Feature Request: Helpdesk style workflow with shared mail account

[onlinelaser]

This is really a feature request that relates to the forthcoming team edition so feel free to move this issue somewhere more appropriate.

I'd really like to see N1 support a helpdesk style workflow, where a single email address eg "sales@widgets.com" is used for all inbound and outbound emails, but internally emails are routed consistently to the assigned sales person.

Why add this to N1?

Almost every business I can think of starts their sales pipeline with a single "sales" or "orders" email account, but then struggles to manage the workflow after that point as enquiries have to be dealt with by individual team members who get sick, leave, change roles etc over time. Just today I've dealt with four separate businesses who've struggled to keep track of my sales enquiries because of this exact problem!

This is kind of a killer feature for the Sync server abstraction, pretty much no one else can add this sort of capability to existing POP/Imap/Gmail (externally hosted) accounts - switching to a helpdesk system is othewise a major integration effort for any business, but with N1 and the sync server it would just be the same regular email as always with effectively zero migration issues.

It also plays really well with N1 sidebar and extensions as it makes it easy to display pertinent customer data to whoever is assigned the enquiry

Use case example:

Alice, Bob and Cat work in sales - Alice is the team lead.

They use Gmail to host their company email and a single sales@widgets.com email address in all their marketing and for all their sales correspondence.

That morning a request for quote comes in to the sales@widgets account from Zack, the first person to see it is Bob so he assigns the email thread to himself and replies to Zack, his reply is still sent from the sales@widgets account (and visible in the gmail sent folder for the sales@ account).

From this point on all inbound correspondence that Zack sends to the sales@widgets address routes to Bob's inbox and all emails that Bob sends to Zack still get sent from the sales@widgets account

The following day Bob goes on leave and as a result Zack's next inbound email goes unanswered. Alice is alerted to unanswered email in the pool and steps in to reassign the thread to Cat. Cat can see Zacks past emails and details in the sidebar and thanks to an in-house add-on can also see all his past orders and pricing structure right in the email client allowing her to prepare him a quote.

When Bob gets back the following week he can see everything that's happened with Zacks enquiry and take over completing the order.

Similar tools

This is the exact workflow that support systems like Zendesk, Helpscout, Liveagent etc all support, but most of them explicitly assign a ticket number and are designed for tech support applications not sales enquiries. They often make customers feel like they are in faceless support queue rather than corresponding with a human.

Helpscout is somewhat of an exception as it hides it all from the customer and just appears as regular email which is ideal for sales - however as a web based tool it's frustrating to a travelling sales force who want the benefits of a regular laptop email client and who are often dealing with large attachments as documents get emailed back and forth with a customer.

Without these systems a lot of small business just share the inbox in question or forward the shared email to their individual email accounts - both of which rapidly turn into their own individual forms of hell.

Related Issues

Possibly this would make #1209 redundant, couldn't see any other feature requests similar.

[emorikawa]

@onlinelaser Thanks for fleshing this out so thoroughly. This is exactly the type of feature we're thinking about as we move towards a more collaborative inbox. Stay tuned!

[jackiehluo]

Super cool—thank you for this feedback!

[fflarssteins]

Hi there, are there any news depending this topic?