Is your team having trouble collaborating?

For most businesses, such as e-commerce, hospitality, and telecom, email is the most commonly used and efficient channel of communication with customers.

While email works fine for small teams in 2024, thanks to features such as labels and filters, you may need a more efficient tool to facilitate team collaboration as your business grows. 

In fact, according to research by HubSpot, 28% of marketing leaders identified cross-functional collaboration as a top way to gain visibility within the company. This figure indicates the urgent need for efficient collaboration tools.

Shared inbox tools come in handy to consolidate all email communications into one platform where your team can seamlessly collaborate on enhancing customer experience.

In this article, we will discuss the best shared inbox tools and solutions for efficient collaboration to help you supercharge innovation and streamline communication.

Want to up customer support for your ecommerce business? Check out my previous article where I reviewed the best customer support software for telecom services to give you an idea of some of the best options for offering stellar customer support.

Let’s get started.

Quick Summary

1. Glassix - Best AI-powered unified inbox for all businesses

2. Front -  Best easy-to-use shared inbox solution

3. Hiver - Best Gmail based help desk for collaboration

4. Gorgias - Best shared inbox for e-commerce stores

5. Drag - Best shared inbox tool for small teams

How to Choose a Shared Inbox Tool for Efficient Collaboration

a) Consider industry suitability

Most shared inbox software are designed with a general approach, which means they may not fit your specific business operations and workflows, like a glove.

When choosing a unified inbox solution for collaboration, prioritize platforms that are designed specifically for your business. Some platforms could be best for ecommerce business while some work best with Google workspace.

b) Keep in mind the cost & budget

Though not a priority consideration, it is essential to ensure you look for any hidden costs to avoid going out of budget when selecting a shared inbox for collaboration.

Compare the cost of the software to the features offered to determine whether it is worth investing in. Often you’ll have to choose between one time payments and monthly recurring payments. This will also help you remain within your budget. 

c) Prioritize integration capabilities

It is challenging syncing data between disjointed systems, which can impede streamlined agent productivity and cross-team collaboration. A shared inbox that integrates with your existing systems will save you time juggling between applications.

Common integrations you can consider to enhance collaborations within your business include reporting and analytics, CRM, and task management tools like Trello & Asana. 

d) Consider features and functionality

You are investing in a shared inbox mainly for its features, in this case, collaboration features. I recommend identifying and evaluating your business pain points also.

When selecting a shared inbox, look for critical collaboration enhancement features, such as comments, tags, and mentions - ideal for redefining how your team works together to deliver great experiences.

e) Security and compliance are key

Collaboration tools in 2024 pose security risks and inherent flaws that could be damaging to your business - such as account exploitation.

I recommend going for a platform with robust security measures to protect your sensitive data. Check for compliance with data protection regulations like HIPAA if applicable to your industry.

1. Glassix 

Glassix shared inbox streamlines communications.

With integration and conversation routing abilities, Glassix is one of the best shared inbox tools to facilitate efficient teamwork.

Collaboration is at the heart of any business. Glassix, therefore, is designed to step up your communications by consolidating all business communication into a single easy-to-use platform.

This enhances productivity to redefine your revenue operations, supercharge customer support, and reclaim time so your team can focus on providing superior customer experiences.

Its shared inbox delivers
smooth workflows with innovative
automation, enabling richer conversations between your teams
and customers. 

You can also assign tickets, route conversations, and know who is working on what for better task management. 

Additionally, you’ll be able to customize the conversation info panel to fit your personal or brand preferences. 

Key features:

• Glassix’s shared inbox consolidates all communications into one platform, allowing your team to collaborate and communicate with customers in their preferred platform.
• Its unified inbox provides shortcut actions that enable you to save valuable time by assigning shortcuts to actions such as adding canned replies and copying the conversation to a clipboard.
• You can integrate several third-party applications, such as Slack, directly with Glassix’s unified inbox to eliminate the need to jump between tabs and software, which can be a great boost to your productivity.

Pricing:

• Offers a 30-day free trial
• Starting plan: $49 per agent/month
  ‍

Verdict

Glassix offers incredible features beyond a unified inbox to facilitate team collaboration, including integration with other software to enhance innovation and creativity. You’ll be armed with all you need to deliver great customer support, and retain customers. It is what you need to deliver exceptional team collaboration.

2. Front 

Front enables cross-functional team collaboration.

If your business is experiencing a huge amount of emails and messages coming in, some may fall through the cracks, which can be disastrous.

Front helps you handle emails in 2024 from a shared inbox where your team can collaborate on issues to enhance responsiveness and remain accountable.

Some incredible features offered by this software’s shared inbox include quick tags, seamless handoffs, and conversation routing that help meet customers’ customer service demands. 

Since you can assign clear ownership of each conversation, it is easy to know who is working on it to avoid double responses and enhance accountability.

Additionally, instead of sending internal emails to your employees every now and then, Front’s in-thread comments enable you to send real-time, behind-the-scenes chats for streamlined collaboration.

Key features:

• Front’s AI summaries save time by providing a summary of conversation threads, eliminating the need to read long chat threads.
• It integrates well with other systems, such as Asana and Slack, allowing you to stay on top of tasks and collaborate better with other departments.
• You also get customer and account history across all channels, enabling your support agents to respond to customers without repeatedly asking for information.

Pricing:

• No free trial
• Starting plan: $19 per seat/month
  ‍

Verdict

Front delivers robust features for enhancing collaborations, including integration and omnichannel customer service. It merges all communication channels in one platform, making it easy for large teams to collaborate. However, Front could improve its knowledge base to empower customers better, especially during initial setup.

3. Hiver 

Do you have lots of unanswered emails?

Hiver provides all the necessary tools to organize and manage your emails, ensure accountability, and facilitate team collaboration, from a single platform.

With clear visibility into which team member is working on what, you can be sure that few emails will fall through the cracks. 

Additionally, you can easily manage your employees and enhance productivity by assigning and reassigning tasks to the right people. 

When you do, your employees will receive a real-time email assignment notification. Email tags can also notify them of priority requests to ensure timely resolution of customer support issues.

And whenever you need anyone’s input on anything, the @mention feature allows you to quickly get help, eliminating the need for CC-ing and forwarding emails, which can cause email clutter.

Key features:

• Alongside email threads, Hiver provides notes that help your team members save time and effort in sharing conversation context with other employees.
• Hiver’s @mention allows you to mention one or more members of a team when you need their input. Mentioned members get real-time notifications, enhancing and expediting collaboration efforts.
• External collaborators only get read-only access to chat threads and notes, helping you avoid faux pas like accidental replies or email forwards.

Pricing:

• Offers a 7-day free trial 
• Starting plan: $15/user/month
  ‍

Verdict

Hiver’s collaborative tools, such as @mentions and notes, are beyond what most shared inboxes offer, ensuring seamless collaborations. However, unlike Glassix, which offers a 30-day free trial, Hiver’s 7-day trial does not give enough time to explore its collaboration features fully before commiting to a payment plan.

4. Gorgias 

How can Gorgias help you manage multiple emails?

Gorgias bills itself as a shared inbox solution designed for e-commerce businesses in 2024 that are looking to redefine customer support. 

It provides an effective shared workspace where you can manage and organize all your business emails in one place.

Thanks to this, your sales representatives and customer support agents no longer have to guess who is working on what.

Similarly, its shared inbox provides conversation status, letting you know which emails are unanswered, and ensuring your team can work together to create enhanced customer support strategies that boost the customer experience.

You also get conversation context, useful in delivering excellent customer service. Besides the convenience and efficiency of not having to repeatedly ask customers for the same information, it saves time which can be spent to increase response rate.

Key features:

• Gorgias integrates well with your favorite e-commerce tools, such as Shopify and Magento, enhancing cross-team collaborations while saving you time.
• Agents can easily build workflows that enable them to auto-sign, tag, auto-respond, and auto-close tickets to save time and focus on important issues.
• You get context by surfacing all customer details, including recent purchases, to help agents customize their responses and deliver personalized customer support.

Pricing:

• Offers a 7-day free trial
• Starting plan: $10 per 50 tickets/month
  ‍

Verdict

Gorgias offers the best shared inbox platform for retail businesses with incredible collaboration features, including AI and integration with e-commerce systems to facilitate collaborations. However, it does not cater to businesses in other industries.

5. Drag 

Drag allows your team to collaborate inside Gmail.

Emails are great for one-on-one conversations but are inefficient when team members want to collaborate. 

Drag found the flow in Gmail and provided a solution to enable your agents to collaborate without leaving the platform.

This software, having been designed to live in Gmail, is extremely easy to use and navigate. It can also integrate with other Google Workspace applications enhancing agent productivity and cross-team collaborations.

Other features that make Drag one of the best shared inbox platforms in 2024, include @mentions and collision detection.

The former allows you to start an internal conversation within tasks or on any shared inbox to collaborate on an issue while the latter prevents two people from working on the same email.

Key features:

• Drag’s shared drafts allow your team to collaborate on replies enabling them to write and save replies to drafts for their colleagues to review before hitting send.
• The @mentions option enables you to communicate with your team members when you need to get their input and collaborate on an issue.
• Drag offers collision detection that notifies you when you are working on the same task as another team member, enabling you to enhance productivity and clear more tasks faster.

Pricing:

• Offers a 7-day free trial
• Starting plan: $10 per user/month
  ‍

Verdict

Drag caters to businesses of all sizes, offering essential collaboration tools such as unlimited workspaces and users. Although this software offers a free plan with several features, it lacks essentials that can supercharge teamwork and enhance productivity.

6. Help Scout

Help Scout’s inbox provides multi-channel support.

You no longer have to deal with chaotic inboxes that make finding partners and customer communication challenging. 

Help Scout brings all communication into one platform and allows your team to always have what they need to provide answers to customers.

What differentiates Help Scout and makes it one of the best shared inbox platforms for collaborations is its ‘light users’ features.  It proves useful in bringing your whole team closer to customers and leveraging their knowledge to deliver enhanced customer experience and boost productivity.

Light users enable you to give user roles to other members of your organization with limited permissions and capabilities, allowing them to collaborate from Help Scout.

Additionally, within this software’s shared inbox, you can tag team members using mentions to make it clear who needs to jump in and help. 

Key features:

• Help Scout’s inbox provides private notes that appear in line with the email text but are only visible to members of your team to enable you to communicate behind the scenes.
• It has collision detection indicators that show you when someone is working on an issue and prevent you from sending a message if another person has already replied.
• In Help Scout, you can assign conversations to an individual or the right team for accountability. You can also sort conversations by assignee to ensure nothing falls through the cracks.

Pricing:

• Offers a 15-day free trial
• Starting plan: $25 per user/month
  ‍

Verdict

Help Scout provides an affordable option for small businesses in 2024 looking for shared inbox platforms to enhance collaboration through robust tools such as light users and project management. However, for the standard plan, you will not get the light user feature.

7. Freshworks

Freshworks empowers your team to work together.

Although it offers a shared inbox, it is a complete customer support software with a suite of products to help increase customer satisfaction and deliver redefined customer support.

Whenever you want to involve stakeholders from cross-functional teams, Freshworks allows you to collaborate in the shared inbox while retaining visibility, even if another team handles the ticket.

With Freshworks’ parent-child ticketing, your team can increase the resolution rate by dividing tasks into smaller bits that are shared among them to work on in parallel.

Furthermore, a ticket divided like this can only be completed when each team plays its role, ensuring accountability.

Key features:

• Linked tickets are helpful when there is a surge of customer support requests, allowing you to link tickets and send status updates on all related tickets in one go while keeping all team members in the loop.
• Freshworks’ ticket collaborator role enables your employees to collaborate with anyone from internal teams or third parties without leaving the platform.
• You also get analytics collaborator roles that give support managers insight into the quality of service and collaborators' performance, enabling them to have data-driven conversations.

Pricing:

• Offers a 14-day free trial
• Starting plan: $18 per agent/month
  ‍

Verdict:

Freshworks is an ideal platform for boosting collaboration in small businesses as it is affordable and offers a free plan to get you going. However, the free plan has limited features, such as a maximum of 10 agents, which may not be ideal for a larger team. Regardless, it’s sufficient if you just want to take it for a spin.

8. Customerly

Customerly shared inbox is powered by AI.

It prides itself on providing a state-of-the-art inbox that consolidates all customer conversations into one place.

This makes it easy for you to collaborate with team members on issues and deliver unparalleled customer support.

Imagine if all your emails were organized and filtered based on category?

Well, Customerly does that through the team inbox, which enables you to group the incoming requests in one channel based on the topic of the inquiry. For instance, if you receive an IT support request, it will automatically be sent to the IT team.

Additionally, all members of that team will be notified in real-time to expedite resolution.

Customerly also provides notes next to customer messages allowing you to tag other team members and communicate behind the scenes to enhance efficiency.

Key features:

• Team inboxes enable you to create as many teams as possible to streamline operations and have every team working on their specific conversations.
• Included in the shared inbox are notes that allow your team to communicate behind the scenes and collaborate to provide assistance to customers.
• Customerly provides conversation context and customer information so that your team does not waste time sending back-and-forth emails giving context.

Pricing:

• Offers 14-day free trial
• Starting plan: $7/month
  ‍

Verdict

Your business can benefit from Customerly’s help desk platform with a shared inbox that enables your team to collaborate on issues behind the scenes to provide superior customer support. The starting plan, unlike Glassix, has very few features besides the shared inbox.

9. Happyfox

How can Happyfox transform collaboration?

Email clutter makes it challenging to manage communications and impedes collaborative efforts.

To solve this common issue, Happyfox provides one of the best shared inbox solutions for collaborations - a must have tool if you want your business to remain standing today. 

It organizes all your emails and makes it easy to collaborate on and respond to high-volume emails that often burden your support team.

Additionally, this software gives you the ability to consolidate all communication from all organizational departments into one platform. You can also create teams to simplify work distribution and project management, ensuring accountability and enhanced productivity.

Within Happyfox’s shared inbox, users can use queues to organize and prioritize support requests. 

And with everyone knowing who is working on what, your company can enhance customer service productivity, increase resolution rates, and make customers happy. 

Key features:

• Happyfox has automation capabilities that allow you to create smart rules to route support requests to qualified agents, enabling you to reduce the time spent on repetitive tasks.
• It has notes in the shared inbox, allowing team members to communicate and collaborate behind the scenes without leaving the platform.
• Happyfox lets you know when and who is working on what conversation to avoid agent collision and facilitate efficient collaboration.

Pricing:

• Offers a free demo upon request
• Starting plan: $ 39 per agent/month
  ‍

Verdict

Happyfox offers great benefits beyond a shared inbox platform which can help your business collaborate on organizational goals and support. However, great features such as asset and task management ideal for small business teams, are only available in the enterprise plan.

10. MessageBird

MessageBird is an omnichannel platform.

Unlike other platforms, MessageBird stands out as one of the best shared inbox solutions for collaboration as it allows you to take your team’s collaboration efforts to the next level, through a unified communication solution.

AI and automation also power the inbox to enhance productivity and boost customer experience, which is also great for customer retention.

Your agents can collaborate and communicate with customers from whichever platform they prefer, all from a single inbox. 

Even when customers change channels, your agents don’t have to worry about context as MessageBird provides everything they need to deliver personalized support.

To avoid cluttering your inbox, you can use the provided labels, tags, and filters to help you organize emails and prioritize urgent conversations. 

Additionally, all team members can view the status of each task with detailed information— in progress, failed, or completed.

Key features:

• MessageBird’s internal notes allow agents to add context, assign conversations to other agents, and invite teammates to participate in a conversation to enhance collaboration.
• Its AI helps simplify manual work like auto-generating conversation summaries to avoid reading a long email thread, re-written responses, and quick-reply suggestions.
• MessageBird has in-built AI and FAQ chatbots within its shared inbox for self-service options and an easy bot-to-agent handoff, saving time while maintaining great customer service.

Pricing:

• No free trial
• Contact MessageBird for pricing
  ‍

Verdict

MessageBird can be a great tool for small businesses who only want to pay for what they are using such as inbox and omnichannel services. However, without a comprehensive pricing plan like Glassix, you may end up with hidden charges that will cost you more.

Wrapping up

Shared inbox tools simplify team collaboration.

Teamwork can supercharge your business operations and increase revenue by allowing employees to share ideas and enhance creativity and productivity.

Actually, according to a study by McKinsey, online collaboration tools and digital workplaces facilitate increased productivity by up to 30%, indicating the need for collaborative tools such as shared inbox platforms.

If you are looking for an efficient solution to boost teamwork, consider any of the vendors we discussed above as they are among the best shared inbox for enhanced collaboration.

However, Glassix provides better features, including automation, integration, and AI automation that prevent team burnout at a relatively affordable price - designed to meet the demands of a wide range of industries.

Sign up for Glassix’s 30-day trial today and explore our shared inbox collaboration tools, third-party integrations that enable cross-team communications.

You’ll discover how your business can benefit from enhanced collaboration.