Boost team collaboration with a shared inbox solution

What is a shared inbox?

A shared inbox, also known as a shared mailbox or team inbox, is an email account set-up that allows multiple people to receive and send emails from a single email address such as support@yourcompany.com.

Modern customer support teams work cross-functionally and collaboratively across different time zones and departments. While email is a primary mode of communication, it's not the most efficient way to track customer requests in a collaborative environment.

A shared inbox allows CS teams to effectively collaboration, optimize workflows, and keep communication completely transparent.

In addition to exchanging emails, you can also use a shared inbox as a basic customer relationship management (CRM) - to store contacts and integrate them with other applications. This makes it a suitable tool for many customer-facing teams, especially customer support.

Depending on your team’s size and requirements, you can choose to use your Gmail account as a shared inbox or upgrade to a more streamlined email-based helpdesk software like Freshdesk.

What are the benefits of using a shared mailbox?

A shared inbox serves as an ideal email management software for five main reasons:

Budget-friendly

In the initial phase of your business, you might not have the resources to purchase a tool for customer engagement exclusively. So converting your existing mailbox into a shared email inbox is an easy and cost-effective way to engage with your customers.

Perfect for small teams

A one-person army or small group might not require a complex system, especially if the number of customer emails are few. A basic, straightforward shared inbox is enough to keep your team on the same page without any lapses in communication.

Secure and safe

Each member of your team can access your shared inbox using their credentials. When agents log in using their details, their names are captured in each reply. This helps improve accountability without compromising on security.

Single easy point of contact

Driving all your customer queries toward one shared mailbox makes it easier for your agents to stay on top of things and resolve issues promptly. More importantly, it makes it possible for you to filter customer queries to suitable agents.

Reduce response time

Customers expect agents to respond to their emails within an hour, and that's a short timespan to ensure your customers get the answer they are looking for. This problem can be solved using a shared inbox.

You can schedule and send automated messages instantly with a shared inbox. You can analyze the responses sent by your team and create canned responses on your dashboard, making it easier to respond quickly.

Top-10 shared inbox software solutions in 2023

1. Freshdesk

Key Features

Freshdesk’s shared inbox makes it easy to track and manage tickets across your team. Team members can work together to solve customer problems using collaboration features.

Freshworks’ omnichannel capability means you can connect with your customers on their chosen platform, from web and email to social and WhatsApp.

Save your team time and boost productivity with Freshdesk’s built-in automation capabilities. It can auto-assign tickets to streamline workflow and cut down repetitive tasks.

Our software can help your customers help themselves, with forums, chatbots and help widgets to answer common queries and offer solutions.

Pricing

You can get going with Freshdesk with up to two agents for free. There are three pricing options for larger teams offering more features and capabilities to suit your needs.

Why do people like Freshdesk?

People choose Freshdesks because it’s easy to use. You can also completely customize workflows, portals and more to make it work for you and your team.

2. Kayako

Key Features

Kayako is one of the longest-standing customer service platforms, having started out over 13 years ago. Since then, over 30,000 companies have used it to offer customers support.

Kayako lets teams automate workflows and see the whole customer journey from a single view. With everything in one place, your team can communicate with your customers across social, live chat and email without having to switch channels or lose threads.

Pros and cons of Kayako

Pros: Kayako offers a reasonable pricing structure and can grow with your business. It has an easily scalable support platform and can be served from a web host or another hosting service.

Cons: However, the additional features are only available in the more expensive pricing options, and it does lack some basic features that other competitors have as standard. Kayako’s interface is a little clunky and difficult to follow compared with some newcomers in the market. The cluttered interface can make it hard to search for specific features when you need them.

3. Help Scout

Key Features

Help Scout is designed to reduce the time required to train your team on using the software thanks to its simple-to-use interface and scalable product. Not only does it support as many email addresses as you need, but it lets you manage several products or brands from a single account.

Pros and cons of Help Scout

Pros: Help Scout’s interface is simple and easy to use for tracking emails and replies. The workflows can automate repetitive tasks and the tagging system helps with managing multiple queries at once.

Cons: However, the software doesn’t have a spam filter so your team may waste time filtering through spam emails. The reporting features are quite top level, and there is little room for customization in the Knowledge Base.  

4. HubSpot Service Hub

Key Features

Included in HubSpot’s CRM platform, the streamlined customer support software has multi-channel communication and ticket prioritization automation so your team can address the most important requests first.

Pros and cons of HubSpot Service Hub

Pros: HubSpot offers a range of flexible subscription plans so it works well for small and large businesses alike. There’s even a free tier that offers ticketing, reporting and live chat.

Cons: However, HubSpot’s automation features fall short of some of its competitors. Pricing also increases with the number of contacts so it can be an expensive option for larger teams.

5. Hiver

Key Features

Hiver is perfect for businesses that use Gmail because it helps you manage customer support and sales directly from your Gmail account. It gives you all the tools to provide excellent customer support without the complex helpdesks of many competitors.

Pros and cons of Hiver

Pros: Built for Gmail and G Suite, Hiver is great for Google software users. Without the usual Helpdesk set up, it can be a streamlined and efficient way to provide customer service.

Cons: However, Hiver lacks some functionality and features as it doesn’t have a Helpdesk setup. It is also more expensive than some, and price plans change regularly as newer features are rolled out.

6. Groove

Key Features

Groove is a sales engagement platform geared towards sales leaders. With smart features like Campaign Automation, it shows you multi-step Flows across channels to capture your audience where they are and follow up with personalized responses.

Groove also gives you revenue intelligence with tracking and analytics, so you can understand where your sales team is succeeding or needs improvement. Perhaps the biggest selling point of Groove is its integration capabilities with Salesforce.

Pros and cons of Groove

Pros: As a sales-focused software option, Groove is suited to tracking prospects, flows, and sales. It’s a great solution for people working in sales, with automation, integrations, and ease of use, all proving popular with salespeople.

Cons: The product is not suited for customer service-related queries. 

Compare Freshdesk with other help desk software

7. Helpwise

Key Features

With its simple helpdesk, omnichannel capabilities and multiple integrations with popular software, Helpwise is ideal for small businesses looking to streamline their processes and improve their customer service.

Pros and cons of Helpwise

Pros: Helpwise offers great value for money, it’s easy to use and can integrate with other apps like Slack, Pipedrive, and Asana. 

Cons: Customers have reported that the app is prone to glitches and bugs, which can make using it difficult.  

8. Front

Key Features

Make collaboration on customer service issues simple with Front. Putting personalization at the forefront of every interaction, Front provides fast and accurate responses to common customer service issues.

Pros and cons of Front

Pros: With Front you can draft responses with other teammates to answer complex questions with ease. The software also lets you see customer service history and data for every interaction, so you’re never going into a conversation blind.

Cons: Some users have suggested that Front could benefit from more app integrations and reported that the mobile app feature is limited.

9. Drag

Key Features

Drag is another Helpdesk that connects to your Gmail account. You can view the Helpdesk in list or scrum board view, and categorize and organize your tasks appropriately.

Pros and cons of Drag

Pros: An ideal option for small businesses and startups, Drag has a simple interface with new features and updates being rolled out regularly. 

Cons: Drag’s simplicity can be too basic for customers. 

10. Acquire

Key Features

Designed with medium to large businesses in mind, Acquire lets your team engage with and support customers in real-time across channels. With built-in chatbots to field smart responses to common questions, your team can help those with more complex issues. 

Pros and cons of Acquire

Pros: The functionality and ease of use makes Acquire a popular choice. It also enables your team to actually initiate the chat with real-time visitors to the site, creating a personalized experience.

Cons: Acquire comes with a large price tag as a result of this, and few smaller businesses choose it for that reason.

How to select the right shared inbox software?

Before choosing a shared inbox software for your business, ensure it ticks the following boxes:

• Ease of setup

• Integrates with your current email provider

• Affordable for your existing customer support team size

• Access to insights and automation

With many shared inbox solutions available today, choosing the right one for your customer support team might be confusing. It helps to remember that a good team inbox will enable you to:

• Assign ownership of customer emails

• Categorize and prioritize email requests easily

• Set up different email inbox views

• Access customer information

• Collaborate with team members

• Generate reports to monitor performance

Shared inbox by Freshdesk

A shared inbox might be enough to handle customer emails when you’re starting out. However, as your business scales, using a shared inbox to manage a high volume of customer interactions can be cumbersome. Without a streamlined way to track who is working on what, view recent customer replies, or collaborate within and across teams, it’s going to be impossible to stay on top of all customer conversations using a shared inbox. 

On the other hand, Freshdesk enables email-based ticketing by bringing together a shared inbox, a knowledge base, collaboration, and process optimization capabilities to help your team be more productive and create better customer experiences. Freshdesk allows you to:

Manage customer emails more efficiently

Using multiple color codes to track the progress of emails can sometimes confuse agents and cause delays in resolutions. Freshdesk helps you centralize communication by automatically converting incoming emails into tickets that can be categorized, prioritized, and assigned effortlessly.

Improve team collaboration and resolve issues faster

In customer service, teamwork is essential for solving complex customer issues. 

Freshdesk offers a collaborative workspace where agents can discuss, drop internal notes, and share ownership of tickets with experts from your organization to find the best solutions for customer issues. 

Streamline processes and optimize efforts

Completing repetitive processes manually can bog down agents and affect their productivity. Spending time on ‘busy work’ also impacts key metrics like average response and resolution times that affect customer experience. Freshdesk enables you to ease agent bandwidth by getting the mundane tasks out of the way using workflow automation that runs on different triggers, including keywords and SLA breaches.

Prevent duplication of effort

Responding multiple times to a single query can confuse customers. Freshdesk prevents duplicate replies by informing agents when a ticket is already being worked on using an in-built functionality. Agents can also save responses and email templates to answer FAQs with just one click instead of typing the same messages repeatedly.

Offer intuitive self-service

Most customers today are happy to resolve issues on their own. Launch a comprehensive knowledge base with frequently asked questions and useful guides to enable your customers or email clients to find answers on their own.

A knowledge base is even helpful in freeing up your team’s bandwidth to pick more complex questions.

Track and measure progress

Reporting and analytics help you understand if you are on the right track and spot loopholes in your strategy that need to be fixed.

Leverage Freshdesk's one-click reports and dashboards to get real-time insights on team performance and customer satisfaction, and fine-tune your email management strategy. 

Extend capabilities with app integrations

Equip your agents with more tools and insights to deliver great customer service by integrating with your CRM, G Suite, project management, bug-tracking software, or any other tool your team finds use for using one-click integrations and flexible APIs.