A shared inbox is one address that a few of you can read at the same time. A ticketing system is that very same mail with a record fastened onto it, meaning an owner, a state, a clock running from the minute the thing landed, and a history that stays put long after whoever handled it has gone off to another job somewhere else. The mail itself does not change at all. What the company keeps afterwards changes entirely, and that is the whole of the difference, plainly said.
What people arrive here wanting is a number. How many mails in a week, or how many people answering them, before the mailbox stops being enough for you. We will hand you a number further down on account of you having come for one, but the honest position is that the number is a poor guide and it would be a disservice to lead with it. Truth be told, the desks that ask us for the figure first are usually the ones sitting furthest away from needing us.
Maxdesk is one of the things you would be moving to, so weigh the rest of this accordingly. It also means we have watched teams go and make this move a full year too early, which is the bit nobody selling it will mention to you, and it costs them a working fortnight they had nowhere spare to put.
The number people want, and the two desks that both had it
Two support desks, both taking somewhere around two hundred mails in a month. Identical on paper, near enough.
The first sells a physical product and near enough everything coming in is asking where an order has got to. One person reads it, looks the thing up, answers it, and the whole of it is finished inside four minutes. Nobody else ever needs to touch that conversation again. Two hundred of those in a month is a quiet job for one person and there is not a bother on them.
The second sells software to businesses. Maybe half of what lands cannot be answered by whoever opened it, on account of somebody in engineering having to read a log first, or the finance side having to confirm what was actually charged and when. A third of them come back a second and a third time before they are done with. Two people end up involved in most of the awkward ones and neither of the two is entirely sure which of them is holding it this week without stopping to go and ask the other one.
Same two hundred. One desk is grand and the other is quietly dropping things.
So the number by its self tells you very little. What tells you something is how often a single conversation has to pass through more than one pair of hands, or live longer than one day, or get picked up again by somebody who was not there at the start of it. Volume matters only in that it makes those three happen oftener.
If you want the rough figure anyway, and fair is fair, you came here for it: most desks we see are comfortable up to around three people and a couple of hundred conversations a month, and are properly struggling somewhere past five people and a thousand. The band in between is wide, and what decides it is the shape of it rather than the count, funnily enough.
What actually gets fastened onto a mail
The mail keeps arriving the very same way it always did. Somebody writes to support at your domain and it lands, and from your customer’s side of it nothing whatsoever has changed, which is worth saying out loud because people picture a portal and a login and a form with fourteen fields on it before anybody is allowed to ask a question. There is none of that. They write a mail, they get a mail back, and none of it looks any different at all from where they are sitting.
What changes sits on your side of the screen. The conversation gets a reference of its own, so two of you talking about it are definitely talking about the same one. It gets an owner, meaning one name rather than a group of people quietly hoping. It gets a state, which does most of the heavy lifting and which we will come back to in a minute. It gets a clock that started the moment the mail arrived and does not care in the slightest whether anybody noticed. And it gets a history: who touched it, what went out, what was said internally about it along the way, all of it kept in the one place and readable by somebody who joins your company next March and never once dealt with that customer their own selves.
None of that is clever. A ticketing system is really a mailbox that writes things down about its self, and the reason the step up feels bigger than it sounds is that a mailbox writes down nothing at all, and never did.
The day somebody else has to pick it up
This one turns up on a Tuesday when one of you is out.
Say a customer has been going back and forth about a broken order for a week and a half, and the person handling it is off with a chest infection and not answering their phone, quite reasonably. The customer writes in again, cross this time, and whoever is in has to work out what has already been said to them before they can say anything at all.
In a shared inbox that job is a search. You go looking through what is in the group, and then, when the last three replies went out from somebody’s own Gmail rather than from the shared address, you turn up nothing and you have to ring the sick person to ask them. People do this. They do it while apologising down the phone, and most of us have gone and done it at least the once.
With a record attached the same job takes a minute, since everything ever said to that customer sits under the one conversation, whether it went out from the shared address or somebody assigned it onward or somebody left a note on it at half four on a Friday. That is the real trigger for most teams and it has nothing to do with volume whatsoever. It is about a conversation outliving the attention of one person.
Read and unread, and the piles you actually have
A mailbox knows read and unread. That is the whole of what it knows, and read only means a pair of eyes went over the thing at some point, possibly on a phone, in a lift, at ten past eleven at night.
What you need to know is different. You need the ones waiting on you, since those are what you are being judged on. You need the ones waiting on the customer, on account of them having been asked for a photograph of the damage or an order number and not having sent it yet. In a mailbox the two look identical, both of them read, sat beside each other, and the one waiting on you goes and gets forgotten in among the ones that are parked quite legitimately.
Then there is the third pile, being the ones waiting on somebody else inside your own company. Finance, engineering, the warehouse, whoever it is. Those go bad more reliably than anything else on a desk, and they go bad because the person who asked considers it handed over while the person who was asked considers it a message in a chat app they will get to later on. Nobody holds it in the meantime. A week goes by like that and not a soul goes and asks after it. What it looks like once it happens weekly is written up over on escalation.
You can fake states in a mailbox with labels or folders, and plenty of teams do exactly that, and it works away fine for a good long while, right the way up until the morning it does not. It stops the day two people label the very same thing differently, and it never once tells you how long anything sat in a state, which is the part of it you would actually have wanted.
The question you cannot answer at the end of the month
How long is your team taking to reply for the first time.
Not roughly. Not how it feels of a Monday. The figure for last month, business hours only, and the same figure for the month before it, so that you can see whether the thing is going the right way.
Out of a mailbox there is no honest way to get that. You can hand count a sample of it, and people do, once. What you cannot get at all is the shape underneath: which day of the week goes wrong, whether Monday morning is twice Thursday, which topic eats the most time per conversation, whether one person is carrying more than the rest of them, whether the queue is growing week on week or simply feels that way on account of you being tired.
That matters for two reasons and the obvious one is the smaller of the two. Obviously you cannot make a case for another pair of hands without numbers, and the person best placed to make that case is the one too far behind to sit down and build it. The quieter reason is that without a first reply time you have no way of telling whether last month’s change helped. You moved something around, things feel a bit better, and you will never know which bit of it did the work. There is more on that whole subject, and on which figures are worth the bother, in our piece on customer satisfaction metrics.
The ones that arrive from outside the desk entirely
Every so often a mail comes in that is not really support at all.
A chargeback, where the card company wants your account of what happened and gives you a short window to produce it. Somebody writing in to ask for everything you hold about them, which you are obliged to answer properly and inside a set time. A solicitor’s letter about a dispute from four months back. An auditor, or the procurement people at a large customer, asking you to show how complaints get handled, with evidence rather than a description of it.
Every one of those asks you the same thing. Show me the record. Not your recollection of it, and not a summary written this afternoon. The record, with dates on it, showing what was said and when and by whom, written down at the time rather than remembered after the fact by your own self.
This trigger arrives without warning and it does not care what size you are. A two person company can take a chargeback in its first year. If the answer at that moment is that the correspondence is in Dan’s mailbox and Dan left in June, what that costs you is not a red face. It is money, and you will go and pay that one out. Regulated work, anything medical, anything with money moving through it, anything where a customer can complain to a body sitting above you: those desks want a record from day one, no matter how quiet they are.
Three desks that should stay exactly where they are
We would rather say this plainly than have you spend money there was no need to spend.
Two or three of you, a hundred or so mails in a month, most finished inside one reply, nobody ever out for long. Leave it alone. A distribution list with a bit of discipline on it is doing the job, and a ticketing system would add a login and a habit and take away nothing you are currently suffering from. If you want a middle rung before any of this, a Google Collaborative Inbox costs nothing and adds the one name on the thread.
The second is an internal desk where the people writing in sit forty feet away from you. Colleagues chase. They come and stand at the side of your desk, and that chasing is a crude sort of tracking system that works surprisingly well up to a certain size of company. It stops working once the company is big enough that the person waiting no longer knows who to chase, and that is usually the point an IT ticketing system starts earning its keep, though not a day before it.
And the third is any desk where the honest problem is that nobody was ever given the job. If mail goes unanswered because one and all of you assume somebody else is on it, then a new system will show you that in more detail and change none of it. Go and hand somebody the pile first. If it is still going wrong a month after, the tooling is your problem and you will know it for certain rather than guessing at it.
What the move costs you on the day
Nobody writes this part down, so here it is.
Your old mail stays where it is. Whatever is sitting in that mailbox today does not walk across into the new thing by its self, and the new record starts from the day you point the address at it. Most teams keep the old mailbox readable for a few months and go back into it now and then, which is grand, but you want that decided on purpose beforehand rather than discovered on the Monday.
Then there are the habits of the people. For a fortnight, maybe three weeks, somebody will keep replying out of their own Gmail because that is what their hands do without asking them. You will have to watch for it and say something the first two times, and after that it stops. Everybody finds this bit more irritating than they expected to and, to be honest with you, everybody gets through it.
And there is a stretch of roughly a month where the whole of it feels slower, on account of writing down what state a thing is in taking seconds the old way never asked of you. Those seconds are the cost of it, being what you pay so that somebody else can pick a thing up cold. It is a real cost, it is worth paying, and pretending it is not there at all is how these moves get sold and then resented six weeks later.
What a move to us looks like, and what we charge
We had better name the thing we sell, since you would only turn it up at the bottom of the page otherwise, and that would be a bit sly of us.
Maxdesk is a help desk built on the one shared address. You point support at your domain over at us, and from the next mail onward every conversation carries the record described further up: a reference, one owner, a state, a clock started on arrival, the whole history sat underneath it. Replies leave from your own support address, so the personal Gmail problem stops being a question of discipline and becomes a thing that cannot happen to you. Notes can be left on a conversation that no customer will ever see, and the mind how you word it, they are up for renewal sort of information belongs in there rather than in one person’s head. Rules move billing questions to whoever does billing without a soul sorting a pile by hand, and that is most of what helpdesk automation means once you strip the word back. Answers you find yourself writing out weekly can sit in a knowledge base and be reused, instead of being retyped slightly differently by four different people over a year.
We charge on the workspace. Head count does not enter the arithmetic at any point, so a desk going from three people to eight over one busy autumn pays in November what it paid in June, and the usual reason a team postpones this move for a year, being the per seat bill that arrives with every new hire, does not apply here at all.
There is a free tier and it costs you something other than money, so here is the whole of it, set out. Three months of history is what the free one holds, with the far end of it rolling quietly away as you go along. Ads sit on your own side of the workspace, and a customer is never shown one. Our name travels out at the foot of every reply your team sends. There is a ceiling on how many automations can be left running at once, and you tend to walk into that ceiling somewhere in the second month rather than the first week of using us. Paying twenty against the workspace clears the ads off, gives you your own name back on outgoing mail, and stretches the history out to a full year. Ninety nine puts an AI layer over the lot and holds two years.
Two narrower reads sit beside this one, should the question in your head be smaller than the whole of it. Getting off a shared Gmail specifically is written up as a Gmail alternative, and the mail handling end of what we do has a page of its own under email management software.
Where we are honestly not the answer
Mail is all we read. There is no chat widget, nobody here picks up a phone, no customer logs into a portal, and not one of those three is sat on a roadmap waiting its turn either, so a desk whose real difficulty is that its customers would rather chat is a desk we are no use to at all, and that is worth knowing before a trial rather than in the second week of one.
The three month history on the free tier deserves a hard look on this subject in particular, given that the whole argument above was about keeping a record. A dispute runs on a calendar that nobody at your end gets to set. A customer comes back to you in November over a thing that was settled with them in August, and three months of rolling history has quietly let August go by then, so the only account left standing is whatever the customer remembers. That is not a small caveat on a page arguing for record keeping, and we would sooner put it here than have you meet it for the first time in your second November.
The last one is about how the first month feels. A ticketing system does not make the mess smaller. It shows you the mess at full size with dates on it, and a fair few teams open their first month of reports and feel considerably worse than they did in the mailbox where none of it was visible to anybody. Nothing got worse. You are looking at it now, is all. That passes and the numbers go the right way after, but the first look is a shock and we would rather warn you about it now than watch it land on somebody in month one.
A test you can run this Friday
Take the last twenty conversations out of your support address and mark three things against each one of them.
Whether more than one person ended up involved in it. Whether it ran on past a single day. And whether the whole story of it can be read today, this minute, inside the shared address, without ringing anybody or going into a second mailbox to find the rest.
Now count the ones failing that third mark. One or two out of twenty and what you have is a mailbox with a bit of untidiness in it, so go and tidy it and buy nothing. Six or seven and the mailbox is not your problem and neither is your team, since the work has gone and grown a shape the tool was never built to hold. Which is a decent enough position to be in, mind you. It means there is more work coming at you than there used to be.
Whatever you decide after, do the counting before you decide it. Half an hour of a Friday is the whole of what it takes. Some teams finish that half hour and buy nothing at all, having found out the mailbox was fine. Others come out of it holding the thing they needed to make the case upstairs, and they go and make it on the Monday.