How are you managing email?

Curious as to how others are managing their emails. I find that the level of email communication has increased significantly in recent years that I spend a large portion of my time reading and replying to emails.

Does anyone here share their inbox or use a unified inbox app or ticketing systems.

LimeFruitGum

I am trying Trello to help with planning team tasks around various threads at the the moment. It’s a bit early for me to say how that’s going, but I’m giving it a go until Q4.

JIRA is alright, but I find it depends on the owning team. If they’re short staffed, the ticket queue gets longer, then they get emails asking about said tickets, and we’re all back to where we started. If the team enforce it among themselves and it is easy to use, then it should be relatively smooth to implement.
I would be interested to see what other suggestions people have.

Buttercake

You could create a second email email address from your regular one, support@ or help@ and ask clients to use it for actual work requests, not conversations!

i use Clientrol turns their email into a request/ticket and i can manage it from the dashboard, they get notified when its opened, working or closed.

or Slack might be an option, bit more "chatty"

Buttercake

Buttercake wrote: »

You could create a second email email address from your regular one, support@ or help@ and ask clients to use it for actual work requests, not conversations!

i use Clientrol turns their email into a request/ticket and i can manage it from the dashboard, they get notified when its opened, working or closed.

or Slack might be an option, bit more "chatty"

The two I'm looking at are Front App and HelpScout. Has anyone tried these?

Cianos

A few things I've implemented around communication;

1. Quick internal communication: Something like Slack would be good. This is best when you don't mind individual messages being lost to the chat stream.

2. Internal Project/Client management communication: Something like Trello, that allows you to include notes, create task lists, set due dates etc. This is for more structured communication that you know you'll need to refer to again in the future.

3. Individual outbound communication: Regular email is grand. I use the "inbox zero" method, where you double up your inbox as a to-do list, so when you answer a mail you archive it and it's now off your to-do list, and when the recipient replies it's back in your inbox/to-do list.

4. Collaborated outbound communication (i.e where you need to collaborate to resolve a query): A ticketing system like Zendesk is brilliant. This massively reduces "middle man" time wasting because ticketing systems allow a query to always remain in context. For example, Sales needs to send a quote out, but the query has some technical points that need to be advised on by someone more technical, so Sales assigns the ticket to Tech, Tech answers Sale's query and reassigns it to Sales, and Sales has all the required info in one place and ready to go out to the customer.