Why Your Shared Inbox Is Missing the Mark (and How to Fix It)

Your business is growing, and even though this is always what you have wanted, the growth comes with stress. Managing customers, sales, emails, and more can become more challenging as your business grows.

Luckily, a shared inbox can help you in these aspects and more. Is your shared inbox just not cutting it anymore? Use our guide to improve your shared inbox:

How to Improve Your Shared Inbox

Your shared inbox could be failing for several reasons. Maybe the interface is not working out or the features aren’t very beneficial to your company.

Some drawbacks of a shared inbox could include customers receiving multiple responses or none at all because of a lack of accountability. Organizing can get difficult when working with a shared inbox. A higher-up often has little oversight when it comes to a shared inbox.

Accountability and collaboration are necessary when using a shared inbox. These characteristics can affect the performance of the employees which will affect the customer experience.

A shared inbox should incorporate collaboration and support software to work properly. If you need to know how to improve a shared inbox, follow these great tips:

Create Rules

Your employees may be using a shared inbox as a primary tool. If this is the case for your company, adding clear and concise rules could make everyone’s workflow easier.

Accountability is a great thing to think about when deciding on rules. Building accountability can be done by assigning certain hours of the day to employees so that there is no overlap. You can also assign specific emails to each employee.

Overlap can cause customers to believe your company is unorganized. Creating these rules can also ensure that every customer gets responded to. If a customer has an issue and doesn’t receive a response, you will most likely lose their business.

New employees should be trained in a shared inbox. Coordination is key when managing a shared inbox. The addition of rules can make the flow of coordination easy.

Record Responses

Responses should be recorded outside of the shared mailbox. These responses can be used as a guide to help your employees answer customer questions with ease.

A template can be made for employee use after they answer a customer question. A guide can be made from this to help customer support solve even the most complicated issues. Common issues should especially be recorded and used as a guide.

These recorded responses should be in a shared space where all employees can access it when needed. This can make life easier for those new to the job.

All responses should be recorded so others can benefit. It is also a good idea to record any problems the company faces such as unexpected outages, shipping delays, etc. When an issue like this occurs again, a guide can walk everyone through it.

Make Folders

A shared mailbox should have many folders for organization. Folders can be used to sort the daily mail coming through. You can organize folders so that they make sense for you and your company.

You can have folders for common topics, miscellaneous issues, in-progress conversations, etc. Employees can be assigned a folder depending on what they are best at.

Security

Even though a shared inbox is shared, security is still an important issue to consider. For maximum security, you should look for a shared inbox that allows each employee to log in with their password. With this setup, employees do not have to shared passwords with anyone.

This not only benefits your company in the security aspect, but it can also help productivity. You also need to consider customer security when you have a shared inbox.

In a shared inbox, you will be dealing with sensitive customer information, data, and business insights. You’ll need to create extra rules to protect this information.

Changing passwords frequently can ensure that there is not a breach. Your employees should not be sharing passwords, this includes writing them out on sticky notes and leaving them somewhere. The shared inbox should not be used for personal emails or used with an unsecured Wi-Fi network.

When an employee no longer works for your company, change passwords, or take them off of the shared inbox. Losing data could mean losing business. Keep up safe practices within a shared inbox to improve security.

Prioritize Your Shared Inbox

Customers expect a response from a company when they have any questions or issues. Even just one email getting ignored could cause problems for your company.

As long as you incorporate rules and safe shared inbox practices, your customers will get the responses they need and continue business with you. Prioritizing the shared inbox can bring a lot of business in.

Your employees should reach inbox zero every day. Getting through customer emails quickly and efficiently can prevent the backlog from occurring. When the shared inbox has a backlog, the more likely you are to miss an email.

Inbox zero can be reached daily if each employee knows exactly what emails they need to be responding to. Creating rules recorded responses, and folders are all tools that will help your employees reach inbox zero.

Fix My Shared Inbox Made Simple

Now that you know how to improve my shared inbox, your company can reap all of the great benefits. A shared inbox with a friendly interface can allow collaboration within the team. Shared inboxes can include key metric features that can easily measure performance so that it can be improved.

Your business needs a shared inbox that will improve your company as a whole. You can schedule demo with Helpwise today!