Triage the inbox
To triage the inbox, go through open conversations and for each one assign an owner, set a priority, and move it to snoozed or closed when it needs nothing more now. Transfer a conversation only when the customer should change hands, because it moves the contact's owner too.
To triage the inbox, go through open conversations and for each one assign an owner, set a priority, and move it to snoozed or closed when it needs nothing more now. Transfer a conversation only when the customer should change hands, because it moves the contact's owner too.
Requirements
- A role that can manage conversations.
- A connected mailbox; see Connect a mailbox.
Steps
- Choose what to look at. Conversations linked to your contacts, the ones from senders who are not contacts yet, or all of them.
- Assign an owner. Give each conversation to the person who should answer it. A property manager's inbox sends maintenance requests to the maintenance coordinator and lease questions to the leasing agent.
- Set the priority. Low, normal, high, or urgent.
- Answer or park it. Reply from the conversation; see Send an email. If it needs nothing until later, snooze it until a date and time. When it is done, close it.
- Hand over the customer, if that is what is happening. Use transfer, not assign, when the relationship itself moves to someone else.
Assign or transfer
- Assign gives this one conversation to a person. The contact's owner stays the same.
- Transfer hands over the customer: it also changes the owner of the linked contact, and with it who sees that contact's future conversations.
Response times
If the business has a response-time policy, each conversation shows when a first reply is due and when it should be resolved. A warning comes before either is missed, and a missed target is recorded on the conversation. Snoozing pauses the clock. An automation can react to a missed target; see Automation triggers.
Cutting noise
- Personal mutes hide senders from your own inbox only.
- Business-wide rules stop mail from an address, or from a whole domain, from being logged at all. They are set by an administrator and apply to mail arriving after the rule is saved; messages already in the inbox stay.
Notes and limitations
- You see what you own. You see a conversation if you can see its contact: you are assigned to it, you own the contact or its account, or the contact has no owner. A conversation you expected but cannot find usually belongs to someone else.
- Seeing that a conversation exists is not reading it. Someone allowed to see all contacts may see who wrote and when, without the message body. Reading everyone's mail in full is a separate permission that is not given to administrators automatically and is announced to the whole business when granted.
- Covering for a colleague. When you cover for someone, their conversations appear in your inbox marked with whose they are, so you know whose voice to answer in.
Related
For how the inbox fits the rest of the CRM, see Email and the inbox.