Team Inboxes in Helpspot

HelpSpot features an inbox system that gathers new requests into a central location. These requests can then be assigned to each agent. This setup works perfectly for many organizations. Some larger organizations may want to split their inbox up into multiple “inboxes” based on what team should be handling the request. Team members can then “take” requests from their specific team inbox without having to sort through unrelated requests. This type of configuration is possible in HelpSpot through the use of HelpSpot’s powerful filter system.

Setting Up Filters

Most often, your teams are dividing up by categories so we will use this criteria in our example filter. Other criteria, such as an escalation status or a reporting tag could be used as well. In this example we will create a team inbox for our HR team.

1. Create a new filter.
2. Set the name of the filter to your team’s inbox name.
3. Under the filter criteria add a new criteria of Category is Human Resources.
4. Add another criteria that is Assigned To is Unassigned
5. Select the Display Count In Workspace checkbox. This will show how many items are in this new team inbox.
6. Under the “Who Can View This” heading select either the correct permission group or individuals that should have access to this inbox.

Next we will customize the columns to add a “take it” column so that new requests can be grabbed by team members.

1. Switch to the options tab of the filter setup.
2. Under the “Select a Column to Add” select the “Take It” column.

You can further customize the columns, ordering and display of the filter as desired. Once you are done go ahead and save the filter.

Automation

Now that we have a team inbox filter built any requests that are assigned to the Human Resources category will appear in that inbox. We can take this process one step further by automating the categorization of requests.  There are a number of different ways to automate this process inside of Helpspot depending on your criteria. We’ll cover a simple example.

Mailbox Setup

If you have a specific mailbox for the department or team configured in HelpSpot you can simply set the default category for that mailbox. This is set under the mailbox settings found in Admin → Email Mailboxes → Your Mailbox → Default Category. This is an extremely simple configuration that will automatically assign the category of Human Resources for any messages that this mailbox receives.

Triggers, Automations and Mail Rules

In some cases you may want to reassign requests to this team inbox when the requests meet a certain set of criteria. Perhaps VIP customers get reassigned to a special team. In this case, a trigger could be created to reassign the request based on a VIP custom field. You can also use automations and more complicated mail rules to route requests to team mailboxes based on a myriad of criteria.

Final Staff Member Setup

Once your filter is setup, staff members in this team can assign the filter as their default workspace. This is a personal setting for each staff member. It is configured under the gear icon on the appropriate filter.

The process outlined in this article can be repeated for multiple teams or departments. The sky is the limit for the level of customization to meet your business requirements.