As your team expands and your customer communication becomes increasingly complex, the convenient method of cc’ing relevant team members is no more so convenient. To achieve seamless coordination and ensure a streamlined customer service experience, setting up a shared inbox is a logical next step for your business.
If you’re an Outlook user looking to improve your team’s collaboration and customer support, you’re in the right place. In this guide, we’re explaining how you can easily add a shared inbox to Outlook and level up your customer service.
A shared inbox is a mailbox that a group of people can manage using a public email account, such as contact@helpwise.io.
When an email is sent to the shared inbox address, it’s visible to all authorized users. Each team member can view incoming messages, read and respond to customer queries, and create new emails. Since all users have access to the same inbox, they can work collaboratively to ensure that no email goes unattended.
If your business experiences any of the following signs it’s time to use a shared inbox:
1. No one knows who has handled a customer request, nor what solution they offered.
2. Different employees reply to the same customer with duplicate or contradictory solutions.
3. Customers send follow-up emails for requests that they haven’t received a response to.
4. Managing your customer service team is unnecessarily difficult. You have no insights into email volume, response speed, who is responding to what, or how satisfied your customers are with your service and support.
5. It’s difficult to assign tasks to team members or discuss projects without forwarding emails.
You can resolve these issues by giving your team members access to a shared mailbox. Here’s how you do it.
The exact process may vary slightly depending on the version of Outlook you are using and your organization’s email setup. Here is a general guide to add a shared inbox to Outlook:
Note: Before proceeding, ensure that you have admin rights to access and manage shared mailboxes in your organization.
You can take additional steps to protect your shared inbox. Adjust permissions based on the team’s roles and responsibilities:
Your shared mailbox is all set now. Mind that your shared mailbox will store up to 50GB of data without requiring an Exchange Online Plan 2 license. Once you exceed the limit, you’ll need to obtain the license to continue to receive and send emails with your shared account.
After you’ve carried out the steps add a shared inbox to Outlook, authorized members gain access to a centralized mailbox where they can collectively read, respond to, and manage customer emails. Here’s how it works:
You’re finally ready to enjoy the benefits of shared inbox for a small business!
Outlook’s shared inboxes offer businesses numerous advantages. These five have the biggest impact on your business growth and customer relationships:
With a shared inbox, every customer request is visible to all team members who have access rights. It means team members and managers can easily see who has handled a particular request and how they did it.
A shared inbox ensures that all team members have access to context i.e. previous customer interactions, avoiding duplicate or contradictory solutions. This consistency in responses helps maintain a unified and professional image in your customer communications.
Shared inboxes facilitate a collaborative approach to managing emails, reducing the chances of emails slipping through the cracks. Even if a team member is out of the office, someone else can respond and keep customers happy.
Shared inboxes enable a streamlined workflow by centralizing all customer emails in one place. This eliminates the need to search through individual inboxes, saving time and effort for your team members.
By minimizing the chances of emails being overlooked or lost, a shared inbox ensures that customers receive timely and accurate responses. This proactive approach contributes to an enhanced overall customer experience.
You’ll want to make a few final adjustments to ensure your Outlook shared inbox functions properly.
First, configure the inbox so everyone can see all the sent items. By default, sent messages are saved in the “Sent” folder of the sender. To allow everyone to see the Sent email, go to the admin center and select Sent items > Edit.
Many businesses like to set up auto-replies for their public email addresses. To do this, go to the Admin center, go to groups and shared mailboxes, and select the shared mailbox you wish to send the auto-reply from. Select automatic replies and select edit. Here you can turn auto-replies on, enter the message, and choose if the email will be sent to people inside the organization, outside it, or both.
To make the most of your shared mailbox, stick to the best practices we’ve covered in our recent guide to shared inbox management.
As your business grows, relying solely on a shared mailbox in Outlook may not suffice. To effectively handle and manage all customer conversations in one centralized place, consider a growth-oriented solution like Helpwise.
Helpwise offers a comprehensive platform that consolidates emails, social media messages, WhatsApp messages, and live chats into a single interface. By using Helpwise, your team gains the ability to collaborate on emails and efficiently assign tasks directly within the shared inbox – a capability not present in the standard Outlook shared mailbox.
A shared inbox in Outlook is a mailbox that allows a group of people within an organization to collectively manage and access incoming emails from a shared email address. Only Microsoft 365 users can create and access a shared mailbox in Outlook.
A shared mailbox in Outlook is primarily used for collaborative email management, where a group of users can collectively send, receive, and respond to emails from a shared email account. All users with access rights can view the same set of emails, ensuring no messages are overlooked, and each user’s actions are synchronized across the mailbox.
On the other hand, a public folder serves as a versatile container for sharing various types of content, including emails, files, contacts, and calendar items within an organization. Users can access the stored items based on their assigned permissions, and public folders have a distinct identity separate from individual users, with emails sent on behalf of the folder.
In Microsoft Outlook, the location of a shared inbox varies depending on your Outlook version and email configuration. More often than not, you can access it in the left-hand navigation pane, if you scroll down until you see the “Folder List” section. Your shared inbox will be in the “Shared Mailboxes” or “All Mailboxes” category.
Note: By default, all selected team members should have access to the shared inbox in their Outlook account. Each member will need to restart Outlook for it to appear. If it does not appear, go back to the shared mailbox settings via the admin center and enable automapping.
A shared mailbox is free for Microsoft 365 license holders. So to create a shared inbox in Outlook, you need to be a paid Microsoft 365 user.
Business plans in Microsoft 365 start at $6/user/month and can reach $22/user/month in a premium package.
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