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Working collaboratively in a shared team mailbox has its challenges. Sortd has the solution!
Are you finding that Emails are slipping through the cracks in your team's shared mailbox?
You are not alone. Email was never designed for team collaboration.
Most companies start out with a simple email address to manage customer service, sales, finance and support. But with regular customer inbound, things quickly get disorganized. When a team shares one email account there is no sense of accountability with who is dealing with what and results in a process that doesn’t guarantee any level of service.
Until recently, using Team Inboxes or Shared Mailboxes within Gmail was a slippery slope into a disorganized mess. Teams used to rely on each individual being super organized but the effort required to fight off the endless stream of emails, reply-alls and email chains coming at your every day means that even most organized and well intentioned people run disorganized mailboxes.
But there is a better approach ...
Businesses who have embraced modern team collaboration tools have seen tangible benefits on their bottom line, team delivery and customer service levels.
If your team logs into a shared mailbox (like sales@company.com, support@company.com, finance@company.com etc) to share the workload of incoming emails like sales enquiries, customer service requests etc - you'll know that it can be challenging to keep track of who's dealing with what, and emails tend to slip through the cracks. Some of the challenges you might be accepting are:
- Difficulty assigning emails to team members
- No clarity on who's dealing with which emails
- No way to get a clear overview of what work is in progress
- No way to see which items due for customers are outstanding
- Lack of visibility into how long customers have been waiting for a response
Sortd can be used to manage shared mailboxes, and has all the tools you need to create an exceptional customer experience every time. With Sortd you can see your Inbox, unassigned emails, and everything that's currently in a work in progress state on one screen.
Like in many other parts of business, embracing the right tool for that job can quickly put your team ahead and give you a service and delivery edge over competitors. Running a managed sales, customer service and support team is one of the greatest opportunities to build long term relationships with customers, and word of mouth for your business.
A Team Email solution is easy to set up, low cost and will quickly empower your teams to deliver results.
Sortd’s Shared Inbox and Team Email workspace for Gmail-based teams provide a new way to impress your customers (and your team). Its user experience is baked into the Gmail experience meaning that your team has nothing to learn and runs on top of Gmail and Google Workspace. In Sortd, you can assign emails to anyone on the team from customer support, to customer success or accounts, you can comment on tasks and manage customer requests through a visual workflow.
Before team inboxes, employees used to rely on a single email address, copying and forwarding emails between individuals, or using expensive Help Desks type apps to solve communication problems.
Team email tools and workarounds come in different forms as shown below and enable your team to centralize messages sent to email addresses like support@, help@, service@ etc.
Deciding on the best option for your company means that you need to evaluate what features and functionality you want.
Sortd only shows the Inbox of the account you are logged into in Gmail, so you only need to worry about managing one Inbox - your own. The Inbox of the shared mail account (if you are using a shared mailbox) remains in tact.
The way email is shared with a team in Sortd is via a shared board to the right of the Inbox. Each user who has access to the shared board will see their own Inbox on the left and the same shared board on the right. All that you need do is set up a quick Automation.
In Sortd you can automate everything so that emails sent to any team mailbox will appear on a shard team board for the right people to see and manage.
If you are ready to get started now, click on the button below and we will help you get set up.
Your team is frequently running into issues where they don’t know who is taking on what, emails get lost, responses are slow and your team spends more time coordinating who is doing the work than actually servicing the customer .. then it’s probably time to upgrade to a shared inbox.
Here are a few clear signs that it’s time to consider adopting better email management tool:
Any one of these issues above may be enough of a reason to consider upgrading your to a business-class email solution like Sortd.
Sortd’s team email workspace molds itself to the way that your team likes to work. Rather than expecting your team to adapt itself to the tool, Sortd can be tailored to any team process or workflow. It brings a new dimension of collaboration with total transparency, accountability and flexibility into email.
In Sortd you can select a board layout that works for your team:
Sortd brings email and work management into one system and what’s best is that it works right in Gmail, where your team is most comfortable.
With Sortd there is very little new to learn and it includes added capabilities to keep your team productive (without creating a new layer of work). This means you can deliver exceptional email service and support from the word go (in Gmail).
In the modern remote working world, teams collaborate on Email, Google Spaces, Google Docs, and real-time boards rather than with lengthy status meetings. But while email is the heart of workplace communication when dealing with the outside world — Gmail’s collaboration capabilities are limited. Sortd works alongside all these tools above to provide a comprehensive business-class experience.
Sortd brings teams together and puts everyone on the same page. It takes emails that are buried in personal inboxes and presents teamwork on visual boards, alongside team tasks. It also allows shared email addresses to be visible to the team. Team members can move emails through a visual workflow, comment and @mention each other on a single copy of an email and add next steps and follow-up tasks.
Sortd transforms how teams communicate, both internally and externally and becomes a powerful hub for centralizing communication with customers and suppliers.
Most specialist tools like Support Desks and Help Desks treat the customer like a ticket, rather than like a human. Ticket numbers tends to add complexity in customer communications and often interrupts the flow of natural conversations - requiring the customer to log into the help desk to see the status or resolve their issues.
Sortd is invisible to the customer and helps team build an authentically human way to build a relationship with the customer.
Teams start a customer conversation right in Gmail or delegate customer queries on a visual board. Teams can hand-off work naturally and see what a customer asked for, whether they were copied on the original email or not (with complete access to note and team comments.
This means that you can turn around a response in a far shorter time with less effort, less back-and-forth and without any CCs, BCCs or Email Forwards.
Replying to a customer often requires assistance from your team but in doing so there is always a risk that one of your team members loops the customer into a potentially sensitive internal conversation. Before Sortd, you might rather compose a new email to the team to ensure the customer is not copied. This typically ends up splintering into multiple disparate emails to solve one customer issue.
Sortd’s powerful chat capability solves this problem and keeps everything together in one place. In one view you can see the customer’s email on the left and your team’s chat on the right, alongside notes, next steps and other important information (like customers contact details, attachments, order information, checklists etc). Also, team chat is instant and it makes the flow of communications with @mentions clearer and more action orientated.
When a customer emails a team address or copies two or more people, it’s often unknown who will ultimately respond to the client. The team will either spend time coordinating who will respond or two people will respond to the same issue. This extra overhead is wasted time that could have been redirected to offering better customer service to another client.
In Sortd, when a team member picks up an email or task, or sets a next step, Sortd will show the photo of the team member to indicate that they own the task. This indicator prevents bumping of heads, extra coordination or duplication of work.
Any email and task in Sortd can be assigned or delegated to a team member. This gives your team the power to know who is accountable and responsible for any piece of work or any response to the customer.
Additionally, even if a team member forgets to copy you on an email (after you have assigned it on to them), you can still access the full conversation with the customer from the board. This enables true follow-up and follow-through management, to completion, with clear ownership along the way.
You can also filter any board by assignee and balance work loads knowing how busy everyone on the team is or re-assign work when a team member is out of the office.
Sortd’s team boards are not limited to one type of customer service workflow. You can tailor your boards to manage sales, customer support, customer success and any type of customer-facing workflow that your team needs.
In particular you can add custom properties to add Tags, Input fields, Drop-downs, Notes, Paperwork, Checklists and even CRM type of data. You can also get a task history of how a customer request has changed over time.
Give your team the tools they need to become more productive without adding any extra burden in learning something new. In Sortd you can manage your email like a to do list, you can set reminders and follow-ups or organize anything on a project board.
Eliminating all the busywork gives your team their time back, so that they can speak more regularly with customers, to understand customer problems and sell more - rather than spending time in their inbox
Smart teams know very well that customer service, sales delivery and support channels are a valuable tool to learn more about customer needs. Customer questions, support and inquiries are often also an early signal that can drive upsells and cross-sells.
It is important to keep a look out for the following:
Sortd’s features go well beyond shared mailboxes and it empowers true cross team collaboration. Team’s use Sortd to manage sales pipelines, order management, finance accounts receivable and payable, customer success and project management etc. Not only is it a great tool to managing customer-facing work with customers, partners and suppliers but it is powerful for driving sales-enablement and diving internal workflow processes. Use Sortd’s knowledge base and video library to learn more
So whether you start out with an email alias, email distribution list, a shared mailbox or Google Group, to truly deliver great customer service you need a tool like Sortd to make your team truly customer centric. With over 80,000 users, Sortd has proved to be one of a few tools on the market that teams actually use.
Sortd is built right into Gmail and offers a collaborative email approach. It brings email and work management into one space. No more dropped balls and disappointed customers ... but rather clear ownership of customer work, organized teams and fast turnaround time that delivers better results for customer service teams.
