Your customers are the soul of your business. keeping them happy is crucial to the success of your company. But managing your relationships with your customers isn’t always easy.
Many small and medium-sized businesses use Gmail to answer questions, concerns, and other customer service requests. Everyone on your customer service team needs access to incoming customer requests. To do this, experts recommend creating a shared gmail inbox for your customer support team.
how does it work? how can you set up and manage your google apps shared mailbox? read on to find out what you need to know.
what is a gmail shared inbox?
A shared inbox is an inbox that multiple people can access and use to send and receive email.
A shared gmail mailbox is often used to help sales or support teams manage incoming and outgoing messages. a true shared inbox will have functionality to allow multiple team members to work together.
how it works: an example
To illustrate how a gmail shared inbox works, consider this example. Let’s say you create a shared inbox for your customer support team with the email address support@company.com. to access the shared mailbox, users simply need to log in to their email account. they do not need to create a unique login and password for the shared mailbox.
by creating a shared inbox in gmail, you are allowing all members of your sales or support team to access the inbox to read and respond to emails just as they would if were the sole owners of the inbox.
If a customer sends an email to support @company.com, it will be sent to all members of your customer support team. Regardless of which member of your team responds, the email will be sent from the shared email address. if the customer responds to the email, this response will be sent to all members of your support team. but the client will not see that it was sent to multiple team members. all they will see is that it was sent to the support@company.com email address.
why should you share a google inbox?
There are many reasons why you should consider setting up a shared g suite mailbox for your customer support team. Some of the benefits of a shared gmail inbox include:
- Easier for customers to get in touch with you. Having a shared email address for your entire customer service team makes it easier for customers to remember who contact when they need help.
- increased visibility. all members of your customer service team will have access to all emails sent to the inbox, increasing the visibility and transparency.
- improves collaboration . sending all customer requests to one inbox makes it easier for your customer service team to work together to resolve customer issues.
- faster response time. your customers won’t have to wait until a specific member of the customer support team is available to get a response to their request. instead, an urgent request can be handled by anyone with access to the inbox.
- better customer service. By speeding up your response time, a shared gmail inbox can improve the overall quality of your team’s customer service.
- easy to monitor. monitoring an inbox is as easy as monitoring an individual gmail account, so you won’t need to spend hours training new members of your customer service team.
- grow with your business. As your business grows, so can your shared inbox. you can give new team members access to the shared inbox at any time.
If you want to experience these benefits, your team must share a google inbox to manage customer support requests.
how can you use gmail to create a shared mailbox?
Creating a shared gmail inbox is easy. follow these steps to set one up:
- create a new gmail account for the email address you want to associate with the shared inbox.
- log in to this gmail account and click “settings” and then “view all settings”. you must be on a computer to access these settings.
- click the accounts and import tab.
- Look for the “grant access to your account” section, click “add another account.”
- enter the person’s email address that you would like to add to the shared inbox.
- click “send email to grant access.” the person will receive an email from gmail asking them to confirm that they want access the shared inbox. they must accept this invitation to access the shared inbox.
Now, everyone you give access to will be able to see your shared inbox every time they sign in to their email account. repeat these steps to add additional members of your team to the shared inbox.
how do you revoke someone’s access to your shared gmail account?
If you need to revoke someone’s access to your shared inbox, please visit the same accounts and import tab in your settings. scroll down to the “grant access to your account” section. you should see a list of email addresses that currently have access to your shared inbox. click “remove” next to the email address you want to remove from the shared inbox.
Having trouble granting someone on your team access? If so, please check the email address you’re entering. you can only add other people from your company to your shared inbox, so it won’t work if you try to give someone access using your personal email.
If you still can’t grant someone access, check your settings. the “require user to change password at next login” option should be unchecked. otherwise, you won’t be able to add new users to your shared inbox.
This is one of the drawbacks of using gmail to share an inbox: it can be challenging to manage the permissions of individual members of your team.
why can’t you just share the password of your g suite shared mailbox?
some people don’t understand why they need to follow these steps to create a g suite shared mailbox. They assume that sharing their login information with their team would be a much easier way than using gmail to create a shared mailbox. this method may be easier, but it’s definitely not a good option.
Sharing your password with others is a security risk. the more people have your password, the more likely it is to fall into the wrong hands. To protect your sensitive data, it is essential that you keep your password confidential.
can i use google groups as my shared inbox?
You can use a google group to manage your group email, but you’ll soon discover that google groups weren’t designed to help teams manage customer support. messages Submitted by a google group also include “click here to unsubscribe” which doesn’t look great to your customers. And your group members have no way to assign or prioritize tickets.
what are the benefits of using a google apps shared mailbox?
There is one main benefit of using a google apps shared mailbox: it’s simple and free. Setting up one of these inboxes will only take a few minutes, even if you’re not very tech-savvy. Plus, their customer service team already uses Gmail, so they’re already familiar with how it works. this means your team won’t need to learn a new program to manage your customer service efforts.
read more: 7 best practices for shared mailboxes
what challenges will you face when using a shared gmail inbox?
There are no doubts that there are countless benefits to creating a shared inbox for your customer support team. however, gmail’s shared inbox product is far from perfect.
A shared inbox looks and works like a standard gmail inbox. The standard gmail setup may work fine for an individual account, but it’s not ideal when multiple people use the same inbox. Because of this, you may encounter several challenges when using a shared Gmail inbox, including:
- duplicate efforts
- not responding to requests
- unbalanced workloads
- difficult communication
- no automation
double efforts
There is no way to delegate customer requests to specific members of your team using the gmail shared inbox. As a result, multiple customer service representatives can start working on a request or respond to an email at the same time.
The client may receive two responses from different members of your team, which can create confusion and chaos. duplicating efforts is also an inefficient use of your team’s time. Avoiding this scenario is one of the biggest challenges teams will face when using a shared gmail inbox.
do not respond to requests
Not being able to delegate customer requests to your team members could also cause other problems. For example, let’s say a customer request arrives via email. everyone on your team sees it in the shared inbox, but everyone assumes someone else will handle it. Because everyone makes this assumption, the client never heard from the company from him.
unbalanced workloads
Because you can’t assign tasks to other team members in a shared gmail inbox, there’s no way to make sure everyone on your support team is doing what they’re supposed to. This can lead to unbalanced workloads across the customer support team.
difficulty communicating
There is no way for team members to communicate or collaborate with each other in the shared gmail inbox. this tool does not have built-in communication features, which means your team may need to use a third-party IM or project management tool to discuss a specific task.
Having toggle between an inbox and a third-party tool can complicate things. For example, let’s say a customer service representative uses an instant messaging application to ask his team leader a question about a specific request from a customer named David A. the team leader opens the shared inbox to find the request. However, the team leader accidentally opens a request from a client named David B. instead. because the team leader is analyzing the wrong request, he is providing incorrect information to the representative who is trying to resolve david a’s problem.
can you use a shared gmail inbox for team transparency?
Transparency is one of the keys to providing high-quality customer service. but unfortunately, a shared gmail inbox doesn’t provide much transparency into your team’s efforts.
Remember, there’s no way to see what someone else is working on in a shared gmail inbox, so your team can spend a lot of time duplicating their efforts. If a shared gmail inbox offered more transparency into what other team members are working on, this wouldn’t be a problem.
But that’s not the only transparency issue related to using a shared gmail inbox. There are no reporting features in a shared gmail inbox, which means you won’t be able to access the data you need to assess your team’s performance.
You won’t be able to see how many requests your team receives per day or per week, for example. You also won’t know how long it takes your team to respond to these requests on average. Without this information, it will be difficult for you to make important business decisions that could improve your customer service.
For example, let’s say you don’t know that the volume of incoming requests has been steadily increasing over the last few months. now, his team is handling three times as many requests as before. because the volume of requests has increased so much, they may need additional help.
However, if you don’t have access to this data, there’s no way you’ll know to hire someone else to help your team. As a result, your team will continue to struggle to keep up with the growing number of requests. your team’s response time may slow down, which can reduce the overall quality of your customer service.
the end result? gmail does not provide transparency on the efforts of its team. if you are looking for a shared inbox for team transparency, gmail is not the solution.
how do i set up a shared inbox in gmail?
google workspace and gsuite do not have a native shared mailbox app built into gmail. If you’re looking for a free option, Google recommends you try Google Groups’ collaborative inbox feature.
While this option is free, it lacks many of the features that allow you to collaborate with your team. see more in our article on google’s collaborative inbox feature.
manage a shared mailbox with maintenance
For great customer service, your entire team needs to be involved. maintenance allows everyone on your team to receive, respond to, and assign support emails right from their own mailbox. What? keep lets you turn your gmail, g suite, or google workspace account into a shared mailbox built for teams.
All support emails from your group email are organized in a new section of your mailbox and are separated from your regular emails. this makes it easier for your team to juggle your customer support efforts and the rest of your workload.
keep allows you to turn your gmail, g suite, or google workspace account into a shared mailbox built for teams.
maintain gives you access to the features your team needs to communicate and collaborate on support requests. for example, maintain allows you to assign tickets to other team members so everyone knows which support emails they’re responsible for and nothing goes unanswered.
Whether your team is two people or 200, maintaining it can help you streamline your customer support efforts.
everything you need to manage your shared gmail inbox
keeping was designed to serve as a shared gmail inbox for teams that do more than just provide customer service. some of the many features of keeping include:
- task assignment: maintenance turns every gmail email in your shared inbox into an assignable help desk ticket so you can share the workload with your team.
- Status Updates: Change the status of tickets in your shared inbox to open, closed, or pending so you can keep track of everything that’s in your team’s plate.
- Shared Notes: Communicate with your team to follow up on a task, ask a question, or provide general information about a task in real time using the shared email notes feature.
- shared templates: Save time responding to FAQs by inserting a response template instead of manually typing the response over and over again.
- reports: check metric as the volume of incoming requests, average queries per day, and average time to first reply.
- workflows: use “if/then” logic to automate the time-consuming tasks like assigning emails, prioritizing tickets, and removing spam from your team’s inbox.
- collision detection: keep kills Duplicate efforts by preventing multiple people on your team working on the same customer support request.
- Third-Party Integrations: Connect to your favorite tools, including shopify, google sheets, slack, crm or project management tool so that all your data is available in your gmail inbox.
benefits of using keeping as a g suite shared mailbox
Your entire team, and your clients, can benefit from using keeping as a shared g suite mailbox. here’s how:
- maintain makes sharing the workload easier, so your clients’ emails don’t fall on one person’s shoulders.
- keep provides transparency on what everyone is working on so your team doesn’t waste time duplicating someone else’s efforts.
- because your inbox will remain Organized, nothing will go unnoticed, which means customers get faster, better support when they need it.
- You won’t need to log in and out of multiple accounts to manage your email inbox. your team and your personal work inbox. maintain brings it all together in one place.
- maintain provides the collaboration tools your team needs to work together and provide the best customer service possible.
- Automation, templates and other features can save your team a significant amount of time and improve their efficiency.
- maintaining gives you access to the data you need to make important business decisions that could improve your customer service.
maintenance vs. other shared inbox tools
- It’s invisible to your customers. Your customers will never know you’re using keeping to manage your customer service efforts. they won’t see any confusing help desk jargon like “case id” or “reply above this line” when emailing your support team. all they’ll see is a friendly email sent from your team’s support account.
- works inside your gmail inbox. your team won’t need to log in to a new program or learn how to use a new tool to use maintenance. why? keep work right in your gmail inbox, which is where you already spend a good chunk of your day.
- your data will always belong to you. other tools on the desk help your data will be kept if you stop using their services. but that’s not how keep works. we believe your data should always belong to you, so your emails will remain in your email accounts even if you decide to stop using our services.
- help is always available. If you need help, someone from our support team is ready to help. you will never talk to a chatbot. when you seek help, you will always be connected to a real, living human being.
frequently asked questions
how does maintenance work?
When you sign up to save, we’ll ask you to forward email from your shared team account to our servers. then maintenance will automatically forward a copy of each email sent to this shared account to your team members’ work accounts. All of these forwarded emails will be stored in a Gmail folder called “Help Desk,” which is located directly below the drafts folder in your inbox. this keeps your inbox organized and helps you balance customer service and the rest of your work duties.
what does the chrome extension do?
You will need to install the chrome extension to access all of the keeping features, including assigning tasks, updating task statuses, and exchanging notes with team members. These features will be available within your gmail inbox once the chrome extension has been installed.
Does keeping have email templates?
yes, you can create your own snippets and templates in our knowledge base to easily answer repetitive questions.
does it keep working with gmail on my mobile phone?
yes, you can access all keeping features from any iphone or android device.
what is a gmail shared mailbox?
a gmail shared mailbox is an inbox that multiple people can access to read and reply to emails.
what are shared mailboxes for?
Support teams often use shared mailboxes to read and respond to incoming customer support requests. Using a shared mailbox allows a customer support team to work together to resolve incoming requests.
can a gmail account have multiple users?
gmail’s “mail delegation” feature allows you to add multiple users to your gmail account. however, there is a limit to the number of users you can add. furthermore, mail delegation was not designed for customer service teams, so it wasn’t built with the features you need to effectively handle customer service requests. For these reasons, it’s better to use maintenance as a shared gmail mailbox instead of relying on mailbox delegation.