The Best Shared Inbox Tools Available at the moment
- 1. Hiver
- 2. Front
- 3. Outpost
- 4. Loop e-mail
- 5. Kayako
- 6. Keeping
- 7. Clientflow
- 8. Drag
- 9. Helpmonks
- 10. Gmelius
- 11. Mailclark
- 12. Missive
- 13. Helprace
- 14. GrooveHQ
- 15. Intercom
- Conclusion
1. Distribute high volume messages
For a start, high-volume e-mail flows are often unmanageable for a single individual. For example, if you get 5,000 customer service messages per day, no one can handle them independently. A shared mailbox enables many people to share the burden of one centralized mailbox.
2. Delegation of expertise
Shared inboxes also facilitate the conversion of messages to tasks and then the assignment of those tasks to the most relevant parties. This prevents messages from being overlooked or forgotten and ultimately contributes to higher customer satisfaction.
3. Eliminate double efforts
Shared inboxes prevent excessive duplication of effort, which can occur when two or more people reply to the same messages. Hypothetically, the assignment and monitoring of tasks should make that impossible.
4. Consolidation and review
Shared inboxes allow you to gather all your communications in one location for further analysis. Many shared mailboxes go beyond e-mail and integrate other forms of communication, such as social media messages and even live conversations. If you want to collect and analyze more data about your clients, that information is invaluable.
1. Group-based e-mail management
First, you will have a central location where more than one person can meet and manage e-mail communication. Anyone can see incoming messages, and people can respond to them as needed.
2. E-mail automation
Many modern platforms also have at least some capability to automate e-mail responses, decreasing the amount of time you need to spend manually creating messages and leading to higher e-mail efficiency.
3. Ticket allocation
Most platforms here let you convert each incoming message into a “ticket” or “task” that can be assigned to a specific person on the team. Doing so avoids duplication of effort and minimizes the risk of skipping a message.
4. Team discussions
Sometimes customer messages are too tricky for a single person to sort by. Many shared mailbox platforms include a sort of internal team chat function to solve this problem, so people can work together to solve problems.
5. Reports and evaluations
You’ll also typically come up with some kind of reporting or analytic functionality. It enables you to measure things such as incoming and outgoing messages, response rates, and even client satisfaction.
1. Hiver
Hiver is a perfect tool if you are interested in a minimalist shared inbox solution for Gmail. It works as a simple Chrome add-on, so it doesn’t take long to install and you can immediately start using it. When enabled, you can use it to manage inbound e-mails as a team, automate outbound e-mails, tag messages to organize them, and even host internal communications.
It’s also one of the most secure shared messaging solutions because e-mail still stays on Gmail servers.
2. Front
The Front is a shared inbox tool meant to consolidate your customer communications across a mixture of different channels, including e-mail, social media, SMS text messages, and more. The main objective here is to eliminate the need for the teams to connect to multiple platforms. For this purpose, Front also provides a broad range of integrations.
3. Outpost
It’s designed for small teams, so it may not be the best for large organizations, but it’s very intuitive and easy to start with. Unlike most shared inbox solutions, it helps teams create a library for quick reference of FAQs. Outpost can be used by anyone, regardless of their industry.
4. Loop e-mail
Loop is an e-mail management center that also offers transparent team messages in typical inboxes. Loop provides quick access to daily team performance reports and messaging. It also offers standard collaboration functions such as e-mail assignment and chat collaboration.
5. Kayako
It’s mostly a troubleshooting tool, but it also acts as a shared inbox. It aims to consolidate all client interactions (e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, and live chat channels) into a single platform. It also provides integrated client satisfaction measurement and reporting support.
6. Keeping
It is a Gmail message management platform designed mainly for customer support teams. It is a simple tool that does not offer standard features from traditional helpdesks.
7. Clientflow
You might confuse ClientFlow with a traditional mail client, but its features are far more robust. ClientFlow combines the functionality of a shared inbox and the components of a project management tool. In addition to tasking, ClientFlow also helps teams organize and track project deadlines, internal tasks, and staff workload.
8. Drag
This app is designed to help you manage messages and tasks in Gmail. It provides access to a Kanban-style layout. As the name implies, its primary interaction mode is drag and drop. It doesn’t take long to learn, and it has a team chat in-house to clarify misunderstandings and allow for easier collaboration.
9. Helpmonks
If you like to host your shared inbox on your own server, Helpmonks, with data storing capabilities, is one of the few tools that can do that for you. It is budget-friendly and includes typically shared inbox functions such as internal notes, e-mail allocation, and collision alerts.
10. Gmelius
Gmelius helps enterprises run a CRM within Gmail. The inbox serves as a hub for communication, collaboration, and automation. The product contains typical features of the shared inbox, such as e-mail assignment, shared labels, and templates for transparent partnership. You can also create pre-defined templates and answers to make your customer service team more effective. You can also integrate Gmelius with almost any CRM.
11. Mailclark
MailClark is a bot that fills the gap between mail – including Slack – and e-mail. This is a shared mailbox built exclusively for Slack and MS Teams. Their goal is to let the bot handle all external communications for tweets, e-mail replies, and more.
12. Missive
Unlike most shared inbox tools, Missive is an e-mail customer in their own right. Employees can set up all their e-mail reports — including private accounts and shared inboxes — in one place. It also supports and manages Facebook, SMS, and Twitter accounts.
13. Helprace
Helprace serves primarily as a customer-focused ticketing system, but it also has an integrated shared mailbox. With it, your team members can read and share notes, collaborate on responses, assign e-mails as if they were tickets. It even establishes attributes for each message to make them easier to categorize.
14. GrooveHQ
GrooveHQ, as opposed to most shared inbox solutions, is designed exclusively for customer support teams. There are no complex characteristics, and every effort is made to help support teams work quickly, without having to learn new things. They focus on customer support features such as a knowledge base and better relationships.
15. Intercom
Intercom is an excellent CRM and help desk software that allows the employees to deal with customer support requests, sales requests, and more. One of the unique features of this platform is that it provides all the information from a client at hand, which allows the team to quickly get the context when they help a client. It will enable teams to delegate conversations to individual service agents and provide a seamless and intuitive user interface.
Conclusion
In these times of covid where physical communication has become almost impossible. It is imperative to find alternative features for our professional life, which has become highly chaotic due to online communication. To simplify the chaos and have a more efficient way of functioning, these different shared inbox software can go a long way in making our life easy.
