The benefits of a shared inbox
It is great to see that business email users are starting to appreciate the real business benefits of a shared inbox. Although every sector varies, for most organisations, the majority of emails are not confidential. Of course, employees would not want to share them with the rest of the world, but there is a strong financial incentive for sharing them with their colleagues. And now, more so than ever.
Collaborative working
As technology has allowed more and more firms to decentralise their operations with many employees working from home and on the road, the opportunities to collaborate are getting fewer.
When people talk face to face, a lot of the information exchanged appears to be redundant. Yet although it may not have direct relevance to the main topic of discussion, it conveys much that gets used further down the line. Who don’t you like? Which is the best person to deal with? Is anyone off sick? When did we do a similar job? What might go wrong?
But people generally type nowhere near as fast as they speak, so if you have a conversation using written text – as you do with an email – you tend to stick strictly to the point. And you lose much information that could turn out to be highly relevant to the business.
The problem with private email
You could overcome some of the “lack of information” issues by simply picking up the phone and in a previous blog we have discussed the benefits of so doing. But it is worse than that. Not only do you say less, but what you do say gets locked up in a private email in-boxes. And it’s no better with a telephone call because although you might say more, it evaporates into the aether as soon as you have said it.
The advantages of a pooled inbox
So forward-thinking businesses are beginning to realise that if they share messages, this can have significant benefits. These we have talked about before and indeed we have written many blogs about shared inboxes generally. However, once you are sold on the benefits of shared inboxes, there are many shared inbox Cloud services to choose from. What most of these services have in common though is that they force users to change their way of working. They might require that users run special applications or a specific email system which must be configured in a particular way.
Keep calm and carry on
This is where Threads differs dramatically. Not only do users continue using their existing email systems unchanged, but also if the subscribing organisation uses a mix of different email systems, Threads is just as happy with this. And if that is not enough, they can include their transcribed telephone conversations too.
Still unsure?
But it’s not just about the benefits of staff not learning something new or chucking out the existing infrastructure. We recognise that shared inboxes may not actually be right for every company. We like to think we have covered all the privacy and security concerns, but there will always be workflows that are not appropriate for shared inboxes. The trouble is, you can often only discover this by trying them.
With Threads you don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Give it a try and see if a shared inbox is for you. If you don’t like it, you just stop using it. You don’t have to worry about having to restore all your previous system because your emails are all still there. But we think you will soon see how the Threads shared inbox changes everything without changing anything.