Shared mailboxes–such as info@company.com , sales@company.com or support@company.com make it easy for your customers to contact you. While it’s easy to set up these shared mailboxes on G Suite or Office 365, operating out of an email interface for teams to review and respond is difficult and outdated. With the introduction of modern collaboration apps like Slack and Asana, managing your shared mailbox can now be more team friendly. This comprehensive guide from Dossier (www.dossier.work) shows you how to set up a shared mailbox from scratch and manage incoming requests directly from Slack or Asana.
Managing your team’s shared mailboxes
Shared mailboxes–ex. info@company.com , sales@company.com , support@company.com — make it easy for your customers to contact you. They allow you to keep all your customer requests organized in one place. For your customers, these email addresses are easy to remember and each department can have their own mailbox, making it fast and cost-effective to set up an incoming channel to listen to and engage with customers.
If you use Google G Suite or Microsoft Office 365 for your business, setting up a Shared Mailbox can be very easy, or very confusing. This is a practical guide to setting up a Shared Mailbox, and outlines four solutions to this age-old problem of a team managing all incoming customer email:
- Sharing an Email Inbox with Your Team
- Google Groups and Outlook Shared Mailboxes
- Shared Mailboxes in Asana
- Shared Mailboxes in Slack
- Google Groups Mailboxes in Asana and Slack
While shared inboxes are easy to set up in Google G Suite or Microsoft Outlook, they keep us mostly in email, or an email-like interface, which is very 20th century. With email, there is no assignment, owners, internal collaboration, or due dates, for instance. However, our modern customer service ethos means that we must apply these concepts to incoming email.
With the introduction of new collaborative platforms like Slack and Asana, there is a faster, more collaborative way to manage shared mailboxes. In this Guide, we will first walk you through setting up a mailbox and then syncing emails to a collaboration platform of your choice.
Here, we will show you how to setup Asana with Dossier, so you can use Asana to manage shared inboxes. Teams can easily track incoming requests without duplication or clutter in their own personal email inboxes. They only have to log in to one place to manage all communications–Asana. By connecting Dossier to Asana, all updates to Asana tasks are synchronized with your G Suite (Gmail), Office 365 (Outlook) or Microsoft Exchange email inboxes.
All requests sent to your mailbox are seen in Asana as tasks
Create an email account for the shared mailbox
Create an email account for your shared mailbox following the steps in the Sharing an Email Inbox with Your Team section. Note that this is an actual, licensed email account at your domain, and not an alias or group. We recommend this technique.
Create an Asana account for your mailbox
- Log in to your own Asana account or create one at https://www.asana.com .
- In the left side-bar, Click the “+” button next to your Asana team
- Choose Add Project.
- Create a Public Project where emails sent to your mailbox will appear (eg. Support Requests).
- In the left side-bar, Click the “+” button next to your Asana team
- Choose Invite People .
- In the field for Invite More Members enter the shared email address, ex. support@company.com .
- Click Send Invite .
- Login to the shared email account and open the signup email from Asana.
- Click the button and sign up for Asana as the shared email account.
Create a Dossier account for your mailbox
- Go to the Dossier website ( https://www.dossier.work ) to get started.
- Enter your shared inbox email in the email field and click the Get Started Button.
- On the “Let’s Create your Dossier account” page, Connect the Gmail , Outlook 365 or Microsoft Exchange account for the mailbox.
- When you reach the “Select an Option” screen, pick Organize my Inbox .
- We need to create a Mailbox type account, so on the “Create account of this type” selection ensure that “Shared Mailbox” is checked and click Next.
- On the Apps page, connect the Mailbox’s Asana account, i.e., the Asana account for support@company.com (we recommend you do this instead of connecting your personal Asana account) .
- On the Asana sync setup page, pick the Asana project where you want to create tasks for incoming requests. Choose the “Support Requests” Asana project you had created earlier.
- Dossier will now sync your inbox and create Asana tasks for any active emails within the last 30 days. These emails will be added to the Asana projects that you specified.
Using Asana to manage incoming emails
Now that you have all your emails in Asana, you can manage all requests directly from Asana. You can close emails in Asana, you can reply to emails from Asana, and you can automatically send notifications to all team members’ email inbox when a task was replied by a team member.
In summary, you can share Gmail or Outlook accounts to setup a single mailbox and have your team members share these accounts. Alternatively, you can manage these emails in Dossier, Slack or Asana where you can collaborate with your team more efficiently to review and respond to customer inquiries. Let’s get to a better place with managing incoming emails!
