The best dynamic that a business can put together is teamwork. When your team is working like a team, you can deliver your best service and product.
To get that beautiful team dynamic, you need strong connections. Items like email collaboration are a great way to bring your team dynamic together.
Not sure how best you can get email collaboration up and running? Here we have an easy guide to put you on the right path.
1. Understanding Your Needs and The Tools Available
The major purpose of a shared inbox and email collaboration is to have a singular source where your company can receive and deal with major business emails.
To start this off, you need to understand where you are coming from and what your company needs. A small business doesn’t have the same logistical requirements of a major company.
The number of employees you are working with and what tools you aim to use are important terms to understand. Helpwise is a strong shared inbox with a great number of features to help a customer support team of any size.
Think also on whether this shared inbox will be for inter-team communication, for customer service, for marketing, or a mix of everything.
2. Establish Employee Login Organization
When you have your team and you have your tools, you need to make sure that everyone gets proper employee logins. This can be a simple step, but it is important to recognize.
You have two options, depending on if you are using one simple email address or a shared inbox. The differences can be quite large.
Who has access and does not is a strong security move. An open email account containing lots of business and client information is a disaster waiting to happen.
Instead, having each person have their own private access to the account allows you to monitor what each person has done. This can be good for recognizing mistakes and catching positive impacts.
3. Tutorials to Proper Email Usage
For the first few days, you will need to make sure your team understands the features of this shared inbox. This can sometimes be longer depending on the size of the team.
As with all things in your business, you need your employees to be accurate in their dealings. A misclick or wrong move can erase hours of work or send incomplete or inaccurate emails to clients.
Helpwise can walk you through our features and have great guides on getting the most out of your shared inbox. Helpwise also integrates into Gmail, Zapier, and JustCall, letting you operate on some familiar ground if need be.
4. Categorize Saved Data
With many shared inboxes, the organization will be different than a single email account, but it can be more powerful overall.
You will need to ensure there is a clear categorization of data. What is client invoices, what is company policy documents, what is new marketing documents? You can categorize all of this with easy keywords.
Even better, with a solid-shared inbox system, anyone can access these keywords with an easy search. This search engine approach allows for quick recovery of even the oldest cataloged file.
5. Avoiding Collision
Collision is when two or more employees all do the same task at once. This is most awkward when sending the same reply to the client multiple times, but even with duplicates of documents, it wastes precious time
A shared inbox can use a ticket system to assign certain employees to a project. Only when the ticket moves forward will other members know that an employee helped the customer.
This allows you to keep track of how certain issues are being handled and keeps other employees from needing to check on each other.
When a ticket gets delayed for too long, that is when management can step in and figure what has stopped progress and fix it. This allows employees to focus on their own tasks instead of worrying about customers.
6. Setting Up Automation
Automation is a growing powerhouse in all aspects of business and communication is key. While personal responses are good for specific questions and elaborate customer needs.
So, for much of customer responses, an automated response can be a great way to alleviate employee work. If a customer needs a simple question, an FAQ can help to answer the frequent questions.
If a customer’s concerns are deeper than an automated response to get more information can be a great way to save employee some initial questions.
Even if an employee must get involved for most of the customer service, an automated greeting can make sure no customer is waiting for a response.
7. Internal Discussions
By categorizing your data and each person having a contact email, you can create back and forth discussions for business questions and conflicts.
Uncertain about how to handle a customer’s problem? Email to a manager or veteran employee is quick and you can categorize these questions with keywords so the employee you are asking can notice it.
This allows questions and discussions to flourish. These can even become public announcements to help educate all of your employees.
8. Broadcasting Market Analytics
Alongside problems, you can have the entire feedback from how your finances and marketing have done. If you use your shared inbox for marketing deals and such, this can be great to categorize them for later discussion.
Getting so much data on all your employee’s work and progress in one place is a great way to understand how to move forward.
9. Coordinating New Customer Details
As customers contact you, you can categorize their information. This can be from complaints, compliments, or simple questions, all of which can be useful.
This information, like all business data, gives you a better glimpse into how well your company works. The number of compliments over complaints is good. Which questions get asked shows what may be confusing in your products.
The demographics of your product effect can be a big deal. This will help future marketing and product design.
All of this comes with automatic cataloging with keywords and seen by whichever employees need to see it. It will give you strong control over the data that can guide your company’s future.
Getting the Most From Email Collaboration
Setting up your email collaboration is not a backbreaking process. Now that you have a better grasp of what it all entails, you are one big step forward towards having a cohesive customer service machine!
Organization and structure are key facets of business, and Helpwise helps you build them up with a powerful shared inbox. A shared email structure is only the beginning. Try out a free trial today! You can Copy email or Open in Gmail
