An owner and a status
Every enquiry becomes a ticket with one owner and a status: open, pending, resolved or closed. Anyone can see who has a case without asking.
Shared inbox or help desk
Shared inbox or help desk: when a shared mailbox stops working
A shared inbox is enough while two or three people answer customers from one mailbox. Around the fourth person it starts to fail: two people answer the same email, nobody knows who has a case, and a customer calls a second time because nobody got back to them. A help desk fixes that by giving every enquiry an owner and a status.
Symptoms
Signs that your shared inbox has stopped working
- Two people answer the same email, sometimes with two different answers.
- Nobody can say who has a case without asking around the office.
- A customer calls because nobody replied, and whoever picks up cannot see the email thread.
- Flags, folders and “I'll take this one” messages in a group chat do the work of a system.
- A case waits for a week because the one person who knew about it is on holiday.
- Nobody can say how long customers wait for a first answer.
Why it happens
Why a shared inbox lasts until about the fourth person
A shared inbox works on agreements nobody writes down. With two or three people, everyone hears everyone: “I've got the one from the builder” said across the desk is enough, and the mailbox needs no more structure than that.
With four or more, people start different shifts, sit in different rooms, take holidays at different times and cover different channels. The spoken agreement stops reaching everybody. Nothing about the mailbox has changed; the team has outgrown it. And the inbox only holds email, so the phone call and the Messenger message about the same problem were never in it to begin with.
The difference
What a help desk adds to a shared inbox
The mailbox stays; what changes is that each email becomes a ticket. Here is what that gives a team in ZynTrail.
Who else is in the ticket
Colleagues who have the same ticket open show as avatars, and you see when one of them is typing. If two people change the status at the same moment, the second is told.
One thread per customer
When the same person writes again, the message joins their open ticket instead of starting a new one. An email reply to a solved ticket reopens it.
Several mailboxes, each to its department
info@, sales@ and support@ can each feed their own department, and the reply goes out from the mailbox the ticket came in on. Start has 1 mailbox, Business 2, Pro 5 and Enterprise no limit; more than one department needs Business and up.
A tracking link for the customer
Every email reply carries a personal link where the customer sees the status and the correspondence, and can reply. The tracking page needs no account and works for 30 days.
Internal notes
Notes the customer never sees sit in the same thread, so nobody forwards an email to a colleague just to ask a question about it.
Moving over
You keep your email address
Switching to a help desk does not mean a new address. ZynTrail connects to the mailbox you already have over IMAP and SMTP (Gmail, Microsoft or Exchange, Yahoo or your hosting provider's mail server), checks it every 15 seconds, and does not move or delete anything in it. Customers keep writing to the same address.
Each mailbox can also send its own “we have your request” email with the tracking link, and a “ticket closed” email. When the other channels join, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp and the website chat land in the same queue.
Honestly
When a shared inbox is still enough
A shared inbox is still enough when one or two people answer a modest amount of email, all of it to one address, and they sit close enough to tell each other what they are doing. A help desk would add steps there without solving a problem you have.
The same goes for a mailbox that mostly receives notifications rather than customers. Switch when you see the signs listed above, not because the team has reached a number. If you are not sure, the 30-day trial is long enough to run your real email through it and compare.
Before you write to us
Questions about moving from a shared inbox
What is the difference between a shared inbox and a help desk?
A shared inbox is one mailbox that several people read and answer from. A help desk turns each message into a ticket with an owner, a status and a history, so the team can see who is handling what.
Do we have to change our email address?
No. You connect the mailbox you already have over IMAP and SMTP. ZynTrail checks it every 15 seconds and does not move or delete anything in it.
Can two people work on the same ticket?
Yes. Each sees who else has the ticket open and when someone is typing, and internal notes let them discuss the case inside the ticket. If both change the status at the same moment, the second person is told.
How many mailboxes can we connect?
Start has 1, Business 2, Pro 5 and Enterprise as many as you need. Each mailbox can feed its own department; more than one department needs Business and up.
Can the customer see what is happening with their request?
Yes. Each email reply includes a personal link to the ticket that shows its status and the correspondence, and lets the customer reply. It needs no account and works for 30 days.
See it against your own case
Tell us how many people answer customers and which channels your enquiries come in on. We will walk you through the screens your team would actually use, with your own case in place of a demo script.
Every plan starts with a 30-day trial of the Pro features, which is everything except telephony.