Is the Shared Inbox an Answer to Email Woes? (Part 2 of 2)

08 Feb 2021

The idea of sharing an inbox is more radical than it seems, but will it fix email?

In a recent post, I talked about the principal problem with email: there’s just too much of it. The common theme around product work in this area deals with automated triage. Take Microsoft Focused Inbox: it uses machine learning to drive high-priority mail to your Focused tab so that you can concentrate on the most critical messages. Similarly, Google uses machine learning in Gmail to eliminate hundreds of million spam messages a day. Today’s ML technology brings valuable benefits to the table. We can be very thankful for that.

Don’t we wish it could end there? The fact is, even after spam is filtered out, there remains much work for the user to do to avoid distraction, the feeling of being overwhelmed, and other side effects. Consider a simple metric: the average number of emails per person per day. Whatever it is, it is too many.

We can address our problem metric using another tool: the shared inbox. Frontis a good example. With Front, I might create an inbox called “sales@scribal.io” and one called “billing@scribal.io” to handle certain types of inquiries coming from the outside world. Next, I would add Sales and Billing team members to those inboxes (these have already been set up as Front users through a simple invitation workflow). And finally, I would create some assignment rules. These take inbound messages from the sales or billing inbox conforming to some criteria I might define and assign those to a team member to handle. I like the choices you have to balance the workload among people, for example, using a round-robin style of auto-assignment. It’s straightforward to define rules in the app, and you can create more complex workflows by layering rule on top of rule.

So the hope here is that shared inboxes would allow you to drive down the metric. If the average number of incoming messages per person per day declines in a meaningful way, that seems like it would be good for the sanity of the whole team.

Of course, it never is quite that simple. What if the average time to close a Billing or Sales inquiry increases? You could see how this could happen. When we reduce the gratuitous circulation of email by using a shared inbox, a point of failure could now appear somewhere else.

This may appear in the guise of the assignment rules used to decide who has to deal with a particular inquiry. What if, after a Billing agent receives a given message, she needs to consult others in her team before taking appropriate action? Then there is the need for a whole new thread in chat, additional meetings, or phone calls. And if that’s the case, and it wasn’t an issue before, then the shared inbox isn’t fixing the email problem after all.