plum mail
Using Plum Mail we no longer need a shared inbox.
Plum Mail is well suited to providing support desk functionality.
The way email conversations are organised with participants enables this without the need for a shared inbox or ticketing system.
We call it ‘support desk lite’ and this is how we use Plum Mail ourselves for customer support.
Contacting Support
When one of our users contacts us we automatically start a conversation with our two support agents (who also happen to be myself and my co-founder Peter).
The new conversation has the following participants:
Both Richard and Peter see the new conversation in their inbox and any replies sent by either support agent are visible to all participants so cross over is not an issue.
Plum Mail can also support contact forms on your website. We both have one, you can find mine at app.plummail.co/richard
In other shared inbox / ticketing systems we tried you have to assign an agent to a specific support request. In Plum Mail’s group conversations you simply don’t need to do this.
When the customer responds their reply will be included in the thread so both support agents can see it.
This solves the basic ‘reply all’ problem shared inboxes need to solve before they are useful.
Side notes
We sometimes need to discuss a particular support issue between us before giving a response to the customer. This is easily done with Plum Mail’s linked conversations.
An agent can start a new conversation that is linked to the original one. If an agent copies and pastes any information from the original message, Plum Mail automatically builds a link back to that line in the message so it’s easy to reference it later.
This replaces thread comments feature in shared inboxes.
Shared Knowledge
Answers to support questions can often be found in our company knowledge-base. When we copy links into Plum Mail it automatically generates a rich link preview as well as a shared pin.
Everyone in the conversation will now have quick and easy access to the knowledge-base link.
More than one answer
When a user asks a hard question, Peter and I will provide opinions on the right answer.
Plum Mail’s highlighted questions are useful in this scenario because each agent can provide their answer to the customer’s question with all responses neatly grouped together under the original question.
If we need to ask the customer a question, it is highlighted and their attention is drawn toward it to encourage an answer.
Concluding the ticket
When the support issue has been resolved, we conclude it.
This indicates clearly to everyone in the conversation that the issue has been handled and no more support is needed.
Lite is alright
In our small team, we have not needed a shared inbox or ticketing system. Our users receive good support and the workload between us is managable.
If you’re regular inbox is causing collaboration headaches but you don’t want all the faff of a big ticketing system then Plum Mail is a good fit.
Visit app.plummail.co/team to contact us if you would like to use Plum Mail for support and we’ll get you set up.
