Six signs your team needs a shared inbox

Between 2014 and 2018, the average office worker received about 90 emails a day and sent around 40 business emails daily. (source)

That’s too much for a day, isn’t it? Most of the times important emails don’t get necessary attention in such cluttered inboxes. Unanswered emails and internal conflicts within the team often result in a loss.

Real-time response, effective communication, successful team collaboration, and efficient email management is imperative for increasing sales conversion as well as customer retention. Most of the companies understand this and so have implemented shared inbox to facilitate team collaboration, enhance productivity and improve their overall results.

Shared team inbox – The basic

Shared inbox is a streamlined platform to manage internal as well as external communications efficiently. There is no single owner of such inboxes; multiple users can access and manage it together. Shared inbox minimizes inefficiencies and helps teams in staying organized. A wide spectrum of coordinated activities can be performed together using a collaborative inbox.

Teams can send and receive emails from a common address like queries@xyz.com, sales@xyz.com, contact@xyz.com, info@xyz.com.

They can easily share the responsibility of responding to the emails and offer timely assistance to the clients.

“Unity is strength. When there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved” – Mattie Stepanek  

Signs your team need a shared inbox

Still wondering if your company needs a shared inbox?

If you and your team are experiencing the below challenges, then you should surely consider using a shared inbox.

1. Problem – Sharing information is an arduous task

Received an information that you need to share with your teammate? How will you do it? By forwarding it?

If that teammate thinks that another person in the team should be informed about the matter, he/she will again forward it further. These forwards eventually turn into long, confusing threads that consume your and the teammate’s precious time.

How can shared inbox help?

In a shared inbox, everything is streamlined at one place. From sales and marketing to customer success team, everyone is on the same page. Each team member can see the email sent by the client, so you don’t need to move across different platforms to share information. It is the best way to keep everyone in the team updated without doing the extra work.

2. Problem – Confusion due to collaboration

It is great to work together; collaboration makes work faster and easier. But sometimes when things aren’t handled systematically, there are unnecessary confusion and complications.

You don’t know who has replied and what has been committed to the client. There is no clarity; it becomes difficult to decide the next step. If multiple people email the client with the same matter, then that might annoy them and affect your relationship.

How can shared inbox help?

With team inbox, there is more transparency. You know what’s happening as you are a part of everything. Even the minutest change is visual so that you can make informed decisions. Stop appearing as a foreigner wandering in unknown land without any information of the past communication.

A shared inbox allows you to keep track of the context to have a more meaningful conversation with your prospects. You’ll know what had been discussed and from where you need to continue or what do you need to avoid. Each team member can stay on track and offer excellent service to the client without stepping on each other’s foot.

3. Problem – BCC’ing is a hassle

You draft an email and then remember you need to keep your teammate in the loop. So, you BCC him. Easy isn’t it?

Well not really. Sadly, he won’t receive the reply of the client. And if in case you forget to inform him about the message received by the client, there will be more chaos and you might land up in trouble.

How can shared inbox help?

Avoid the BCC’ing hassle with a shared inbox, as teammates who have the access can see the clients’ replies.  If in case, you need someone’s help you can instantly mention them inside the note. He/she will be notified to act in real-time. Instead of working individually, you can work together as a team using this shared inbox.

4. Problem – Internal churn is a major hurdle

You surely wouldn’t want an opportunity to exit with your employee. If the communication your employee had with your prospect isn’t streamlined in one place, then it would be difficult to take the deal forward. The person replacing that employee wouldn’t know what had been discussed earlier. He will have to ask the prospects to repeat details which they might not like as it would be time-consuming.

How can shared inbox help?

When you add someone in a shared inbox, they get access to all the previous communications. The neat thread of communication gives them a proper direction of what has been done and what they need to do. With a centralized view of the client communication, they will get an idea of how you deal with different types of messages. They’ll understand what kind of replies should be given for providing a good buying experience to the customers.

5. Problem – Delay in response time

Lead qualification drops by 80% if you wait longer than 5 minutes to respond.

Prospects and customers are not ready to wait. They need an immediate response to their queries. Internal confusion often becomes the reason for the delay in response.

Sometimes, the marketing team doesn’t share the information with the sales team on time, or the customer support executive assumes that the other teammate might have taken care of the query. Such delays create a bad impression on the clients.

“If you don’t take care of your customer your competitors will” – Bob Hooey

How can shared inbox help?

With a shared inbox, you can address to client’s issues more promptly in real-time. There is no dependency for information on anyone, so you can act quickly. You can easily assign the email messages to any person in the team and ask them to handle it further. Moreover, with a simple set of rules, you can even unassign the message if required.

6. Problem – Haphazard management

Businesses often suffer a drop in profit and revenue when things are not managed properly. With a long to-do list, most of the teams find it difficult to manage emails, update records and track feedback on-time. When everything comes together, teams tend to mix and misplace details that cause problems later.

How can shared inbox help?

A shared mailbox makes your life much easier. It helps you in handling the clients’ messages more efficiently. In a shared inbox, you can use tags to create batches of emails for staying organized.

More emphasis can be given on these tags by highlighting them with preferred color. Besides you can even move these tagged emails to a different folder. Tags are the best way to remind yourself about completing a certain task. Moreover, you can also choose to snooze the emails to address the urgent emails faster.

Wrapping up

Whether you need to know about that excellent prospecting email sent by your teammate or you want to know about the discussion your manager had with the client in your absence; everything is in front of you in a shared inbox. Your team can easily coordinate and synchronize work. With information flowing freely, there is less confusion and more clarity.

You can refer anything at any time without depending on anyone. There is no need of switching between platforms to handle your customers’ messages. You can seamlessly manage everything from one shared email inbox environment and save time.

You can find this excellent feature in an intelligent CRM like Salesmate. It keeps introducing new features for its customers.

Earlier it had taken many initiatives to improve the selling and calling experience of the users. Now with shared inbox, Salesmate aims to bolster the team communication. Check this and many other features by trying Salesmate for free.