Using your Shared Inbox

Overview

This article will give you an overview of the basic functionalities of the Shared Inbox and how you use them. The inbox mimics many of the same functionalities you already know if you've ever used email, so feel free to jump right in.

Here's an outline of what we'll cover here:

• A tour of the Shared Inbox layout
• Creating a new ticket
• Replying to messages
• Forwarding messages
• Adding an internal note
• Setting the status of a ticket
• Setting a reminder on a ticket
• Assigning a ticket to someone
• Tagging a team member in a message
• Tagging a ticket
• Moving a ticket to a different inbox
• Moving a ticket into a folder
• Merging with other tickets
• Deleting a ticket

A tour of the Shared Inbox layout

Here's what the Shared Inbox looks like when you go to the app. You can click on the Shared Inbox icon, or use the keyboard shortcut, g i.

On the left hand side, you will see the list of icons that allow you to navigate to other areas of Eager (such as the Documentation Site, Notification Feed, etc).

The second column on the left shows the various areas specific to the Shared Inbox app.

If you click on Mailbox, it will expand to show the various inboxes you have permission to access. Permission level access to specified by account owners and managers (who have permissions themselves to set these access levels).

Below that, you will see a number of labels:

• Unassigned
• Assigned to me
• Priority
• Snoozed for me
• Closed
• Spam
• Trash
• Folders
• Tags

These represents various statuses of your email tickets, and we'll talk about each one in this article.

In the next column, there is a list of tickets that you've received. Similar to email clients like Outlook or Mail (on MacOS), the most recent email is shown first. You can search for emails using the search bar at the top of this column.

The next column displays the actual ticket thread. By default, the reply box is hidden until you click on the reply icon or use the keyboard shortcut, r.

Finally, the last column (to the far right) shows the context of the ticket, such as some customer information, previous tickets, and who is currently assigned to the current ticket.

How Eager handles inbound emails

Tickets arrive into your inbox as Unassigned, and so they will first be placed here. The only exception to this is if you've created automation rules or modified an inbox setting to automatically assign tickets to a specific team member.

Assigned to me refers to tickets that belong to you. Note: Once a ticket is assigned, it no longer will be in the Unassigned tab.

If you're working in a team where different members are expected to answer on the same ticket, it will be best to leave tickets as unassigned so every one can see them.

Creating a new ticket

You can send an "outbound" email to a customer by creating a ticket. To create a new ticket, go to the Shared Inbox part of the app. You can click on the Shared Inbox icon or press the keyboard shortcut, g i.

Once there, you will see a "plus" symbol on the sidebar:

You can also navigate to the new ticket page by using the keyboard shortcut, t n.

Once there, you will see a new ticket form:

At the top of the form, you will see a label "Sending as...". This indicates which inbox you're sending your email from.

You can change this by changing the email in the dropdown under Send as.

The rest of the form will look like the ones you see in email clients, where you specify To, the Subject, and your Message.

You can format your message with some styling, such as:

• adding Bold, Italics, Underline, or Strikethrough to texts
• styling blocks of text as a "code block", lists, or numbered lists

You will also see that you can add links, embed images, and add attachments.

On the rightmost side of the form, you will see an icon for using templated canned responses.

Once you're done with your message, you have the option of either saving it as a Draft or sending it.

If you save a message as a draft, a ticket will be created by the message itself won't be sent until you go back and click on Send.

You also have the option to sending the message, either immediately or scheduling Eager to send it at a later time:

Scheduling a message to be sent later is useful in situations where you don't want to bother the customer with an instant reply, but rather send it back during the regular weekday hours.

Replying to messages

You can reply to messages when you're viewing a ticket. Click on the Reply icon or use the keyboard shortcut, r.

A reply form field will appear, similar to the new ticket form, with all the functionalities from that form.

Note that if you create a reply but don't send it immediately, it too will be saved as a Draft. You can schedule your replies just as you can when you create a new ticket.

Forwarding messages

You can forward an entire ticket thread (as it exists at the time of the forwarding) to another email address. Click on the Forward icon or use the keyboard shortcut, f.

Adding an internal note

You can add an internal note that's embedded in the ticket thread. This allows you and your team to communicate with each other on a single ticket.

In order to create an internal note, you can use the dropdown on the Send button:

Click on Save as internal note and the message won't be sent.

Note that you cannot change an internal note into a message that you want to send later. You will have to create a new reply. If you have a long message already written out but saved (incorrectly) as an internal note, simply select, copy, and paste what you see on the screen.

Setting the status of a ticket

Each ticket has one of the following status at any time:

• Open
• Closed
• Priority
• Spam

By default, new tickets and tickets that have been updated (eg. with a new message from a customer) are updated to be Open.

To change a status, you can use the drop down menu in the ticket thread view:

Eager also a several keyboard shortcuts to help change status quickly:

• s o : Changes status to open
• s c : Changes status to close
• s s : Changes status to spam
• s p : Changes status to priority

A note about Mark as spam: Eager uses a set of heuristics to determine if an inbound mail is spam or not. When you mark a ticket as spam, the ticket is sent to the spam folder. We are currently collecting data from these messages which have been marked as spam. In the near future, we will use such data to help our algorithm better able to filter out spam messages. In general, however, our spam detection is much more lenient than other systems (eg. Gmail) as we want to ensure that you receive all customer emails. As a result, you may notice a higher number of possible spam messages making its way to your Unassigned tab.

Setting a reminder on a ticket

You can set a reminder on a ticket. This will "snooze" the ticket and will move it from the Unassigned or Assigned folder into the Snoozed for me section of the inbox.

You can access the reminder functionality by clicking on the clock icon:

There are a few presets, such a set reminders for 1 hour, 3 hours, 6 hours, tomorrow and Monday of next week.

Important to know: For the Monday of next week preset, it will set the reminder for the following Monday at 9:00 AM for the timezone set on your account. If you set this on a Sunday night, it will be for the next morning.

Also important to know: Reminders are set on a per user basis. For example, when you set a reminder, it will reminder you (the logged in user) only. Another team member can set a different reminder. Neither that team member nor you will see each other's reminders.

Once you set a reminder, you can remove it manually. Otherwise, the system will automatically move the ticket back into the Unassigned or Assigned to me sections when it is time.

Tickets for which you have set a reminder will show a timestamp at the top like so:

Quick tip: Clicking on the reminder timestamp will allow you to remove the reminder easily without having to go through the dropdown.

As with other functionalities in Eager, you can also use the following keyboard shortcuts:

• o r : Open ticket reminder menu
• t r 1 : Set reminder for 1 hour later
• t r 3 : Set reminder for 3 hours later
• t r 6 : Set reminder for 6 hours later
• t r t : Set reminder for tomorrow
• t r m : Set reminder for next Monday
• t r r : Remove current reminder

Assigning a ticket to someone

Important: If you're working with multiple team members and the expectation is that multiple team members will respond to a ticket (ie. no single person is responsible), then it is not recommended to use the ticket assignment functionality.

Tickets can either be assigned or unassigned. By default, new tickets are unassigned. The only exception to this is if the inbox is set to automatically assign incoming tickets to a single person or if a workflow automation rule has been set in place to set assignment.

To assign a ticket, click on the assignment icon. You will see the following dropdown menu:

You can quickly assign tickets to yourself by clicking on Myself or to a Teammate. If you click on Teammate, a popup will be displayed where you can search for the team member you want to assign the ticket to.

Here are some keyboard shortcuts to help speed up your workflow:

• a m : Assign ticket to myself
• a t : Assign ticket to a teammate
• a r : Remove ticket assignment

Important to know: Once you assign a ticket to a team member, you won't be able to see the ticket in your Unassigned folder anymore.

Tagging a team member in a message

Within the content editor field (both in replies and in new tickets), you can tag team members who have permission to the same Shared Inbox by prefixing the "@" followed by their name:

When you tag a team member, they will receive a notification within the app that they've been tagged. Team members are only tagged once per message. However, you can tag them again in subsequent new message replies and they will receive a notification again.

Tagging a ticket

In addition to being able to tag other team members, you can add or remove tags from a ticket itself. To do so, click on the Add tag button:

An input field will appear where you can start typing your tag. Press enter when you're done adding the tag. To keep things organized, an auto suggest dropdown will appear when you start typing. You can select one of the previously used tags in this dropdown.

To search tickets with a certain tag, you can use the Tag menu on the left sidebar.

Moving a ticket to a different inbox

If you're working with multiple Shared Inboxes in your account, you can move tickets from one inbox to another. An example of this use case might be moving a ticket from sales@yourcompany to support@yourcompany.com.

To move a ticket to a different inbox, click on the drawer icon.

Important to note: If you move a ticket from a Shared Inbox to which you have permission to access into one where you don't have permission, you won't be able to view the ticket again.

Moving a ticket into a folder

You can also organize your tickets by adding them to a folder.

It isn't advisable to have too many folders as things can get out of hand quickly. Recommended folder organization might include:

• Feature requests
• Billing problems
• Refunds & Churn

Clicking on the folder icon in the ticket thread top bar will show a folder organization menu.

Keyboard shortcuts available for this:

• o f : Open folder menu

Merging with other tickets

On the right hand sidebar, you have the option to view a customer's recent tickets. Clicking on the ticket will open up a pop up with the ticket's content.

This is useful for viewing contextual history for a particular customer's questions and issues.

In some cases, a customer may email you multiple times on the same or similar issue. Sometimes, customer emails appear as separate ticket threads altogether due to the way different email systems send email (and makes it impossible for Eager to identify a single thread and automatically add new emails as messages).

In these instances, you can merge tickets together to keep things tidy.

A Merge ticket button is available for you to merge two tickets together. Note that once merged, tickets cannot be separated (ie. un-merged). The ticket that is in the primary view will be the ticket which the other ticket will be merged into.

Deleting a ticket

You can permanently delete a ticket by clicking on the Trash icon. Note that when a ticket is deleted, it will be moved to the Trash folder, which is accessible in the sidebar.

Once a ticket is deleted, it will be available in the trash folder for 30 days. After 30 days, it will be permanently deleted from Eager's servers.

You can restore a ticket by clicking on the undelete icon in the ticket thread top bar.

Keyboard shortcuts for deleting a ticket is t d.