Team inboxes are a great way for groups of people in your company to work together in Intercom. You can assign conversations to a team, rather than an individual teammate. Every team has its own space, so members can easily see and manage the conversations assigned to the group.
Here are a few examples of how you might want to use team inboxes:
New lead? Assign pricing related conversations to the sales team.
Bonjour! Assign conversations in French to a group of French speakers.
Request for event sponsorship? Pass along the conversation to the marketing team.
Team inboxes can also be used to @mention a group of teammates in a conversation note.
Setting up team inboxes
You can set up a team from Settings > Help Desk > Team inboxes. Select "New team inbox" and give your team a name. Each team is given an emoji avatar when you create it. You can change this to something that best represents your team. The avatar is only seen in Intercom, so your users will never see it.
When you add teammates to a team, an email notification is sent to let them know.
Then, choose the assignment method for new conversations in this team inbox
You can choose from three options:
Manual - conversations will not be automatically assigned. Teammates in this inbox will manually assign conversations to themselves or others.
Round Robin - evenly distributes conversations in sequential order to teammates in the inbox.
Balanced - conversations are assigned to teammates with the fewest active conversations.
Learn more about managing teammate workload here.
You can easily view the team in the inbox and see any conversations assigned to the team.
Using team inboxes in Intercom
There are three main ways team inboxes can improve your workflow:
When you are assigning a conversation, you can assign it to a team instead of an individual. Teams appear at the end of the list of teammates, whenever you assign things in Intercom. Assigning a conversation to a team means it will appear in that team's space in the inbox, so team members can pick it up and respond.
When you are sending a message, you can assign replies to a team. This means that you could assign replies from product announcements to your marketing team, or replies from onboarding messages to your customer success team.
You can use assignment rules to assign incoming messages to a team, just as you would a teammate. This allows you to assign billing queries to the sales team, high paying users to a VIP support team, or Spanish speakers to the Spanish support team.
When you need to notify a whole team about an incident, product bug, SLA breach, or training opportunity, you can @mention a team to send notifications to all teammates on that team at once.
Notifications
If you have notifications turned on for conversations assigned to you, then you will also receive a notification if a conversation is assigned to a Team you are a member of.
Best practices to structure your inbox
Consider the following setups for your teams...
Tiered
Implementing a tiered team structure in Intercom will allow you to offer different levels of service for each tier, allow Tier 1 teams to triage conversations, and route customers directly to Tiers 2 & 3 based on the type of issue or customer spend.
Tier 1 teams typically handle basic how-to and troubleshooting questions, and can be responsible for escalating more complex conversations to Tier 2 & 3 inboxes. Tier 2 & 3 inboxes can also be used to field inquiries for higher spend or VIP customers.
Ideally, an inbound Workflow can be used to route conversations directly to the appropriate tiered inbox, so that the Tier 1 team has to spend a minimal amount of time manually escalating conversations.
Regional
If your support team is spread across multiple regions, it can be helpful to set up team inboxes for each regional team.
This team inbox structure can be used by regional managers to oversee the support reps on their teams. It also enables team inboxes to use team level reply times, which will then be shared with end users based on routing rules.
Channel Based (Chat, Email, Phone, Social)
This option is best if you’re directing resources differently per channel. If you’d like your support team to focus on chat conversations before email, it’s typically a good strategy to have unique team inboxes for each channel. This enables support reps to focus on conversations that come in through the chat team inbox first, before an email inbox.
Conversation Subject Based
If you’d like your support team to specialize in certain topics of conversation, this is a good option to use. This is more common for support teams of complex B2B SaaS platforms, when support reps may be more productive if they focus on certain use cases, workflows, or industry types using the platform.
What's next?
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