Group email question

Copper Contributor

hi there,

we have a group email for our support team,

the issue that we are trying to solve is that, when we receive an email on that group email, we don't know if any one of the team reply to that email or not.

this can cause issues when more than one members of the team reply back to the customer.

is there a way for a user to take ownership of that customer email and somehow notify the other users of the group?

we don't want currently to assign a licence to that group email and have its own mailbox.

 

Thanks in advance

4 Replies
Hi Katsogiannis,

Sounds like you are using a distribution list going to several recipients,

Optimal way for this - and most commonly used - is definitely a shared mailbox

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/admin/email/create-a-shared-mailbox?view=o365-worldwide

The all the sent mail will be from the shared mailbox not the user. Shared Mailboxes are free in Office 365 if that is your concerns over licences - no licence needed.

Hope that helps

Best, Chris

Best, Chris

There are couple of options you can use:

 

1. Have all your support team members enable conversation view. Ref: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/view-email-messages-by-conversation-0eeec76c-f59b-4834-98e6...

By doing so, when a team member replies to a customer (assuming the group email address is not removed from loop) other team members will be able to see the chain thread in Outlook/OWA.

 

2. Create a Shared mailbox for the group email address- shared mailbox do not require license. All the team members can be granted access over this Shared mailbox, and this will show up as an additional mailbox on their Outlook client. You can create sub-folders under this Shared mailbox for team members to move the mails to different sub-folder when they've taken ownership (sub-folders can be created for each team member of need be).

That way, if a customer mail is in Inbox it has not been actioned yet; if it has been actioned the mail would be in a sub-folder and not in Inbox anymore.

How many users do you have? I would highly recommend using a real support style solution for this rather than trying to work out of a group or mailbox. You get very bad visibility into your support workload and responses etc. by trying to work out of a mailbox. If you only have a few users, there are many online free helpdesk / support products that offer 3-5 users for free that can accomplish support much better than using a mailbox. Zoho has a 3 free user. Zendesk is very nice package but costs $5 per user but it's a solid product with a great e-mail engine (Forward e-mails to create tickets on behalf of user, e-mail tracking of conversations into ticket etc.) There are many others you can find cloud based that you can just forward your email too. You get some basic reports etc. as well.

We used to have our membership group try to work out of a shared mailbox and it was a nightmare with sync issues etc. We got them into our support system and never looked back.
Fair point @Chris_Webb - and it integrates with Microsoft Teams ;D. Yes, for sure if they are willing to take on the PUPM licensing costs