Email communication is an important part of any business. But have you ever thought about how much of your time is spent reading and responding to these emails? A survey by Adobe says that people spend nearly 3.1 hours daily on email, which amounts to 15 hours a week and a total of 20 whole weeks.

And once your business grows, the influx of emails would be even higher, demanding more time and human resources from you.

This is where the shared inbox software can be handy; specifically, for efficient and seamless functioning of business and better productivity of your teams.

Let’s have a look into what shared inbox software is, its benefits, and, equally, five shared inbox tools to enhance your collaboration among the teams.

What is Shared Inbox Software?

Shared inbox software, also known as email collaboration software, is used by businesses or companies to manage the influx of emails to their public email id. Facilitating teamwork, simultaneously, this collaborative platform consolidates emails, fostering joint efforts among team members to efficiently respond and collaborate on messages. Shared inbox software can integrate multiple email accounts into one inbox for better management.

Why Shift to Shared Inbox Software?

As a business, it is normal to receive a bulk of emails every day in the form of customer inquiries. But it becomes difficult for teams to keep track of reverts they need to provide or collaborate to do the email management.

To address potential task overlaps, incorporating shared inbox software ensures seamless collaboration. This eliminates the risk of conflicting responses to a single email query. You need to switch to a shared inbox software for better email management in all or either of the following cases:

1. If duplicate or contradictory replies to your customers are becoming a growing concern due to a lack of coordination within the team.
2. This enables the team members to seamlessly connect with customers across various channels.
3. If you find it hard to organise and manage customer-facing emails based on their categories and departments.
4. If team members are not ready to take the ownership or accountability of responding to emails.

5. If there is a perception of limited access to customer emails among all team members, however, a lack of transparency persists.

Some Common Features of Shared Inbox Software

Below are some of the common features and benefits of shared inbox software that help businesses in better email management:

1. Group email management enables the access and management of the email address at one central location.
2. Collision detection lets the team members know who else is working on the same email, thus preventing sending different replies to the same customer.
3. Internal discussions and notes feature, likewise, enables communication among team members, simplifying the process of replying to the customers.
4. Insights and analytics are useful to understand the response performance and time of the team. This helps further track the processes and identify the areas that require improvement.

8 Best Shared Inbox Software

1. Saufter: Saufter provides all-in-one helpdesk software and omnichannel communication with features like email integration, live chat integration, social media integration, and Shopify integration. This enables the team members to connect with the customers through multiple channels; similarly, it fosters effective communication and engagement. The best things about Saufter are:

1. It can set automation for repetitive tasks like email or message replies, thus saving time and effort.
2. Facilitates auto-response to product inquiries
3. Automated deals and discounts are being offered.

2. Help Scout: Help Scout is a seamless inbox software that gives immediate access to the sender’s full profile and has many good features. It enables:

1. Multi-channel communication means it can manage email, live chat, and phone conversations from a single mailbox.
2. Collision detection through real-time detectors shows when someone else is replying to a request.
3. Advanced search with the help of search operators, advanced filters, bulk actions, and quick views.

3. Outlook shared mailbox: It’s suited for smaller teams. You can create a shared inbox without additional costs if you already have an Outlook account. It has a few limitations; however, like not having enough bells and whistles.

4. Google collaborative inbox: This is again a free shared inbox tool available to businesses with a Google Workspace account. Some of the key features of this tool are:

1. It will provide you with a group email address; thus, multiple people can respond from one email ID without sharing any login credentials, resolving the major security issue.
2. It enables you to set the status for certain conversations.
3. It also allows you to set different permission levels for collaborators. However, this feature has limitations.

5. Hiver: It is a Google Chrome extension that adds many features to your Gmail inbox and turns it into a shared inbox. It comes with a lot of powerful features like:

1. Better email management by turning emails into actionable tasks and assigning them to designated owners.
2. It provides email tags that help categorise customer issues.
3. Shared drafts, simultaneously, enable teams to collaborate on email responses and determine the best solutions for the customers.

6. Front: It is an integrated shared inbox tool that manages all the accounts in one place and saves time. Through this, simultaneously, you can manage personal and shared email addresses to respond to messages. Some of its features are:

1. Collaborative features like internal comments.
2. Advanced options like analytics, automation, and CRM integration.
3. Responding options to all the accounts like emails, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, and live chat, all within the app.
4. Editing of email as a team, like with Google docs.
5. With Front, you can connect your inbox to over 50 apps.

7. Outpost: It is another shared inbox tool suitable for small teams. You can work with general inboxes whichever email provider you use with Outpost. The tool has features like:

1. Share internal notes among teammates to reduce the necessity of sending emails to representatives. Also, team members can discuss a particular email through these notes.
2. A collision alert lets you see who is working on an email, preventing sending two different responses to the same customer.

8. Kayako: This shared inbox tool unifies customers’ interactions across email, Facebook, Twitter, and live chat channels. This tool enables you to:

1. Gain insights on customer satisfaction and first reply time.
2. Collaborate behind the scenes in chat to discuss and ask questions and to ensure that the customers receive correct and relevant information.
3. Automated assigning of emails based on their content.

Conclusion

Managing a shared inbox is quite comfortable. It is the easiest way to help teams collaboratively manage projects from their inboxes. Simultaneously, empower teams with a unified platform, streamlining email management. Seamlessly track customer emails, furthermore, swiftly resolve issues, and efficiently reassign tasks to relevant teams, all within one integrated system. If you want to streamline your business communication and email management, additionally, you must consider giving it a try for enhanced work processes and productivity.