Google has released changes: the G Suite legacy free edition will retire starting May 1, 2022.
Let’s check the main aspects in short:
- From May 1 to June 1, 2022, Google will transfer you to Google Workspace free of charge.
- Accounts become suspended from July 1, 2022, but your admins can sign in to the Admin console to a) upgrade or b) migrate data.
- If you don’t wish to pick a paid Google Workspace subscription, you would be transferred to a no-cost version without premium Google Workspace functionalities such as custom email or multi-account management.
- And if you prefer to drop it, Google will transfer you to a Google Workspace application set based on your current functions.
- Google has an export app to transfer your records but might not cover everything you’d wish.
It is a perfect time to decide on data migration to a help desk system. Start your financial year with a choice to upgrade your customer support service.
When your business is just taking off, you've already learned the major lesson: be ready to commit to adaptation. Talking about customer service, you focus on attracting more customers, and then about dealing with customer issues. Here is where the shared inbox is a good, flexible solution for a quick fix on a small number of requests. After all, it is much easier to personalize the responses due to fewer clients. But what should you do when your company evolves and wins more customers?
When you provide more features or products it makes things more complex. And you receive more support requests which are getting more complex too. How to address everything without mess? Just four words: a help desk system.
In the beginning, email customer support may work, but soon you realize its numerous disadvantages. That provokes you to think about migration from email to help desk, which is more efficient than shared inbox support.
Why Move from Email to a Help Desk Platform?
The major reason for adopting help desk software is managing customer support requests easily. You're better to move from email to ticketing system if:
- support requests are lost or forgotten
- support agents send duplicate responses
- clients have to wait for answers
- support reps productivity is low
- customer service team crave for customer's communication history
Although your team spends much effort handling volumes of requests, some may slip through the cracks. Clients send relevant follow-up emails for getting their problems resolved. But it is impossible to define which issues are addressed and which stay pending. That is because your company has no system to identify and order pending requests.
Receiving the same answer from two support representatives makes your client confused, and puts your brand credibility under a question. The worst case is when your agents give different information which arises more questions than answers. Often, hurried support reps reply without tagging them previously. Unlike shared inboxes, most help desk tools include an agent collision feature.
If your deals scale, you have to work hard to keep track of the increasing requests and answers. Probably support agents track all the necessary information in a particular spreadsheet. However, it takes a lot of time to copy/paste and double-check the sheet. This makes your response time dropping which also affects your customer's loyalty.
Performing efficiently is valuable and expected to be high. However, your support agents are crippled without the appropriate tools necessary for handling client queries. They find it frustrating to receive numerous similar requests and provide the same response. At the same time, customers with more urgent problems must wait. The overworked and overstressed support team perform worse and burn out faster.
Nowadays, customers pick and choose from a list of possible communication channels, not those you offer. They may request you via tweet and later email you some additional information. That makes your support service agents struggle with connecting the dots and challenge to provide a seamless experience or a quick answer.
What Are the Benefits and Setbacks of a Shared Inbox
Among the main benefits of a shared inbox in Outlook or Gmail are:
- Easy to use. A shared email works similarly to different personal email applications. After all, email serves as a part of people’s daily activities, and everyone knows how to deal with it. But time tracking and allocation should be tracked via checking receive/sent time.
- Easy collaboration. Compared to personal inboxes, shared inboxes are run by everyone in a support team. Also, you can create and assign tasks.
- Actions depend on historical data. Support agents use previous customer interactions to keep the conversation in the same context and flow.
Among the main setbacks of a shared inbox are:
- Missed client details. Shared inboxes in Gmail, for instance, (without add-ons and extensions) don’t offer customer profiles with details and records. That impacts the quality and speed of fixing customer queries.
- Mixed responses. Your support agents share all communication with clients so agent collision happens quite often. The result of missed tags or notes, as well as a human factor: inattentiveness.
- Ownership. As everyone can access inbox at the same time, customers may observe the lack of accountability or ownership. The tickets you have, the harder is to count them. And "orphan" emails no one takes as expect somebody on the team handles this query. In the end: poor customer experience.
Why Move from Gmail, Outlook, or Another Email Provider
Among the most critical reasons to switch email are the following:
- Limited integration capabilities
- Advanced automation
- Analytics & reports
- Omnichannel customer support
A shared inbox serves as an email management tool. However, it is not enough for scaling up. Your company needs an upgradeable, adaptable tool to increase the efficiency of customer support workflow. For example, help desk software integrates with CRM, ERP, collaboration and communication tools, shopping carts, and many others. That streamlines routine and interaction.
Some email providers have a particular process setup. Often, it requires buying some add-ons or plugins to get some difference. With help desk solutions, you have opportunities to automate workflows, but need to set everything up. Workflow automation depends on predefined triggers, which enables your agents to focus on providing more accurate services faster. Sometimes, it is easier to hire an agency to tune everything up.
Error-free, quick support service is the result of continuous performance analysis and improvements. From determining peak hours to evaluating agent skills, the help desk software collects significant metrics related to overarching objectives. After all, visualizing customer data in a set of dashboards helps define problem areas and work out short and long-term fixes.
Nowadays, customer support goes further than email, phone support, live chat, social media message, or chatbot. It mixes each and every into the flow. Customer chooses and the business adjusts or loses its audience. A shared inbox strives to enable all the necessary options. But often fails to identify duplication of customer requests. That leads to poor response times or even orphan emails. Most of the help desk systems have built-in omnichannel support and give your team a unified view of every customer interaction. These days, the speed and quality of brand response matter a lot.
Help Desk Software: Pros and Cons List
In the help desk software advantages list you can find:
- Centralized ticketing. The ticketing system helps support agents to oversee the customer queries properly.
- Accountability. Each ticket has a support representative who handles customer requests or issues. Agents are assigned to the tickets and have a stronger feeling of ownership over their tasks.
- Reporting. Help desk software stores interaction and customer data regarding tickets and support representatives' performance. Reports improve the support strategy and workflow overview, identify typical client problems, and provide tips on changes.
- Improve mobility. SaaS help desk apps are not only trendy but actually useful. You get an option to offer support 24/7. Your support representatives aren't enticed at the office, moreover, you can outsource customer support and scale it as you want.
- Self-Service Portals. One crucial feature of good help desk software is gathering customer complaints. It then assembles these complaints into FAQs that users can refer to later. With this feature, similar complaints can be directed to the FAQs section. This helps to free agents and gives them time to attend to other pressing issues.
- Collaboration Features. A good help desk software should have built-in solutions that facilitate communication among support teams. Dedicated chat features and delegation functions for managers can help you achieve effective collaboration.
Among the main drawbacks of the help desk software are:
- Cost concerns. The price of help desk solutions is higher than shared emails. The price goes in correlation with the features you get. Most of the vendors charge on a monthly or annual basis per seat.
- Learning curve. When you adopt a help desk system, prepare your team and run some training series to show them how to work with software.
Drawing a Line
If you struggle with some email-related issues, it is time to move from email to help desk software. Compared to a shared inbox, customer support tools offers more opportunities:
- daily operations with the appropriate structure
- customer service hub for the entire team
- all data stored in the same place
- automation of routine, manual tasks
- transparency of processes
- improved customer service and experience
Whether you want a small Zendesk import or a full-scale Freshdesk migration, you’ll need a lot of preparation. Yet, if the time is of the essence, and bothering your team’s time for a migration is not an option, our experts can help you out.
Frequently Asked Questions
You can create tasks right from the inbox. Thus, each provider has some specific rules on how those can be created from the primary and shared mailboxes.
If you flag an email in the shared mailbox, you won’t see it either in the shared mailbox’s Tasks or in the To-Do list. You need to create a security group first. Then add all users from the shared mailbox. This way, they will see the task in their own Task list as soon as they accept the email.
You should be a Microsoft Planner user to assign a task to multiple users. However, if one of them marks the task as complete, the whole task will be marked as completed. To assign a task to multiple users, you need to put a tick so the task is replicated to all team members.
On Gmail's main page, you should see a right-side panel with icons for Calendar, Keep, Tasks, or other Google apps. If the side panel isn’t displayed, click on a small arrow on the button right. To open Tasks, press on its icon. Tasks will open up in the right sidebar. Click “Add a task” to set up tasks. You can drag and drop tasks to change their order. Plus, you can save an email as a task.
You need to download the Google Tasks app in Gmail on your desktop. As you connect the app to your Gmail account, your tasks will sync up with your desktop tasks. Plus, you will also see them in your Google Calendar on your desktop.
