Help Scout: A Team Inbox Built for Customer Support
Anyone who’s worked in customer support knows it’s best played as a team sport. Strong individual contributors matter, but the real magic happens when working together.
In order to create an environment conducive to collaboration, you need the right tools — and one of the most important is a team inbox.
What is a team inbox?
A team inbox is a shared mailbox where multiple agents can manage and collaborate on customer conversations from a single email address (support@, help@, etc.).
Team inboxes also generally include tools to improve productivity, like automations, as well as reporting features that help you understand team performance and analyze support trends.
The benefits of using a team inbox tool
The biggest benefits of having a team inbox are increases in team productivity, collaboration, and transparency. For example, with a team inbox, you can automate tasks like assigning conversations, or you can use saved replies to quickly respond to frequently asked questions.
With private notes, your team can collaborate on complex problems and learn from one another, building knowledge while also providing the best answers possible to customers. A team inbox also gives every agent access to a customer's full history of support requests, so customers never have to repeat themselves.
Finally, reports provide you with key insights to understand where you’re excelling and where there are opportunities to improve. For example, with a team inbox, you’re able to see what times of day are busiest and can schedule your team accordingly.
Key features of Help Scout's team inbox
Over the last 10 years of supporting customer service teams, we’ve learned some incredibly valuable lessons. Those lessons helped us build a refined team inbox that creates a great customer — and agent — experience.
Multichannel support
Part of creating a great customer experience is communicating with customers where they’re most comfortable. With Help Scout, whether your customers prefer to reach out via live chat, email, or phone, you can easily manage all of those conversations in one mailbox.
Workflows
Some manual tasks in support are inevitable, but not all of them have to be. Use workflows to automate routine tasks like assigning conversations based on rules you set. You can set up fully automated workflows or create manual workflows that need to be triggered in each instance.
Saved replies
Manually responding to frequently asked questions may not be the best use of your time. Quickly address common inquiries and focus more on complex cases using saved replies. They can also function as a great training tool for anyone new to the team.
Reporting
Analyze conversation trends, see team performance, and much more to understand where you’re excelling in your support efforts and where you have room for improvement. Easy-to-read dashboards and custom report building capabilities make it easy to stay informed and perform at your best.
Customer profiles
The last thing customers want to do is repeat themselves. Customer profiles let you see past conversations and add notes so there’s no guessing for future interactions. Best of all, they’re created automatically and are incredibly easy to update.
Empower your team to do their best work and create stronger customer relationships with Help Scout. Start your free trial today.
Jesse Short
After spending a few years working as a support agent, Jesse made the switch to writing full-time. He is a Help Scout alum, where he worked to help improve the agent and customer experience.
