There are over 4 billion daily email users – making email the most widely used form of work communication. Whenever anyone has a question, whether it’s your team member, customer, or anyone seeking your help, they’re likely to send you an email.
However, the problem with collaborating through email is that it’s messy.
With forwarding, CC’ing, and group email addresses, a simple question can diverge into an impossible-to-follow chain of replies. That’s where shared inboxes come into play – they solve these issues, making you and your team work more efficiently.
In this post, you’ll learn about the 13 best shared inbox tools to help you manage your team.
What Is a Shared Inbox?
A shared inbox is an email inbox that multiple team members can access to send and receive emails.
It’s common for companies to begin managing team email by developing mailing lists that route messages to specific departments such as sales@, info@, or support@.
But as your email volume and staff grow, this will be increasingly difficult and confusing, resulting in critical messages potentially falling through the cracks.
Why Does Your Team Need a Shared Inbox?
While each company is unique, there are several very good reasons why teams choose to use a shared inbox. Think about how each of the following three main benefits could make a positive impact on your business’s efficiency and effectiveness.
Shared Mailboxes Enable Teams to Collaborate via Email
Inboxes with a high volume of new daily emails are untenable for one person to handle. If you have 3,000 new customer service messages coming in per day, you’ll need a team to help handle them.
A shared mailbox allows an entire team to share the burden and collaborate.
Many shared inbox tools offer features that allow you to leave notes and tag employees, alerting them to resolve a particular request.
Shared Mailboxes Offer Transparency and Accountability
Shared inboxes can convert email messages into tasks. You can then assign those tasks to the appropriate teammates.
This prevents messages from being forgotten or overlooked, increasing customer satisfaction.
Ultimately, when emails are assigned to specific members, you’ll get full transparency and accountability since you know which messages and tasks each member is responsible for.
Shared Mailboxes Are Secure and Easy to Monitor
With a normal email account, you’d have to share your password with others to gain access. However, shared inboxes give each team member their own login information, ensuring the company inbox is safe.
Additionally, shared mailboxes allow team members to manage their emails together from a single location.
There are plenty of tools to help organize messages, such as looking up messages by name, internal notes, labels, and tags, making everything easy to track.
The 13 Best Shared Inbox Tools
Teams of all industries and sizes can work together with a shared inbox tool.
When evaluating your options, you’ll want to consider the key features that your team members need to complete work more efficiently, as well as how easy each tool is to learn and to use.
Here are the 13 shared inbox tools we feel are the very best in 2023 – and necessary for every serious business.
#1: Atarim – Best Support Inbox for Web Design and Development Agencies
Atarim is the perfect collaborative platform for web design and development agencies to skyrocket their productivity and improve customer satisfaction. Agencies are notorious for using dozens of tools to manage their business, such as a CRM, web design collaboration tool, project management, email, etc.
As the leading visual collaboration platform, trusted by 13,000+ agencies, Atarim provides an all-in-one software solution that integrates those tools in a single place.
With the visual collaboration feature, you can empower your clients to leave requests directly on the live website, wherever they wish. They can literally point, click, and type – and all that information gets instantly sent to a shared mailbox, where the tasks can be assigned to specific team members.
Atarim also provides a Kanban board utility, and a fully integrated support desk as well. The board acts as a project management tool, letting you assign and move tasks across various phases until each project is complete.
Offering a Free Forever plan, agencies and developers can try out Atarim’s features at no risk, discovering for themselves how much easier visual collaboration and team collaboration can be.
#2: Missive – Best for Team Collaboration
Missive provides a unified inbox that keeps all your communications in a central location. This includes emails, live chats, and social media messages. This platform provides a wide range of features, such as conversation assignments, canned responses, rule-based automation, and shared labels to make managing contacts easier.
The entire product is designed to boost productivity and make collaboration easier. For instance, you can assign conversations to specific members.
With the workload balancing feature you can easily distribute the workload among your coworkers via either round robin, all at once, least busy first, or randomly.
#3: HubSpot – Best for Sales Teams
HubSpot provides similar features to other shared inbox tools. It offers a centralized inbox that allows you to respond to messages from customers from various channels in one place. However, there’s one crucial element that separates Hubspot from other platforms.
HubSpot automatically connects each customer to the CRM tool.
By doing this it can automatically create new profiles or add the conversation history to your existing CRM database. This is crucial for sales since your reps can view your contact’s interaction with your company, allowing them to provide a more personalized experience.
#4: Kayako – Best for Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, and IT Teams
As your team grows, there’s a good chance that you’ll begin to branch off into different departments.
As new roles are established, there can be a divide in departments such as sales, marketing, and customer support. Keeping your team aligned throughout the customer journey is key to closing more deals and keeping customers happy.
The Kayako software stands out since it provides a complete picture of the customer’s journey, so you know exactly where they came from. Your reps will be fully aware of the previous conversations and the history that they’ve had with your business.
You can even see the issues clients were facing before they reached out. Having a profile attached and a customer history makes this a more dynamic shared inbox tool than many others.
#5: Groove – Best for Small to Medium-Sized Businesses
Groove is a great shared inbox tool designed for small to medium-sized digital businesses.
Whether you’re running an agency or an e-commerce store, there’s a good chance you’re using a variety of tools such as Shopify, Mailchimp, Stripe, Messenger, Salesforce, Jira, and perhaps many others. With Groove’s ability to integrate with many tools at once, you can interact with your favorite software tool within a single interface.
Groove has many other built-in features too, such as a shared inbox that lets you assign messages and mention others for better collaboration. You can even add private internal notes and respond to customers via live chat directly from your centralized inbox.
#6: Helpwise – Best for Marketing Teams
Helpwise unifies all channels into a single place, allowing your team to be completely omnipresent and never missing any messages, no matter where your prospects or customers ping you. You even get notifications for any mentions of your brand, so you can stay alert and keep your PR strategy on point.
This tool provides a wide range of analytics, giving your marketing team exactly the data they need to develop and improve their campaigns. For instance, you can view channel performance, such as daily volumes and query load. These metrics are great for identifying which channels provide you with the most traction.
There are also other key metrics such as team or individual performance, and customer satisfaction scores.
#7: Freshdesk – Best for Growing Teams
Scaling your business is difficult, especially since hiring isn’t always feasible. There’s a lot that goes into hiring, onboarding, and training new employees.
Freshdesk solves this issue by offering AI automation features that will help you scale without hiring more employees – saving you a lot of time and money.
Freshdesk deploys AI-driven bots across your channels to deliver self-service. The bots can perform a variety of tasks, such as automating common resolutions, collecting the required information to save time, and providing intelligent self-service solutions such as pointing them to relevant help articles.
Also, the AI bot will collect the appropriate information and send the data to the right agent.
Users also have access to a shared inbox, although they’ll have less to do since the AI bot will help to eliminate or alleviate certain tasks.
#8: Help Scout – Best All-In-One Shared Inbox
Help Scout is one of the more popular shared inbox tools, with plenty of features to support your needs. This includes assigning messages to your team, using tags, and leveraging templates.
With Help Scout’s ability to automate common tasks you should see a significant improvement to your workflow.
For instance, any billing issues can be set to automatically create reminder emails that go out to your customers. Or you can create automation for customer feedback every few months.
With so many features, Help Scout is a diverse tool that you can customize to your business’s unique needs.
#9: DragApp – Best for Teams Looking for a Shared Inbox with Project Management Capabilities
DragApp is an “everything inbox” with a Kanban board-style layout, and an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. With this tool, you’ve got an all-in-one workspace with a few practical features, such as task management, internal team chat, and email assignments.
There are many boards that can be created to help align your teams. Furthermore, all projects and tasks can be color-coded by urgency, time zone, and other priorities, allowing project managers to keep everything organized.
The DragApp is built directly into Gmail, meaning there’s not a huge learning curve to get everyone on board. They even offer high-level functionality such as custom automation, which allows you to send automation follow-ups or alerts, or automatically categorize high-priority messages.
The platform lets you create templates and even track your open and response rates, giving you everything you need to get more done.
#10: Mailflow – Best for Teams Looking for Advanced Email Analytics and Reporting
Mailflow offers an all-in-one inbox for companies that provide flexible workspaces. They enable easy email sharing without requiring cc’ing or email forwarding to users.
Additionally, users can opt to receive internal notes on the specific message or project, which prevents long internal threads.
There’s also plenty of tracking and email monitoring so you can see how your messages are performing. Analyzing the open and response rates allows you to improve your customer service.
#11: SupportBee – Best for Customer Service Teams With Ticketing Systems
SupportBee is a solution geared towards customer service teams looking to scale their support effortlessly. This is achieved by taking a three-pronged approach providing:
- Shared inbox – A frictionless way for your team to collaborate on tickets.
- Knowledge base – Build your knowledge base and let team members insert links to relevant support articles when replying.
- Customer portal – Users can track their support ticket by seeing the progress. This ensures accountability and transparency, which boosts customer satisfaction.
While SupportBee doesn’t offer other channels such as Slack or social media, it helps your team complete more support tickets more quickly.
#12: SharedInbox – Best for Slack Users
For those looking to level up their Slack experience, SharedInbox is a great addition to your toolset.
Rather than switching between Slack and email, the SharedInbox add-on lets you draft and receive emails directly within Slack.
Once emails are sent, they’ll appear in a thread, just like a message on Slack would. From there, you can continue the email chain directly in Slack. Additionally, you can tag other team members, which means you can assign a message to anyone from your team.
#13: Hiver – Best for Customer Support Teams
Hiver serves as an add-on to Gmail, making it an easy extension to your existing inbox processes.
However, not only can users take advantage of the shared inbox feature, but they can also incorporate other channels, such as a knowledge base and a live chat. The Hiver shared inbox has all the necessary features you need, such as adding notes, tagging likes, and assigning messages to people.
Hiver Analytics is particularly useful for customer service teams since it provides key metrics for individual members, such as satisfaction ratings, the number of messages replied to, and responsiveness.
After Action Report – Leverage Software That Helps You Delight Your Customers
The right system for your team to work together to provide your customer with the best possible experience is absolutely essential. And email is clearly the preferred channel for most customers. That’s why you must maximize the effectiveness of your email communication – eliminating any delays or friction.
One way to achieve this is to evenly distribute tasks and customer requests among your team members.
And that’s exactly what our tool can help you achieve!
One of the unique and revolutionary features of Atarim is that it has been built on the foundation of point-and-click collaboration – allowing clients to simply point at what they’re referring to, and then immediately leave feedback, say what needs to be changed, etc.
Agencies, developers, and project managers use Atarim to eliminate the need to rely on guesswork and endless back-and-forth email communication. Beyond these powerful collaboration features, you’ll also get access to in-depth reporting, time tracking, work summaries, and more.
If you’re specifically focused on triaging visual feedback requests & feedback, give Atarim’s shared email inbox a try for free.
- Integrated into the leading visual collaboration platform trusted by 13,000+ agencies (web dev, design, and beyond) worldwide.
- Supporting project delivery for 1,200,000+ of their clients and stakeholders.
- Deliver projects in weeks instead of months.
