204: 8 Benefits and Strategies for Managing a Shared Team Inbox Through HelpScout

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So the best thing that I did was start to go pro on software so that I could go really lean with other parts of my operations. And I always joke that software is actually my first employee that I try to delegate and automate everything I can to software so that the team members I do work with have as much of their time set free as possible for the things that they really enjoy doing. That's more creative.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with fathers, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hi friends. Welcome back. I hope you enjoyed the last two solos which weren't technically solos but mega permission slip episodes in 200 and 202. Definitely go back and listen if you haven't yet, bookmark them for a rainy day. Today I'm going back to one of my super quick, practical systems oriented solos. I like to mix these in every now and then because for as much as I have not figured out, there are certain things that really are helping me move from friction to flow in my business. And with my delightfully tiny team that I would love to share in case it's helpful for you and yours. You know that I like to rant about email here on the pod and never ending inboxes that seem to multiply every time a new company gets invented and it becomes a best practice. The inboxes don't go away, they just pile up faster. The one place that is working really well in my business is having a shared team inbox. And I'll tell you what I mean by that. The software that I use is Help Scout. I'll put the link in the show Notes I moved off of Zendesk because I felt it was very complicated and clunky and I didn't like the user interface. Ever since I moved to Help Scout. It has created a lot of ease and a lot of joy. So I'm going to share with you eight reasons that I appreciate having a Team inbox Even though I have a very tiny team, some of you might think, well, why do you even need a team inbox? Why do you need software like Help Scout? It can get pricey. Right now at the time of this recording, it's $20 per team member, so I'm paying $46 a month for me and my right hand person, Faye. When we correspond with groups like the podcast production team, that's all happening in Notion. And when Faye and I communicate with each other, that's all happening in Notion as well. Where Help Scout comes in is to manage emails that come in to the business, whether that's for Pivot or for free time. So anything related to people who are pitching for the podcast, our contact forms, the general get in Touch form, speaking inquiries, those contact pages on the Pivot website and the Freetime website all come in to Help Scout. Additionally, I've also set up jennyvivotmethod.com feeds into help scout, as does jenny'sfreetime.com my personal gmail is another story. I've had that for a long, long time and it often gets intermixed with email, but you'll hear about ways you can even send those messages into Help Scout for proper routing and response. Before I get into the eight reasons that I really Appreciate having a Team inbox, I also want to point you to a few episodes that I'll put in the show notes episode 92 train the system Then the person is all about email systems and helping make your system smarter so that you don't spend a lot of time training team members who might not be with you forever. It's going to save you time no matter who is on your team. In episode 86 I shared the Cyrano strategy for delegating important communications. That's all about helping a team member respond to your VIP clients, even if they don't know exactly what to say. So you're the one kind of hiding in the bushes. But it kind of helps with optics that you're not in the weeds of customer support or response or with an important maybe corporate client. And yet you still get to really help shape the content. And Help Scout makes this much, much easier, as does Notion, of course. And then in episode 161 I talked with Yaro Starek, who's the founder of Inbox with done. He's actually sponsoring a month of the podcast I'm super grateful for that. Inbox Dent is a company where they will assign you to human assistants to train you, train your systems and make your life much easier. And so that's 161 on inbox taming. And he shared some of his strategies as well. Okay, so why on earth do you need to have a team inbox? Why can't you just use your Gmail account? Or maybe you have Google Apps for business, you have some kind of email service? The reason is it's incredibly difficult to properly assign messages that come in to individual email addresses and know what to do about them, comment on them, create drafts, having your team member create drafts for review, there's a lot of functionality that those services don't have. So although you would want to spend time taming your personal email inboxes through systems and tagging and a deep dive and deep digging into the process, it's not well set up for corresponding with your team and moving them through the business faster. And email is really important because for as complex as it is, it often represents every single element of your business and every type of customer and community member, from the ones who are brand new, to the ones who've been with you forever, to the ones who are paying your bills and keeping your lights on. It's really important to be organized so that you can cut the spam and the clutter while still being super responsive and warm to the people that you do want to serve really well and that you care most about. So with Help Scout, let me tell you what I appreciate.

Number one, you can have one separate inbox for each account. So if you're like me and you have multiple elements or channels of the business, it's nice to have some separation. So we have a pivot inbox and a free time inbox. That alone is already really helpful because we know what part of the business we're diving into. For most of you, you probably don't need two inboxes, and it's not like you have to pay more if you have more than one area. But it is nice to be able to kind of segment if you have a more complex business structure, you can have an inbox for each account.

Anything that comes into my personal email. So number two is you can forward messages from any other email account into your team inbox. When you do that, you can append a note, you can tag somebody, you can say what tags. So Help Scout has some shortcuts that you can make it even smarter that when you forward that message, it goes into the team inbox and it already has some intel along with it. So that's a nice way to get things off your plate. If you're listening to this and you're the business owner, who knows, maybe somebody reaches out to you for a professional situation, but it goes to your personal email. Or maybe you're somebody that has five different legacy emails. Because you've pivoted many times over the years, you can either forward messages one by one over to Help Scout in the team inbox or you can set automatic forwarding where everything to a certain email address feeds into Help Scout just like I mentioned. I do. So not only does helloivittmethod.com goes into the Pivot inbox, the contact form on the Pivot website goes into the Pivot inbox. The speaking inquiry type form, when that's filled out, feeds into the Pivot Help Scout inbox. And I can forward messages on a one off as well as Jenny at Pivot Method. So you can already see that now we're getting more intelligent about that part of the business because the Pivot inbox is collecting from multiple sources all into one place.

The third strategy that I use with Help Scout is we've learned over time that to use very action oriented tags. So for example, if a speaking inquiry comes in, it gets a tag. Speaking inquiry, great. That's intuitive. But I will also append a tag maybe JB decide or if I see it come in and I know that it's a yes, like this is a good potential client. In addition to those other two, I'll add the tag yes. And so before Faye even comes in to work, before she even has taken a look at the inbox, if I see things first, I'm able to tag them with action oriented words. We get a ton of podcast guest pitches. It's kind of wild. So on some days we get at least five. And so that's a good case where Faye will make recommendations. I'll talk about notes in a minute. But with action oriented tags alone, we could say potential podcast guest could be one tag to decide or yes or no. So the tags are a way to quickly at a glance see what types of messages are in the team inbox and also starting to give clues about how we want to handle them.

Number four, the best part about having software that facilitates a team inbox, to me, the reason it's worth the cost, even though you pay per team member and I know that software can get really pricey, is that you can add notes to emails. When I was just working in Gmail, we had to add it as a draft. So if a team member wanted to draft a reply or they wanted to ask me questions, they had to save it as a draft in my inbox and they had delegate access to my Gmail. That's terrifying because what if you accidentally hit send or something goes wrong? I never ever want the client or the person who's writing in. I just don't want to risk having them see our behind the scenes notes. In Help Scout. As soon as you go to append a note to a message, it's a different color. It's obvious that it's a note and that's where you can write to each other. So I can say, here's how I'd like to handle this or she can write me enny, here's a question for you. And we're able to write notes back and forth and communicate about that message and assign the message back and forth. Now, I've told Faye, please don't assign anything to me because they get lost, never to be seen again. I like to keep anything that still needs attention from me in the main inbox, whether for pivot or for free time. But I will often write a note about how to handle something and then assign it to Faye so when she starts work, she can go in and already see what's assigned her with notes on them about additional context, what to do. So that assigning is another really, really important feature that to me is a game changer of managing an inbox this way. Again, if you're just in something like a Gmail inbox, you can't assign messages. You could assign tags, which I do for Faye respond this week or add to notion. I have separate tags in Gmail just with Faye's name and then I have add to notion is a separate tag or respond this week, it's a separate tag respond today. So I have all kinds of crazy labels in Gmail, but it's so much easier. We could actually assign the note not just the note, but the message itself in Help Scout. And then each person can log in. Especially if you have more than two team members like me, then each person can log in and see what's for them. The only time that emails get assigned to me are when it's just for my information. I like to read about Descript, an editor I use for podcasts like this one. I like to read their update. I like to read Zapier's articles that they send. So certain newsletters that are work related. I just assign them to me so I can read them at any time. I know that there's no rush.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Number5 Another thing I really love this is possible in Gmail too. In Help Scout they're called workflows so we can auto archive certain messages. I think I've gotten it to the point where if someone writes the words guest blog post it just gets auto archived. It's such spam. I don't even have a blog anymore and I say on my contact form on both websites I don't accept guest posts. And yet there's a lot of that clutter spam that comes in. So you can definitely set up workflows how to handle certain types of messages. But As I share in 92, where this gets even more powerful is that one of your workflows can be to auto assign certain types of messages or auto append notes. And so where my email systems in Help Scout have gotten much smarter over time, ever since I had this aha moment is that let's say you leave me a voicemail for either podcast when a speak pipe message comes in, a note gets automatically assigned pointing to our Notion page in our manager manual. It's now called the email guide that's just for email. How to handle it and if you don't have an email guide in notion or you don't have a manager manual in notion, I think it's better to just put the link to that page. So you could always update that page. And your operations, your SOPs or standard operating procedures are all in one place. But a second best thing would be that a speak pipe message comes in and you auto append a note that says please take these actions and you actually list in the note steps 1 through 5. Listen to the message if it's relevant to the podcast and not a random pitch. Transcribe the message, download it, save it here in Dropbox. Create a card in the podcast production. Assign this or leave this in the inbox so Jenny can also reply to the person who leaves the voice message. Something like that. You get the idea. And so that's where workflows become really powerful is auto assigning to the person, auto assigning notes and then making the notes really clear about what to do with this type of message. And that's where it gets much easier if you ever have turnover on your team or even your team member can easily get overwhelmed. Email is so vast and often much more complex than it seems. They quickly get some guidelines about what to do.

Number six Saved replies. These have been called different things over the years. Canned responses. I heard Amy Porterfield call them guided responses, which I really like. Just sounds so much better than canned. I've had email templates in textexpander for a long time because what I like about textexpander is that you create shortcuts for so many things. I have hundreds of textexpander, whether it's I'm expanding my hex colors of my website, I'm expanding affiliate links. For example, if I type semicolon Help Scout, that's my affiliate link in case you want to sign up for Help Scout. I don't know if it actually gives you a discount or not, but of course that's what I'll put in the show notes. Not with an agenda. It's not like I'm recording this, although hey, they should be paying me. I just like to share when software really works for me. I feel good about sharing it because I take so long to vet software and I sunk a lot of time and money and effort into software that didn't work. So I'd rather save you that time, effort and energy. But I also have textexpander shortcuts where if I type semicolon sinq that stands for speaking inquiry, it actually populates an entire email reply for when we get an inquiry. And that way no matter if I'm in Gmail Help Scout, wherever that text expander can be used. However, it is nice in Help Scout for the most common inquiries to use their saved replies feature and here's why. Because you can have Dynamic insertion of the person writing dear so and so like we don't use the word dear but hi first name and then the message can populate and then you say you know our sign off is usually warmly the responder's name in Help Scout. So it's simple, it's straightforward, but you can have dynamic insertion of those key details and then the person on the team still needs to remember to update, but at least it provides a template right there while you're working in Help Scout, pretty easy to use the dropdown and also have clues how to handle the most common messages, knowing that everything will require customization and that even more detail about how to handle things lives in the manager manual and the email guide.

Number seven One of the things that sold me on this early on is being able to search for the full customer history. This is really important because for example, I run the private BFF community and that community has taken different forms over the last eight plus plus years. But it's important if somebody's writing in they have a question. Sometimes we do want to be able to search the customer's email address or the community member. I don't know why I don't love the word customer, but we want to be able to search and see what's the history. Are there any other open tickets or even just context? Maybe somebody says oh I wrote in a couple years ago and you were so helpful with xyz. It's nice to be able to search in one place, whereas if you have disparate email boxes it's hard to have any one source of truth on customer and community member history.

Number eight. Finally, it's pretty cool to get reports. I don't use this feature very often, to be honest, because it is what it is for us. On my delightfully tiny team when it comes to email, we do the best that we can. I don't obsess over the statistics, but HelpScout will give you reports for different time intervals, whether seven days or a year, about how many messages you've received, how many emails you've created, how many replies you've sent, how many tickets you've resolved, what percentage were resolved on first reply. For example, how long did emails languish in the hubscot inbox? So if you do have a bigger team, it's really nice together as a team. You can track these metrics and you could even track per person if you want to get to that level of detail. Just to see what the trends are. Is there room for improvement? Are things getting Better. I mean, one way to know if your systems are working, even if you start slowly with building out some of these practices, is just to see are we lowering our resolution time over time. And you can also know how much time is email taking? Like, how many messages are we getting? Sometimes when you're in it, you're working in the business in your email inboxes. It's really hard to get perspective on how much time is this actually taking? What do we need to plan for in the future, knowing what our averages have been up till this point?

So those are the eight things that I love about having team inboxes. I think it's one of these areas of the business where at some point it's good to go pro. And what I mean by that is that for a long time, at least the first five years of my business, I tried to use every software at the free tier. I just tried to not pay for software. I tried to keep my costs really, really low. And then eventually there was this year, I want to say 2018 or 19, where I decided it was more important to go pro on the important areas and I needed to upgrade my software. It was okay to pay. In this case, again, you know, 46amonth. It's not nothing, but it's worth it because it makes our systems and our communication so much clearer, and that saves a lot of time. Who knows, if we didn't have good systems, I might be paying a whole nother team member to even just help with email alone, let alone other parts of the business. And so when you're working in a way that's inefficient and that has opacity and that has friction, not only are you more frustrated and are you more of a bottleneck, your team members get frustrated and confused, and there's a lot of bloat in terms of time, energy, and attention. So the best thing that I did was start to go pro on software so that I could go really lean with other parts of my operations. And I always joke that software is actually my first employee, that I try to delegate and automate everything I can to software so that the team members I do work with have as much of their time set free as possible for the things that they really enjoy doing, that's more creative. Even when it comes to corresponding with customers, the more that we automate and simplify and document, the more warm and personal they can be in their response. And as can I as well. Because our mind isn't bogged down by where things are or things getting lost, falling through the cracks, not sure which inbox, who's responding, what's the draft here? What's the plan of action? It just cuts all that out. So Help Scout is one of my favorite pieces of software in my business. I also have@itsfreetime.com tools the rest of my favorite software. And of course there's the FreeTime toolkit. It's totally free, has a lot of tools and templates, including my Stuck emails guidelines of what to do with the messages that get stuck in your inbox that I call the wall. There's usually about 50 messages in my Gmail, my personal Gmail just sitting there, the wall because they're requiring more or they're more complicated or I want to give a really thorough, careful, you know, warm personal response even to people I really care about and then they end up piling up. So I am always working on email as a part of the business and how I can get smarter with the systems. I hope you found this helpful or interesting. Even if you don't use a service like Help Scout, maybe there are certain practices from this that you can adopt. And like I said, I'll put all the links in the show notes. You know I always love to hear from you. You can either comment on this episode's page in Spotify, which is a new favorite feature of mine, or you can leave me a voice note and you know it will get auto categorized. In Help Scout. You can go to itsfreetime.com ask that's itsfreetime.com ask and I also love hearing voice notes for your favorite time saving system. Something like today's conversation that you would love to share with fellow free timers so you can send that in at any time as well. You hereby have permission to stop managing a zillion inboxes and narrow them down to one centralized inbox for you and your team so that you can make your life easier and get out of the weeds of email. Thank you so much for listening. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

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