The average American worker receives about 125 emails each day, and that number only continues to grow. When you look at the email volume of an entire service team or organization, the number is truly staggering. Managing all of these emails in addition to customer chats and social media messages can create a heavy burden on your company's customer support and customer service teams. Using a shared inbox has become necessary in recent years to help teams organize their work and be more productive.

A centralized inbox gives teams a single platform to make assignments, collaborate on replies, and track key metrics. Leading shared inbox providers also include features like a knowledge base and customer portals with their software. These tools extend the service offering beyond your team and give customers direct access to essential information and resources. The ability to integrate team messaging, CRM, and other tools with a shared inbox platform is also an important consideration for many departments. Here's a look at a few of the essential shared inbox integrations to streamline workflows and improve collaboration.  

Task and Calendar Management (Asana)

Asana puts conversations and tasks together, with the ability to view tasks and projects as lists, in a calendar format, kanban boards, Gantt-chart style timelines, and more so your team members can work the way they want to. Plus, Asana integrates with shared inbox tools like SupportBee, so you can send a ticket to Asana and create a task with a single click. The task contains the ticket content and a link back to the SupportBee ticket to provide the full context your team needs to solve customer issues efficiently.  

Notifications (Slack)

Slack is a tool that brings all your communications together in a single app. It also integrates with your favorite shared inbox tools, like SupportBee, so your team members can get notifications in Slack channels for time-sensitive and important events in your support desk. With SupportBee's Slack integration, notifications pop up in Slack with all the necessary ticket details and information your team needs to take action immediately.

Project Management (Basecamp)

Basecamp brings all the information you need into a central command center for efficient project management. Manage tasks, schedules, conversations, and documents and files all in one place, including tickets from your help desk or shared inbox. With SupportBee's Basecamp integration, you can turn SupportBee tickets into discussions, to-do lists, or to-do items to collaborate with your team on customer issues with ease.

Customer Relationship Management (Insightly)

Insightly is one of the most popular customer relationship management solutions, bringing marketing, sales, and project management together in a single platform. Integrate Insightly with your favorite shared inbox tool, like SupportBee, to seamlessly share information about customers between Insightly and your help desk. With SupportBee's Insightly integration, Insightly checks for a matching customer in the app each time you receive an email in SupportBee and automatically comments on the SupportBee ticket with a link to the customer's Insightly profile to arm your support team with the customer's complete background. You can also send support emails to Insightly as tasks, link tasks to projects, add opportunities to tasks, and more.

Workflow Management (Customer.io)

Customer.io improves your customer interactions by providing your team with real-time customer data. By integrating Customer.io with your help desk platform, your support team is armed with relevant contextual information to inform discussions and provide more meaningful resolutions for customer issues. SupportBee's Customer.io integration provides quick access to all the information your company has about a customer, from their purchase history to the pages they've viewed on your website, within the ticket's interface in SupportBee.  

Sales Pipeline Software (Pipedrive)

Integrating Pipedrive’s sales pipeline software with your shared inbox allows you to share information seamlessly between the two platforms. When you integrate Pipedrive with SupportBee, for instance, you can fetch a customer’s information from Pipedrive and show it as a comment on the ticket, complete with a link back to the customer’s profile on Pipedrive to put all the essential information at your support reps’ fingertips. Plus, when a customer sends a new ticket, the information is automatically updated in Pipedrive to ensure that your sales team is in the loop with all customer communications.

Software Development (JIRA)

In software development, customer feedback is key for identifying bugs and issues. Integrating JIRA with your shared inbox provides a streamlined workflow for keeping your dev team up to speed on the problems customers are encountering when using your product. SupportBee’s JIRA integration lets you send customer support tickets to JIRA as issues without leaving SupportBee, so your developers can start addressing problems right away.

Managing a shared inbox takes a lot of focus, and it's important to consider how your various software tools are structured. By choosing a robust shared inbox tool as your primary communication platform and supplemental integrations that help you get even more from your shared inbox, you can build a service offering that meets your customers' unique needs. With so many great options available, it is possible to find an excellent solution for any business regardless of the size or industry.