From a shared mailbox to Zendesk: what changes

Moving off a shared mailbox changes more than where mail arrives. Here is what genuinely improves, and what your team has to unlearn.

Moving off a shared mailbox changes more than where mail arrives. Here is what genuinely improves, and what your team has to unlearn.

What you gain immediately

• Nobody answers the same message twice. A ticket has one assignee, and you can see who is on it.
• Nothing falls off the bottom. A status says whether something is waiting on you or on the customer, so old messages do not simply scroll away.
• History follows the person. Their previous questions sit next to the current one, whoever answered them.
• You can measure it. How much comes in, how fast you answer, what it is about.

What your team has to unlearn

• Folders are not the model. Views replace them, and one ticket appears in several views at once. People who filed things into folders find this unsettling for a fortnight.
• Forwarding is not how you consult a colleague. Internal notes and side conversations do that, and they keep the thread intact.
• Deleting is not tidying. Solving is. A solved ticket stays available and counts in your figures.
• Reply-all has consequences. CCs behave differently from a mailbox thread, and it is worth agreeing how you use them.

The change that is not technical

A shared mailbox lets everyone see everything and nobody own anything. Zendesk makes ownership explicit, and that is the actual shift. Teams that agree who picks up what, and what each status means, settle in a week. Teams that do not end up with a queue of unassigned tickets and the same arguments they had before.

See also

• What to bring from your old system and what to leave
• The ticket statuses: new, open, pending, on-hold, solved, closed
• What a view is and what you use it for