What is a shared inbox? The Secret to Unlocking Customer Delight

Emails slip through the cracks all the time.

Your customers can't do their jobs when you fail to respond to important emails and resolve service requests. This customer disappointment marks the beginning of a downward spiral and customer churn. If you're having trouble managing, reading, replying to, and archiving customer conversations, shared inbox software can help.

The beauty of a shared inbox is its ability to streamline and centralize communications with customers. With a shared inbox, your team can stop worrying about which emails are urgent, which customer questions they answered, or who answered.

What is a shared inbox?

A shared inbox is an inbox that different team members can use to access, receive, or reply to emails. For example, a help desk or customer support team uses the support@companyname email inbox to get all customer questions in one place and get them answered quickly.

A shared inbox is an evolution of the traditional email inbox that involves all the channels a business uses to communicate with its customers or prospects. Modern Shared Inbox has many features that enhance the unified customer experience. For example, it offers live chat, social media messaging inbox, private notes, audio-video calls, and shared browsing!

Shared inboxes aim to bring efficiency and transparency to businesses. When all of your communication channels are centralized, your entire team can work together toward a single goal. Instead of forwarding emails, you can nominate the right person or mention them behind the scenes. No more copying someone, no more different software and no more information lost. Everything is easier.

Why use a shared inbox

Small organizations don't often need a shared inbox because the transfer queue is manageable. They can easily find customer emails and keep support inboxes clean at all times.

As they scale, they sometimes need help finding forgotten emails, duplicate replies, or tickets. Support agents are starting to think others will catch up and handle those pending emails. As a result, customer support teams start emailing the wrong people.

This confusion in the inbox is the biggest problem for growing businesses. Collaborative inbox software improves team collaboration and solves all these problems with the following:

Clear rules on who works on which clients and emails. Ownership expectations for timely resolution of support tickets. Real-time data insights so that every support agent makes the best decisions.

Now that you know why to use shared inbox software, let's see how it works.

How does a shared inbox work?

A shared inbox allows multiple users to view a single inbox for incoming emails, reply to them, and manage conversations with customers. It also has a common calendar to facilitate planning shifts or managing vacations.

You cannot sign in to a shared mailbox using workspace email credentials. Typically, support teams have full or send as access to shared mailboxes, depending on the requirements of the job. You will come across three types of access permissions in a shared mailbox:

Full access means full access to a shared inbox. Send as access is what you need to be able to send emails. Send on behalf access allows you to send emails on behalf of a shared inbox. Group email vs shared inbox

A group email address is a single, dedicated email address that you use to send emails to a group of people. For example, you can create a Gmail or Outlook group project@companyname and add all employees in the project management division. This way, you can easily share important project management updates with all product employees without remembering individual email addresses.