Three people handle customer email. When volume was low, forwarding messages and adding 'can you take this?' worked. Now we have duplicate replies, unanswered threads because everyone assumes someone else owns them, and a lot of archaeology in sent mail.
I am not convinced we need a huge help-desk platform, but we clearly need visible ownership and status. At what point did you move from a normal shared mailbox to something more structured, and what was the minimum feature that actually solved the problem?
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We moved away from forwarding and into a shared inbox view once the same issue got touched by three people in one afternoon. The minimum tha...
We moved away from forwarding and into a shared inbox view once the same issue got touched by three people in one afternoon. The minimum that helped was one owner per thread and a way to mark it waiting on customer or waiting on us.
Yep. Even a label system works if everyone uses it. We had three labels and a rule that nobody replied unless they owned the label.
The owner part is the real fix. We used a spreadsheet for a while and it was ugly, but at least customers stopped getting two answers.
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I would start with statuses before software. If the team can see open, waiting, done, and who last touched it, the chaos drops fast.
I would start with statuses before software. If the team can see open, waiting, done, and who last touched it, the chaos drops fast.
This. We used one inbox and a sticky rule: if you moved it, you wrote what happened in the subject line.
I’d be careful not to let the tool become the project. The process question is more important than whether the box is colorful.