Helpwise Shared Inbox Review (Using it for last 3 months)
We started using shared inbox software Helpwise as one of their early users in 2019. It played an important role in helping us provide great customer support, improve our sales and hiring processes. In this post, we are going to share:
- Problems that we were facing before using a shared inbox
- why we selected Helpwise
- how Helpwise helped us.
As one of the leading social media scheduling and analytics platforms in the market, we work with hundreds of thousands of businesses and marketers around the world. It is really easy to provide personalized support to customers in the early days when each team member is responsible for a dozen to a few hundred customers. Your reply to every email in a quick time and know your customers by name. Because of this excellent customer support, your existing customer starts talking great about you, and your business picks up.
But this all works well till you are small and working with small & medium scale businesses only. As your business starts growing, communication problems start knocking your door. And because of this, you start losing a lot of business, customer service levels take a nosedive, and most importantly, you start leaving a lot of money on the table.
Problems we were facing before using a Shared Inbox
With a growing customer base, our customer query email load started to rise rapidly. And, this directly impacted our customer support quality and response rate. As we crossed 10000 users, 25000 users and 100000 users mark, the time it took to respond to queries went through the roof. As a result, both our subscriber churn rate and revenue churn rate started to grow at an alarming rate.
To solve the problem, we grew our customer support team rapidly but that solved the problem partially. Rather, it gave birth to a bunch of new problems – lack of transparency, inability to track the performance of our support agents and we started missing out on replying to some of the emails.
We tried some customer support ticking solutions like Zendesk, Freshdesk, etc. But our email chaos was not limited to customer support only rather we started to face similar issues with our sales emails, partnership emails and hiring emails. Also, the ticketing system looks very impersonal, unlike the kind of personal touch we like to provide to our customer communications.
Team members were sharing passwords for these shared email accounts like help@, sales@, partnerships@, jobs@, etc email addresses. When any team member left Viralwoot, we had to change the password of these email accounts.
How we used Helpwise Shared Inbox?
So, it was all a painful mess. And, upon searching online, we found that the best solution for our email management related issues will be a shared inbox software. While doing our research, we found some great applications. For ease of use, quality of support and affordable pricing, we picked Helpwise.
- Shared Inbox as Customer Support Helpdesk
We first signed up for a free shared inbox plan (refer Helpwise Pricing) of Helpwise for our support inbox. We connected our help@viralwoot email address and added 5 of our team members from the support team to have access to that inbox. Whenever a new support email came, it was assigned to one of the available team members. Team members were able to collaborate via the in-built chat feature to send correct replies – every time! Switching our support emails to a shared inbox stopped us from sending any duplicate and contradictory replies to customer queries.If an agent is writing a reply to a customer query, other agents can see that activity in real-time. Analytics dashboard gave us all the actionable insights on the performance of our agents, kind of emails we are getting and our KPIs around customer support like response time, the average number of replies required to close a query and so on. - Shared Inbox for our leads and sales queries
After hearing good things about Helpwise from our customer support team, we upgraded our Helpwise account to the Standard Plan. It comes with the option to add unlimited users for a fixed monthly price (THANK YOU, Helpwise Team!). And, added a new mailbox to handle all our emails from new leads, opportunities and ongoing sales conversations. This helped us improve our sales velocity by sending our replies faster, preparing & editing contracts without going through multiple forwards & CCs among team members.We use Hubspot as our main CRM. Helpwise Hubspot Integration helped us sync our data within Helpwise. So, our sales agents were able to access information about the person they were communicating with via email. And, update deal stages in Hubspot from Helpwise itself. That saved our sales agents a lot of time and effort. Helpwise also gave our sales team an option to connect with the cloud phone system. With this, they can now log every call & SMS against the concerned profile within Helpwise. - Shared Inbox For Job Application TrackingAs we have been growing fast, we were using an application management system for handling all our incoming job applications. We shifted our Hiring function to Helpwise. Why we did so? Both HR folks and Hiring Managers can be a part of a single mailbox. By doing so, our team members saved themselves from all the email forwarding they had to do to get feedback on candidates.Now, each email thread works like a job application and the relevant hiring manager can chat with HR/Recruiter within the email thread, tag email thread as Good Fit, No Fit, Offer Made, Offer Accepted, Test Sent, Test Submitted and so on. Hence, Helpwise not only served our purpose but also saved us from using another separate software (& paying extra per month for that software)
- Automating Processes Around Email
Zapier integration helped us implement automation across our support, sales and hiring emails. If you have resources, you can also use their APIs and Webhooks to further automate your workflows.
“If you are not using a shared inbox for your team emails, you are missing out on important productivity hack. Setting up a shared inbox for every team is the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to team productivity. Grab it & set it up without any second thought!” – Alex Cruz, CEO, Viralwoot
About Helpwise
HelpWise provides a central inbox that all authorized team members can access. Helpwise keeps your team on the same page to avoid duplicates and other endless circuits that clutter everyone’s mailboxes.
With HelpWise, everyone on the team can see the incoming email thread. Helpwise allows you to assign an email for a response or follow-up to a member of the team. Another very useful function is that team members can chat directly with each other in the discussion thread. Ideal for chatting quickly on the response to a request for example.
Helpwise offers both free and paid plans as per your requirements and team size.
Interested in generating similar results for your business? If your business is also growing and email chaos is becoming problematic, you must get your support, sales, hiring, operations, finance, and legal teams Helpwise shared inbox.
Schedule a free demo with Helpwise Team or Setup Your Team Mailbox For Free