A Collaborative Inbox is a Google Group with the extra features switched on, so that mail sent to the one address lands in the one place, and whoever is in the group can put their name against a conversation and mark it finished when it is finished. It comes free with the Google account you are already paying for. Setting the thing up is about twenty minutes of a Tuesday morning, near enough, and for a fair share of small teams it is honestly the right answer for a year or two.
We build a help desk over here at Maxdesk, so you can weigh the rest of this accordingly. Talking somebody out of a free thing that is working away grand is no way to be going on, mind you, so what is below is the setup done properly and then the five places the thing stops. It stops quietly, is the trouble. Nothing goes down. No error comes up on a screen anywhere, and nobody sits you down about it either, so the whole of it is on you to notice.
What it is under the bonnet
Google Groups has been about a good long while and underneath the whole of it a group is a mailing list. An address, and a set of people who get a copy of whatever arrives at it. That much has not changed in years. It is not going to either, funnily enough.
Collaborative Inbox is a layer sat over that. Turn it on and every conversation in the group can carry somebody’s name, and it can carry an ending as well, which is either that the thing is complete or that it was a duplicate or that no action was needed on it at all. So instead of eleven people seeing the very same mail and one and all of them assuming somebody else has it in hand, there is a name against it. One name, visible to the lot of them.
That is the whole of what it adds, plainly said. It is a good deal more than most teams have the week before they switch it on, and it is a good deal less than the people selling against it would have you believe as well.
Turning it on, and the setting that stops everybody
You do the lot of it at groups.google.com and you want to be an Owner or a Manager on the group before you start, since the settings are not there for you otherwise.
Create the group first. Give it the name and the address people will actually write to, which is support or help or hello at your own domain, and not something clever. Then the posting permission, which is the one to think about for a minute: if your customers are writing in from outside your company, whoever can post has to include anyone on the web, or their mail bounces off the thing and they never once find out why. Teams set that to members only, watch a fortnight of customer mail vanish, and go blaming Google for it. The setting was never hiding on them. It was simply the wrong one.
Now the setting that catches near enough everybody. Conversation history has to be turned on before Collaborative Inbox will switch on at all, and the two are in different parts of the settings screen, so what happens is you go looking for the Collaborative Inbox tick box and it is either not there or it will not take. Turn on conversation history, then go to the group settings and find where it says to enable additional Google Groups features, and Collaborative Inbox is in there. The order of the two is the whole of the problem in its self.
If you are on a work or school account rather than a personal one there is one more gate again, on account of Groups for Business having to be on in the Admin console, and that is your Google admin’s job rather than yours. On a personal account it is not a question at all.
Then the people. Add whoever is answering the mail, set their role, and mind the subscription setting on each of them, since that is what decides whether the mail lands in their own Gmail as it arrives, or once a day as a digest, or not at all so that they have to go into the group to see anything. That last one is quiet in a way people do not expect. Somebody set to no email is not going to notice a thing for a week, not unless they go looking their own selves.
Twenty minutes, thereabouts. Nothing in it is hard.
What you get out of it on the Tuesday after
Fair is fair, and the honest part is that the ownership works. A conversation comes in and somebody takes it, or somebody with the rights assigns it to another person, and from then on there is a name sat on the thread where before there was a shrug. You can mark a thing complete when it is done. You can mark it as a duplicate of another one, which is more use than it sounds on a day when the same customer has written in three times. You can mark it as needing no action, which is the honest ending for most of what arrives in a support address. Most of it, truth be told.
And you can filter the whole of it, so the unassigned pile is a thing you can actually look at rather than a feeling you have about your morning. For a team of three that pile being visible is most of the benefit right there.
None of that costs a penny and none of it needed anybody’s approval to try. If you have been running support off a plain distribution list up to now, switching this on is a straightforwardly good afternoon’s work and you should go and do it before reading any further.
Where the reply goes out from
Here is the first place it stops, and it is the one that does the most damage before anybody spots it.
Whoever answers can do it inside the Groups tab, in which case the group has the reply and everybody can see the whole of it. Or they can just hit reply in their own Gmail, which is what a person does at half four on a Thursday without thinking about it once. When that happens the mail goes out under their own name and their own address, and there is no shared Sent folder anywhere to catch a copy of it, so unless the group address was left in copy the rest of you have no way of knowing what was said.
Worse again, the customer now has a personal address to reply to. So they do, naturally enough, and from that day the whole of the thread lives in one person’s mailbox rather than in the group, so that when the person is out sick in November, or has gone to another job by then, the conversation is not simply hard to find, it is not in the group at all and there is no record anywhere that it ever was. You will find these later, one at a time, usually while somebody is on the phone to you.
There is no setting that fixes this. None at all. There is only telling people to answer inside the group, which works for about three weeks and then quietly stops working on you.
Nothing in it is watching the clock
Take whatever came into your support address last month and work it out on the back of something. Forty mails a week is a bit over eight of a day. Say two of the eight are the kind that need somebody to go off and check a thing before answering, and the delay lives in those two more or less always, and say a third of them get picked up and put back down again.
Now try and find out how long any of them waited. You cannot, is the answer, and not because you have gone and configured it wrong. A Collaborative Inbox records that a conversation was assigned and that it was completed at some point after that. It does not hold a clock against the two, it does not know what you promised anybody, and it will not put its hand up when something has been sitting there since Monday with nobody near it. Nothing gets escalated on its own because there is nothing in the thing that knows a thing is late.
Which is fine when there are three of you and the pile is short enough to eyeball. The day the pile is longer than the screen, the oldest mail in it stops being the one you can see, and that is a good long while before anybody in the team says the word ticket out loud. Our piece on escalation is mostly about what that looks like once it starts happening weekly.
The month end, and having nothing to hand anybody
Somebody is going to ask you how support went last month. Might be a board, might be one investor, might just be yourself in January wondering whether to hire.
What a Collaborative Inbox can tell you is what is open this minute. That is genuinely useful and it is also the whole of it. How many came in, how long the average first reply took, which day of the week goes bad, whether Thursday’s volume is twice Tuesday’s, who is carrying more than they should be: none of that is in there in any form, and there is no export that quietly has it either. People do go and hand-count a month. Once, mind you. They do not go and do it a second time.
So the argument you end up having about hiring is an argument about how everybody feels, which the busiest person on the desk tends to lose, on account of being too far behind to make the case properly.
Two of you on the same mail, and nowhere to say so quietly
You will get a fortnight into this before it happens the first time. Two people open the same conversation inside the same few minutes and neither one has any way of seeing the other in there, since nothing warns you and nothing locks anything at all. Both write back. Neither knows. The customer gets two answers off the one company inside the hour and the two of them do not entirely agree with each other, so now they have to decide which of you to believe, and they will mention it the next time they write in.
The other half of the same problem is that there is no quiet place to talk. If you want to say to a colleague that this customer is on the difficult side of things, or that the refund was already done last week, or that the account is up for renewal so mind how you word it, there is nowhere in the group for that to go. It has to happen in a separate mail, or on a chat app, or over a desk, and every bit of it is lost by the time somebody new picks the customer up in March. So they go and ask the same questions over again, and the customer answers them over again, less patiently than the first time round.
Nothing moves on its own, and nothing is kept to be said twice
Everything in a Collaborative Inbox happens because a person did it that minute. Nothing routes itself to whoever handles billing, nothing tags itself, nothing sorts the new from the ongoing, and nothing gets assigned by any rule you can write down anywhere. The word automation does not really apply here. Not in any useful sense of it.
Nor is there anywhere to keep an answer you have already written. The reply about your delivery windows, the one about how to reset the thing, the paragraph about what the warranty does and does not cover: every one of those gets typed again from scratch by whoever is on the mail, slightly differently each time, and after a year of that you have four versions of your own policy out in the world and no idea which of them a given customer was told. That is the quiet cost and it does not show up anywhere at all. Helpdesk automation of the ordinary sort is most of what people mean when they say they have outgrown a shared mailbox, though they rarely put it that way.
And the whole of it lives in a tab that is not Gmail, which sounds like nothing and is not nothing. The mail your team actually reads all day is in one place and the group is in another, so somebody has to remember to go over there their own selves. On a busy Thursday they will not. That is the fifth place it stops, and sitting with it a while, it is really the same place as the other four. The thing knows who owns a conversation. What became of that conversation afterwards is recorded nowhere in it, and never was.
When it is genuinely enough
We would be doing you no favours pretending otherwise, so here is the honest shape of it.
Two to five people answering mail, a volume you can still see the bottom of most days, customers patient enough that the odd slow reply costs you nothing much, and everybody living in Google Workspace already so that nobody has a new tab to learn. That is a Collaborative Inbox working exactly as it was intended to, and there is no reason on earth to be paying anybody for something else while that holds. Internal groups are the very best fit of the lot, since your own colleagues will chase you when a thing goes quiet, and your customers will simply go elsewhere and never once tell you why.
What actually pushes teams off it is rarely the volume in its self. It is the first time a mail is missed that mattered. Or a second person joins and the two of you start standing on each other, or somebody upstairs asks you for a number you have not got and have no way of getting. If none of those has happened to you yet, this page is early and you can come back to it another time.
What we make, and the price of it
This being our own page, we had better name the thing we are selling rather than let it arrive by surprise in the last paragraph.
Maxdesk is a help desk sat on one shared inbox, and it is the same idea as a Collaborative Inbox carried a fair distance further. A clock starts on every mail as it lands, so a first reply becomes a number rather than an impression. Rules do the routing, so billing questions go to whoever handles billing without anybody in the team looking at the pile. Answers you find yourself giving weekly can be saved and reused. Notes can be left on a thread that no customer ever sees. And whoever writes back, the reply leaves under your own support address and the copy of it stays in the thread with everything else, which is the piece that quietly fixes the personal-Gmail problem above instead of asking people to be more disciplined about it.
We charge by the workspace. The head count in it does not enter the arithmetic anywhere, so a team that goes from three to seven over one season pays us the very same twenty dollars in September as it did in June.
That free tier does cost you something all the same, and there are four such costs on it to be weighed before anybody signs up to a thing. History rolls at three months, with the far end of it dropping off as it goes. Ads run in the workspace on your own side of the screen, never in anything a customer opens. Outgoing mail carries our name along the bottom. And only so many automations may be left running at the one time, which is a limit you will meet in month two rather than on day one. Twenty dollars a month, charged on the workspace and not the person, strips the ads out, hands you back your own name at the foot of every mail, and holds twelve months of history where you can still reach it. The ninety nine dollar tier lays an AI layer over the top of the whole of it and keeps two years.
What this will not do for you
Mail is the only thing we read. No live chat, no phone line, no portal for anybody to log into, and nothing of the sort sitting on a roadmap either, so if the plan in your head was the one screen for every channel at once then we are simply not that, and you want to know it now rather than in the second week of a trial.
The three month history deserves a second mention on this particular subject. A support argument keeps no calendar of its own. Somebody writes in during November about something that was agreed with them in August, and on the free tier that August has rolled off you by then, so the only surviving account of the thing is the customer’s own version. Paid tiers hold on to it. We would sooner flag that here than have somebody find it out the hard way in their second November.
The last one is not really about us at all. A tool does not fix a habit, and if mail is being missed on account of nobody having been given the job of reading the pile of a morning, then better reporting will show you the very same thing in more detail, one week at a time. Somebody has to be handed that pile. Nothing we sell hands it out on your behalf. There is more on the mail side of it in our email management software page, and if you want the broader argument about what a ticketing system adds over a mailbox, or a plain read on Gmail alternative setups generally, both of those are written up.
An afternoon and last month’s mail
Before you change anything, go and get the last thirty conversations out of your support address, whatever way you have them today.
Mark against each one whether anybody’s name was ever on it. Then mark whether the person who wrote in got an answer inside the day, which you will have to work out by eye, and that job being awkward is itself the finding. Then mark the ones where the reply went out from somebody’s own address rather than from support, since those are the ones that are no longer anywhere you can see them.
Most teams doing this turn up the very same shape. The names are mostly there, the timings are guesswork, and there is a small pile at the end that left the group entirely and nobody had noticed a thing about it. If your first column is healthy and the other two are not, then a Collaborative Inbox is doing the job it was built for and you have simply gone and outgrown what it was built to do. That is a different problem to having set it up wrong. If your shop runs on Microsoft rather than Google, the Outlook side of it is written up separately. Worth knowing which one you have got before anybody spends money on it.