- Good day there, Pete Moriarty.
Today I wanna cover off sharing mail boxes,
and sharing email addresses inside of G Suite.
(upbeat music)
So, today I have a question from Claire,
who asks about having multiple different email addresses,
from multiple locations, send email as the same alias,
or like it looks like the same person.
And, this is something that's pretty common
in the IT industry, so I'm gonna use us,
as an example of a business that wants to send
and receive emails from a common email address,
to their customers.
So, that might be, service@yourbusinessname,
for us our email address is help@itgenius.com.
But, we have 25 staff who send and receive
from that email address.
Now, how do we get that setup?
On a very basic level, you can achieve this within G Suite.
And, there's a few different ways of conceptualizing
how email happens inside of the Google realm.
Now, in G Suite, each human has generally a bucket of email,
and we call a mailbox a bucket of email,
because that's one place that email can go.
And, for some businesses they would
like to have a shared bucket.
So, that might be info@, or team@, or sales@,
and you might want multiple people to access that bucket.
Now, we do that inside of G Suite,
with a tool called mailbox delegation.
And, with mailbox delegation,
we set up the sales bucket of email.
And, with that sales bucket of email,
multiple other people can see into that bucket.
And, when they see into that bucket
with their own accounts, they can send and receive email
as if they were sales@yourcompanyname.com.
So, that's the most basic way to set things up,
and you can do that all within a Google account.
And, it's great for maybe, info@, or inquiries@,
or sales@, if you're doing a low volume of email.
If you're a business that has maybe,
a customer service element to the business,
or your someone like us and you're dealing
with a high volume of customer responses,
then you might consider using
a third-party system to manage those inquiries.
Now, when we start talking about ticketing systems,
people often think about the, you know,
old school IT systems where you have a number,
and you know, you get auto responses,
and it feels very, let's say, inhumanized,
you know, to actually be on the receiving
end of those kind of systems.
And, businesses that have given poor customer support,
get thrown in the same bucket as any business
that uses a ticketing system like that.
Now thankfully, modern ticketing systems
allow you to switch off the auto responders,
and basically make them look like
it's just sending and receiving email.
So, some of the examples of systems like this,
would be teamwork desk, zendesk, or HelpScout.
And, each one of those solutions allow you to set up
a common mailbox where you can send and receive email
from each one of your staff,
straight to and from your customers,
without your customers knowing that you've got that kind
of centralized way of doing things.
Now, we happen to use zendesk for ours.
You can use any one of those solutions.
They all kind of do the same thing.
And, inside of zendesk, we can take a high volume
of responses from our customers every week.
And, I'm talking about thousands of responses,
from our customers, every single week.
And, it means that, you will never, ever miss a client
inquiry when it comes in to a ticketing system.
The other great thing is,
when you go to email your customers,
you can actually put internal notes on side the emails.
So, if you've got maybe, one person from finance,
one person from sales, one person from delivery,
or technical services, working on one customer inquiry,
then each of those people can put internal notes,
inside, on the ticket, and then the customer
only sees the public responses that go out to them.
And, of course, they're all coming from
one central email address.
Which is pretty cool.
But, back to G Suite.
How does this work in the Google world?
If you wanna use the same kind of set up
inside a Google account and you just have one bucket
of email outside of Google, you can use stars,
you can use labels and, there's a few other features
within Gmail that will let you set up kind of a pseudo
ticketing system inside of your Google bucket of email.
So, that's certainly one way of doing it.
And, using delegated mail, you can then set that up
so that multiple people in your business have access to it.
Now, we would recommend that each human in your business
have their own personal account, with their personal name.
What that allows you to do is, see who's accessing files,
see who's sending emails and see who's accessing
different resources in your business.
We would never really recommend you to share mailboxes.
So, if you're maybe a healthcare clinic,
and you have one front desk reception,
we wouldn't really recommend having one reception account
that 10 different people are accessing,
because if something happens in that account,
if there's a data breach, if something changes,
if someone sends the wrong email to a customer,
you wanna know who that was.
Now, from time to time, some customers will say,
"Well Peter, I've got two part-time staff,
"And they're really, really just sharing that email address.
"Can we just share the login for that?"
And, we'd say,
"Okay, yeah sure, that's fine."
But, we really strongly discourage multiple people
using any Google account.
Particularly if you're in Australia,
and you're in the healthcare industry.
It's actually not compliant with
Australian Privacy Principles to have any accounts shared,
because you're not properly doing your due diligence,
and locking down accounts.
So, little bit of food for thought there.
Anyway, hope this gives you some ideas
on how you can set up your email addresses
for sending and receiving.
Our strong recommendation is
that you use a ticketing system.
They start at very affordable rates.
Zendesk even has a free product called zendesk inbox,
which allows you to get started with a very basic system.
That means you can put internal notes on emails
before they go out the customers, very easily.
But, if you'd like any help getting any of this set up,
or any help in general with your G Suite account,
get in touch with our team.
Head along to itgenius.com.
Our team will be very happy
to walk through your requirement.
And, we've done this so many times,
for so many of our customers, setting up shared mailboxes.
We know all the different ways you can do it,
and you know, if you want some help with some advice
on your business and how you might structure that,
and of course, then the implementation as well,
we're very happy to help out with that.
So, get in touch, if you need any help.
Until next time, I'll catch you in the next video.
Cheers.
(ambient music)