This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
What are the best tools to manage a shared business inbox? Really simple, yet practical and important question today. We're going to help a listener find the best way to co-manage a business email account with their team, including some options such as Help Scout, HubSpot and more. By the way, Happy Christmas Eve to those who celebrate. It is episode 2,915.
Welcome to Side Hustle School. Let's hear from a listener. I forget her name. We're going to hear it in a moment. She's looking for a way to co-manage this email account.
Basically, if you have a business and you want more than one person to have access to team communication, for example, customers write in with requests. They need support. They need sales help. And you might not always have the same person responding to messages, or you might need to be available at different times in one person's way on vacation or doing something else. So how do you set this process up so that multiple people can touch email without missing messages or creating confusion?
I'm going to give you a couple tools and best practices here. Hopefully it will help our listener and somebody else out there as well. Hey, by the way, thank you for listening. Detailed question coming right up. Hey, Chris, this is Sarah from Fort Worth, Texas, and I'm setting up a business email account for my floral shop.
And I'd like for multiple people on my team to be able to like access and manage it. Is there like an easy way to co-manage an email address so that we can all stay on the same page without creating confusion or missing messages? I'd like to know any tools you recommend for making this work smoothly. All right. So the good news is this is a really simple issue and something that is important to solve early on in your business.
Of course, if you're the only person doing everything all the time, then not a big deal. But if you ever want to work with a virtual assistant, for example, or anybody just helping you out in any way, even if you're not trying to build a whole bunch of employees and create a big structure and organization, there still might be a case where you don't want to necessarily like hand over your personal Gmail account to somebody else to manage. So what do you do? Well, you basically sign up for a service, you know, they're all services these days, right? So none of these are our sponsors, at least at the moment. I have used a couple of them as a paying customer.
One of them is Help Scout. I used to pay them for years. I'm doing something different now. Tell you about that in a second. But Help Scout, it's designed for teams to manage customer support, other shared email accounts.
It allows you to kind of transfer notes around. You could you could look at the initial communication and pass it off to somebody else and include a note that only they see. Like you could say, hey, give this person a discount or hey, here's how to how to resolve this issue, you know, for this customer. And then they go off and do it because they have your guidance. The customer never sees that communication. There's tagging. There's lots of different features.
So Help Scout, that's great. I did use it for years. As I said, lately, I've been trying another tool called Groove. And it's just how it sounds, G-R-O-O-V-E. Groove shared inbox. If you Google that, you'll find it.
And it's built with simplicity in mind. It's kind of like Help Scout, but a little bit easier. And I think at the moment is more affordable. So just on a personal recommendation, as I said, no business relationship. But as a personal recommendation, I'm trying this now myself. So Groove or Help Scout HubSpot also allows you to do this.
But it's a little bit fancier for larger teams. You can also lastly use Google Workspace for a more basic setup. And that will allow you to create a shared email account. You just log in at different times. This might not cost anything at all, or it might be like five dollars a month.
But it lacks some of those more advanced collaboration features that Help Scout and Groove offer. So a few different recommendations for you there. Help Scout, Groove, Google Workspace and HubSpot. Find one that works for you and then move on. More important to think about how you can create profit and achieve growth in your business, at least in a way that works for you.
Think about that this holiday season as we wind down for the year. What do you want your next year to look like? I'm setting some goals for myself. I hope you'll do the same again in whatever fashion works best for you. Of course, new episode every day. Thanks for being out there. My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School.
♪♪♪ From the Onward Project. ♪♪♪ From the Onward Project.
