Crafting a better work experience

Ask any lawyer, and they're likely to have a similar stress point: their email inbox.

Email is a convenient and quick way to communicate, but without a system in place, law firm staff can struggle to keep up with all the incoming requests, questions, and comments.

Email management software, or the system used to receive, send, and organize email messages, is a must for a law firm of any size. But all approaches to email management are not created equal.

Introduction to Email Management

Email management is not as simple as hitting inbox zero or clearing your inbox of the most urgent messages. It’s about developing systems and tools to handle incoming and outgoing emails.

While Gmail or Outlook might be the tool you use to receive and send messages, email management is about all the ways you and your entire firm manage email.

For law firms, following email management best practices should be a collective approach using the right strategies for your whole team to easily receive, prioritize, delegate, communicate about, and respond to email messages efficiently.

Why Is Email Management Important for Law Firms?

Lawyers who don't have a great system in place for managing their inboxes face several challenges. Here are some of the most common complaints from attorneys:

• Their inbox is cluttered, and it’s hard to sort information to work on projects.
• They’re constantly buried in "putting out fires,” responding to the most pressing or the most recent messages.
• Their email "system" is a series of endless back-and-forth forwarded messages.
• Staff members struggle to stay on the same page with what's expected of them.
• Previous software they’ve tried was overwhelming, so most staff members gave up in a day or two.
• Their team doesn't know who's handling what, so multiple people work on the same email or, worse, no one takes the initiative to respond.

"There was a major time tax in our firm spent on forwarding emails" says Steve Rice, founder and lead attorney of Steve Rice Law, when asked about how his firm handled email before using a dedicated email management tool.

"We worked mostly in Google Calendar, Clio, and Gmail, but it was really difficult to have access to each other's lives. If people haven't been copied on things or someone's out of office, that's a problem" says Ryan Hamilton of Sherwood Family Law.

Law firms that put a robust email management system in place have a way to control inbox chaos, avoid email overload make sure that important emails are addressed promptly, and keep all staff members on the same page.

Benefits of Email Management for Law Firms

When your email system works well, it's a beautiful thing. With the right tool and training in place, some possible benefits include:

• Clear organization
• Prompt replies for clients and other stakeholders
• Happier staff and less overwhelm
• Confidence about meeting deadlines for your cases
• A cleaner inbox for you and everyone else on the team

CORPLaw founder Kristen Corpion says, "Before, we were not able to cross-collaborate as a remote team on emails without having to forward them back and forth."

Lawyer Derek Martin of Driver Defense Team echoes that need for collaboration. "Prior to using Missive, everyone just used their individual email addresses. That just doesn't work if someone goes on vacation or takes a day off, especially for our inbound sales team or core client relations. Even a day can make a big difference."

With other essential elements of your law firm, you use tools like case management or practice management software, client intake workflows, or document management systems to keep things streamlined. Email management adds to that tech stack and allows you to sort and handle all the communications and documents coming in and out of your law firm.

10 Tips for Better Email Management at Your Firm

Getting started with proper email management may seem like an uphill battle. The good news is that there are proven ways for attorneys to stay on top of their inboxes. These 10 tips will help your law firm waste less time.

1. Use the Right Email Management Tool

It all starts with the right tool. The wrong tool only frustrates legal professionals and their teams, meaning it won't be adopted.

Attorneys work in a collaborative setting. Even small firm owners and solo lawyers communicate daily with an assistant or paralegal. All lawyers deal with a high volume of emails each day from prospects, clients, other attorneys, and other sources that can quickly become a confusing mess.

Start with what you're using now: does your current tool have the collaboration and organization features you need?

Pro tip Outlook and Gmail don't cut it for modern law firms. Too many law firms have developed bulky "systems" while trying to make Outlook or Gmail work, but they don't perform consistently well for the complex needs of attorneys.

"I was using Outlook before, and although I don't have a huge team, I have a lot of email addresses. It was really cumbersome to track replies" says lawyer Shawn Stone of Stone Law Group.

"I was concerned about some of the limitations with Gmail. Forwarding emails was a tax on our firm, and it was hard not to be able to discuss things before sending emails" adds attorney Steve Rice.

That's where Missive comes in. Missive is a tool that allows your team to receive and manage email consistently. If better collaboration and organization are your top priorities for email, Missive is the perfect tool for making your inbox easier to manage.

In my view, I think we are a better firm because of what we have available to us with Missive.Steve Rice, Steve Rice Law

2. Use a Shared Inbox

When your whole team works from the same place, it's easy for anyone to jump in on a pending matter.

Knowing when other people are working on emails is helpful, too. Managing email with Missive has saved lawyer Kristen Corpion a lot of time while also building a better workplace for her staff.

It's much easier to cross-collaborate as a remote team. We can have multiple team members weighing in and editing emails together, which is great. Being able to see when other team members are online or are looking at the same time you are, you feel more connected.Kristen Corpion, CORPLaw

For attorney Shawn Stone, the cumbersome shared inboxes on Outlook weren't cutting it. He says, "The beauty I found in Missive is I can have shared mailboxes. I can see if someone's already responded, I can assign someone else to the email, and I can make comments."

Leaving comments was a quick way for Shawn to say, "Hey team, here's how we'll handle this" a lesson that gets taught once. From there, team members know how to manage repeat situations consistently.

Adding Missive to his firm’s tech stack gave Shawn great confidence that every client was getting the best experience no matter whom they interacted with on his team.

Missive is a great tool to ensure that the team is on the same page concerning communication with our clients and to help ensure that we don't have communication slipping through the cracks. It's been an invaluable tool for my office.Shawn Stone, Stone Law Group

3. Use Rules, Filters, and Labels to Organize Your Inbox

Rules, filters, and labels all create powerful email shortcuts.

Many lawyers using Microsoft's Outlook or Gmail will recognize rules, filters, and labels. These are ways of sorting your inbox by characteristics like client name, subject line, and body text. At a basic level, these work fine in Outlook and Gmail.

But inside a supercharged email client like Missive, you'll find these popular options while simultaneously taking advantage of many other powerful features.

Email rules automate actions when certain things are triggered by a message received or sent. Use a range of conditions to determine if/then scenarios. Filters and labels help you choose the best way to sort data in your inbox. In Missive, you can even use shared labels for the whole organization.

Email rules are easily changed as needed. If a priority email on an upcoming case should be pushed to the top of your inbox only for a short period, you can adjust your rules for client emails.

4. Schedule Times to Read and Reply to Email

The average person checks their email about 15 times daily. That's counterproductive. Most lawyers barely get through all their unread messages only to discover that the messages they sent are already generating new responses in the inbox.

Instead of keeping your email open constantly and letting the anxiety build up as your number of unread messages grows, set aside specific times to read and reply to emails. Start three times per day and close your inbox in between.

When you add advanced tools like rules, filters, and labels, you'll discover this is more focused and less stressful overall.

5. Triage and Prioritize Emails

Here's a simple but winning approach to prioritizing your emails: sort them as "Do Now," "Do Later," and "Delegate." Then, teach your team how to triage their inboxes so you don't get buried in unread emails.

With Missive, you can delegate and assign messages to someone on the team. Likewise, emails coming to your main firm account can be directed by other staff to you, at which point they'll show up at the top of your inbox.

Following this process helps team members get feedback before a message is sent and gives the owner manageable oversight of the email process.

Being able to get insight into the messaging is helpful. With Missive, I can see the quality and timeliness of replies.Derek Martin, Driver Defense Team

6. Don't Use Email for Internal Communication

Attorneys often receive emails that require consensus-building or input from other lawyers at the firm. Getting these insights forces most lawyers to forward these messages to their coworkers and hope everyone remembers to hit reply all so that the conversation stays on track.

Emailing your team is time-consuming. It's easy for vital context to get lost in a sea of out-of-sync cc'd and forwarded messages.

Keep email for external communication and look for a tool that allows you and your team to reference email in internal conversations.

One option is to use Slack, but jumping between apps to talk about work email can cause as much friction and context switching as forwarding emails.

A better option is to use Missive for internal conversations about email by using built-in chat features.

Within Missive, you can comment on individual emails and tag team members. If you need input from colleagues, just leave a comment tagging them. The email chain is then shared with them, automatically landing in their inbox so they can reply in the comments.

You can also open a chat room within Missive to discuss things in real-time. Missive's room feature is perfect for one-on-one or team communication.

7. Practice Inbox Zero

The Inbox Zero method is a productivity practice aimed at keeping your email inbox empty or nearly empty at all times.

This approach keeps your inbox from getting out of control. When your inbox reaches high numbers of unread messages, it's much easier for something to slip through the cracks.

Here are a few pro tips to get started with inbox zero right away:

• Archive old emails so they don't even show up in your inbox
• Open and file emails only in your email-checking sessions
• During an email check, delete or archive things you don't need first
• Set up labels for emails you want to read but don't need sitting in your primary inbox (like law school alumni newsletters or organizational updates from your bar association)

8. Unsubscribe from Distracting Email

No matter how long you've been in practice, one thing is for sure: too many people have access to you through your inbox. Over time, as you get on newsletter lists, you're giving your time and attention away.

As your interests change or you want to remain more focused at work, an easy way to do this is to ruthlessly evaluate all the newsletter lists you're on and hit that unsubscribe button.

9. Disable Email Notifications from Social Media

Nobody needs every notification from social media. The goal of these notifications is to get you to stop what you're doing and open up the social media app or website instead. Don't give them that power.

Unless you get leads via social media messages, shut the notifications down.

If you are getting law firm leads through social media like Facebook Messenger, route them through Missive instead. Missive offers social media and SMS connections so you'll get the most important data you need without being on social media or your phone all the time.

10. Use Canned Responses and Email Templates

Many of the emails that lawyers and their staff send throughout the work day provide the same information to different clients. Repeatedly writing out these boilerplate messages is a waste of time.

If you’re using Gmail or Outlook, you may already be using templates to save some time on email follow-ups. But with Missive, you can take canned responses to the next level with searchable shared templates and variables.

Once you’ve created a response in Missive, you can choose to keep it private or share it across the team. All team members instantly get the latest version if you have to update one of the shared templates.

All canned responses are searchable within the app so anyone on your team can find the right response with just a few keystrokes. Here's an example of how different queries all pull up the same email template in Missive:

You can even speed up the time it takes to send a canned response by using response variables to insert information like the recipient's name automatically.

What Lawyers Should Look for in an Email Management Tool

You can't practice law without communicating clearly and promptly with your clients. That calls for an email management tool with features designed to help you keep organized and save time.

No matter the size of your firm or your practice area, here are some key features to look for in your email management software.

Collaboration

Sending out an email might require some behind-the-scenes conversations. Missive makes it all possible with first-class collaboration features, including live collaboration on drafts.

The beauty I found in Missive is that I have the shared mailboxes, and I can see if someone has responded easily. I can also make comments to my team to give them direction on how to respond, meaning they can handle similar issues like that in the future. I describe Missive as collaborative email.Shawn Stone, Stone Law Group

We use Missive like our central communication platform. We do check-ins and social threads to stay connected as a team. There was not another platform that allowed us to have that social dynamic. This is our team collaboration tool that also allows us to email.Kristen Corpion, CORPLaw

Delegation

As a lawyer, you'll always end up with more email messages that you can or want to reply to. Seek out a tool where you can assign a message to someone else with just a few clicks.

As Ryan Hamilton points out, attorneys have too many emails. "We need to build out a foundation now so that it's streamlined from the beginning. The size of our law firm now won't be the size in two or three years. Our staff utilizing the team folders and the legal assistants filter out everything from thousands of emails to the ten the lawyer needs to see that day make our attorney's lives a lot easier."

Ease of Use

What's the point of getting new software that comes with all the bells and whistles if every person on your team can't get behind using it? User experience is vital.

The right solution for email management should make it simple for everyone to learn the tool quickly.

The best news about Missive is that it's loved by law firm staff across the board. Just ask lawyer Derek Martin.

Everybody in our firm picked up Missive quickly. I onboarded four new hires to the platform in a month with nearly no training because of the intuitive UI/UX.Derek Martin, Driver Defense Team

The tool is simple and easy to get used to, and your team will love the improved communication and time savings they'll experience.

Automation

Features like rules and email templates save time by helping keep your inbox organized, ensure that important emails get a fast response, and create consistent messaging from all staff members.

As a lawyer, look for a tool to easily automate your team's workflow as much as possible. That way, you can focus on what’s important—like getting new cases—instead of worrying about emails falling through the cracks.

Better Email for Modern Law Firms

Let email work in your favor with the right system. Empower your team to take the lead on a message or assign things back to you when necessary. Happily reach inbox zero. It's all possible with the right system.

If you're going to invest the time and money into a permanent email app for your law firm, stick with the one that provides the best overall value and experience.

We use so many cloud-based services I've lost track. It adds up at the end of each month. Missive is never on the list of what to cut. It's really changed the way we're able to help our clients by being synchronized across the boardRyan Hamilton, Sherwood Family Law

Ready to take Missive for a spin in your law firm? Sign up today and give it a try for yourself.

Email collaboration is vital for teams in today's business world. Without it, important tasks can slip through the cracks, and opportunities can be missed.

Most businesses aren't using email to its full potential, especially among small businesses.

Whether you're already using a shared inbox software or simply need to find a way to manage team communication more effectively, here are 10 simple ways to boost email collaboration within your team.

What Is Email Collaboration?

Quickly put, email collaboration is a practice where team members cooperate on emails, generally from a shared inbox, to share the workload.

Most shared inboxes are used for companies' shared aliases like support@ or info@ to enable teams to work together on emails. This can involve sharing information and updates, discussing ideas and decisions, and providing feedback and support to each other.

Some tools, with features such as commenting, collaborative writing, and sharing options, also make it possible to collaborate on personal emails.

Benefits of Email Collaboration

Having a good system of email collaboration comes with a lot of advantages for your business whether big or small. Some of you might think that your small team doesn't need it since you only have a few team members, but chances are they are responsible for multiple aspects of the business and will certainly need to collaborate on emails with a coworker at some point.

A good can help teams to streamline communication and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their work processes.

By collaborating on emails, teams can work together efficiently even if they are not in the same location. And since all team members have access to the same information and can see each other's contributions, transparency and accountability are also increased.

Common Drawbacks of Email Collaboration

Collaborating on emails brings a lot of benefits to your team, however, if you're using a tool like Gmail to manage your personal and team emails at work there are some downsides you should know about.

Gmail isn't great for team collaboration and can do more harm than good. The main drawbacks are:

• No ownership: It's hard to assign people to emails and to have clear responsibilities. This can make it easy for emails to fall through the cracks or for team members to duplicate work. It's also hard to see who in the customer support team for example is working on an email. this can lead to duplicate work.
• No centralized app: If you are using Gmail for work emails, you could start using Google Collaborative Inbox to manage shared emails. However, you would have to constantly switch between the two web applications. That's without mentioning having to learn a completely new tool with a different UI.
• Less productivity: You can't view all the emails that are assigned to you. Also, your only option assigns an email to another person is by forwarding it. It translates to more emails cluttering your inbox.
• No private discussion: While there are ways to add notes to Gmail, you can't send private messages to colleagues to exchange around a specific email internally. You'll be required to use email threads which can lead to other problems when misused.

Using software made for email collaboration like Missive can solve these problems and make sure that your company benefits from all the advantages of collaborating on emails.

10 Email Collaboration Strategies for Better Team Work

1. Establish a Process & Accountability

Having a process in place is key when it comes to email collaboration. Every team member should understand their role and managers need systems to maintain accountability.

That means that you should always be clear about who needs to do what by when.

For example, if you need someone to review a document, include specific instructions on what you'd like them to do and make it clear that they're responsible for completing the task. Deadlines should also be included whenever possible.

In Gmail, you could establish a streamlined process through the support of external documentation and SOPs so that your team knows exactly how to collaborate on email.

You could also make use of Google's "Tasks" app to keep track of deadlines and individual responsibilities. The problem with adding comments and notes to Gmail this way is that it’s still based on the individual and doesn’t lend itself well to collaborative work.

That’s where email clients like Missive, a tool built with collaboration features as a first principle, can be a game changer.

In Missive, you can do this by assigning emails or tasks to teams or individuals with a few mouse clicks (or keyboard shortcuts like ⇧ ⌘ K ), eliminating the need to CC or BCC anyone.

The email will automatically be added to the assignee’s inbox.

If you need functionality for due dates or additional data to be tracked, you can send tasks directly from Missive to popular project management apps like Asana, Trello, Todoist, and ClickUp.

2. Don't Share Email Accounts the Old Way

When you share an email account, it's difficult to keep track of who's responsible for what. Important messages easily get lost in the shuffle.

Instead, each team member should have their email account that they or can access. That way, everyone has a clear record of who’s responsible for what and who completed it.

But that doesn't mean that you can't still share information–you just need to do it more smartly. A collaborative email tool like Missive makes it easy to share emails and other information without actually sharing email accounts.

With Missive, you can add other team members to a shared team inbox so everyone can easily view and respond to messages together while simultaneously maintaining the integrity of their email accounts.

You can even chat with each other right from the app so that you can quickly discuss important details and cut down on the back-and-forth context switching in other tools like Slack.

Missive gives you the best of both worlds: everyone's inbox remains segregated, yet still shareable for collaboration and accountability purposes.

3. Delegate, Don't Forward

When you need to pass along an email to another team member, it's tempting to just hit the forward button. However, that's not always the best course of action for email management.

Think about it: you're still on the hook when you forward an email thread.

If there's a problem with the task or questions to be answered for a customer, the email will have to go through you instead of the customer support team member who's responsible for the task, so you’re still the support POC for that task.

Instead of forwarding an email, delegate it.

Replying to someone with your delegate CC’ed is one way of doing things, but the problem is it’s common for your delegate to still have questions and need clarification. And when they do, an unruly chain of back-and-forth emails ensues.

Delegating through Gmail can be challenging because the only way to do it is through shared Google Workspace accounts or Google Groups.

Google’s collaborative inbox provides a central place for your team to communicate, and share documents, calendar events, and more.

But it still doesn’t solve the problem of having to forward emails back and forth whenever you need to discuss the context of an email with a coworker in the email itself.

Using chat is an option, but still requires you to add a bunch of contexts.

Delegation in Missive

When you delegate things in Missive, you can use comments and chat to include specific instructions on what needs to be done—reducing the back and forth and confusion and improving workflow efficiency.

4. Use the SCQA Framework to Communicate Clearly

Clear communication can dramatically boost team collaboration.

Here’s a useful model to apply when you need to convey an idea, respond to a question, delegate a task, or provide details around a situation in written communication.

Lead with the point of your communication (called the BLUF principle), followed by the details structured using the SCQA framework coined by McKinsey consultant Barbara Minto.

SCQA stands for Situation, Complication, Question, and Answer.

Here's how it all works together:

• Lead with your point.‍
• Situation: Start by succinctly describing the situation. You’re setting the stage here and facilitating alignment. Without stating the situation and establishing alignment, everything else you try to communicate about will fall apart.
• ‍Complication: Next, explain the complication. In other words, what's the pain point, motivation, or reason for action? Keep things fact-based.
• ‍Question: Now it's time to ask your question. Be as specific as possible. It should flow logically from the situation/complication. If you framed your situation/complication correctly, the question should almost sound rhetorical.‍
• Answer: The answer should also be structured so that it relates to the situation/complication and directly addresses the question. It is the summary of your main idea or thought that you want to be conveyed.

A collection of excellent examples of this style of writing in different contexts can be found in this article over good business writing by Leonardo Fed.

When you use this framework across your communication channels, you can be sure that your emails are clear and concise. Plus, you'll avoid misunderstandings and save everyone's time.

5. Centralize Your Email

Centralization means having one place where all your team's email communication is stored—a central hub where your whole team can see all the emails sent and received by the team. Think of it as a group email but with separate emails for each person.

There are a few different ways you can do this.

One option is to use an email client like Microsoft Outlook or Gmail. Another option is to use a project management tool like Asana or Trello. But, each of these requires sacrifice in terms of collaboration or context-switching to make them work.

The easiest way to centralize email amongst a team is to use a collaborative email client like Missive.

With Missive, each user has a mailbox for their account but the admin can also set up a shared mailbox (such as a team account) that all users can access and respond from. That way, everyone can see the same emails and there's no need to forward messages or CC everyone.

You can also manage communication from channels other than emails like WhatsApp, SMS (via Twilio), and social media channels like Instagram and Facebook Messenger.

The benefit of using a centralized system is that it makes it easier for the entire team to stay up-to-date on the latest email conversations in their mailboxes in a single place.

Plus, it's easier to search for old emails when you need to reference them. And the best part is that emails can be broken down into smaller tasks or projects, making it easier to stay organized and encouraging teamwork.

6. Use Shared Email Templates

When you're sending emails to clients or customers, it's important to be consistent. That means using the same language, tone, and format for all your communications.

One way to ensure consistency is to use shared email templates. These are email templates that can be accessed and used by anyone on your team.

Not only do shared email templates save you time, but they also help to ensure that your team is always on the same page. Plus, they can be customized to fit your brand's voice and style.

If you're using Gmail, for example, you'd have one of your team members develop a template following email etiquette for customer service. Then, you'd copy them to a shared repository (be that Google Docs, Notion, Guru, or similar.). Your team members can then add that template to their canned responses.

Great–but what happens when the template changes in the repository? Unfortunately, you'd have to inform your team members to update the template in their canned responses.

A better solution is to use a tool like Missive, which, when any user generates a template, stores that template in the repository and makes it available to everyone on the team. Plus, when someone updates a template, that change is pushed to everyone's account automatically. That eliminates the need for manual updates!

7. Share a Book of Contacts

If your team is constantly sending emails to the same people, it makes sense to create a shared book of contacts. This way, everyone will have access to the same contact information and you won't have to waste time searching for an email address every time you need it.

A shared book of contacts can be stored in a central location, like your email client, a CRM, or in a Google Sheet/Excel document stored in Google Drive or Dropbox that your team has access to.

However, adding contacts to a sheet and manually updating is laborious and a possible point of failure for many teams.

Missive has a built-in shared contact book that supports syncing with Office 365 and Google accounts. They also have options to sync data with other contact tools using no-code tools like Zapier and Make or by building your own custom integration with the Missive API.

When you add or update a contact in Missive, that change is immediately reflected for everyone on your team.

8. Use Shared Filters and Labels

If you're using Gmail, you can take advantage of filters and labels to segment and organize emails to find later.

For example, you could create a label called "Webinar Launch", which has a filter that includes all the emails sent and received by people on your marketing team that include specific keywords related to your campaign.

But the problem is that labels aren't shared across workspace accounts and must be set up manually.

This is made easier in Missive where you can share labels and filters with your team.

Shared filters and labels make sorting and organizing emails a breeze and ensure that everyone is on the same page. They also save you time that could've been spent setting up labels and filters manually.

9. Leverage Automation

It’s 2022. There's no reason to waste time on tasks that can be automated. You don't have to

You can set up auto-responses, snooze emails, and even create rules to automate email filing.

For example, in Missive, you can create a contact group in which you add spammers and use automation to automatically trash them the moment they hit your email inbox. Goodbye everyone out there with high-quality backlinks to sell. 👋

Imagine using built-in shortcuts to quickly insert a template or emoji into your email without having to leave your inbox. Or, setting up auto-responses so you can reply to common questions without having to type out the same message over and over again. Better yet, how about snoozing an email until a later time or date so you can focus on what's most important right now?

Automation can save you a lot of time and headaches, so it's worth considering if you're looking for ways to improve your team's email collaboration and internal communication without putting in a lot of extra work.

10. Write Collaboratively

Finally, one of the best ways to boost email collaboration for teams is to write collaboratively. Instead of sending individual emails back and forth, you can use a tool like Google Docs or Dropbox Paper to write and edit your emails together in real time.

Writing collaboratively has several benefits.

•  It saves time sending emails back and forth and trying to teach everyone that even Word Docs can be worked on in the cloud.
•  It also helps ensure that everyone is on the same page and that the final email is consistent with your team's style and voice while simultaneously giving new hires a useful way to learn how someone more experienced with the SCQA framework crafts an email.

However, doing the writing anywhere else other than your email client can introduce needless work for you and your team. You have to write, copy, paste, and then send, right?

With tools like Missive, you can write your emails collaboratively right from your inbox. That means you can avoid the extra steps and still take advantage of all the benefits of collaborative writing. Just write and send using Missive's Live Edit feature!

Ready to Take Your Team’s Email Collaboration to the Next Level?

Collaboration doesn't have to be a pain. By following these simple tips, you can boost email collaboration for your team and make everyone's life a little easier.

Whether you’re using ancient email clients like Gmail or collaboration software like Missive, you can find ways to eliminate wasteful manual labor and stay focused on what matters.

Start a free trial and give Missive a try. Your team will thank you for it.

As more of the workforce demands flexible remote work options, we have to adapt so that we can still collaborate with our team at the same level from our homes that we would from the office.

To do that, we need a way to easily communicate about our customers and with our customers—in one place.

That’s not Slack. That’s email.

What we need is a platform built for email collaboration.

What is Email Collaboration?

Email collaboration is the ability for multiple people to work together on an email. This can be by adding comments, editing the draft, or approving it before it is sent. The best way to do it is by using specialized software. You could also share access to the email account, but this comes with big security risks. The goal of email collaboration is to improve communication and workflow within a team.

What is an Email Collaboration Software?

Collaborative email is a type of email inbox software that multiple people can access and use and collaborate on email and tasks. It is most useful for teams that need to work on email together as a group, such as customer support teams or executives who delegate their Gmail account to an executive assistant.

Cost-conscious companies often create a shared mailbox in their Google Workspace, Gmail, or Microsoft Office accounts to make it easier for customers to reach them (e.g., info@acme.com) and share login information with everyone on a team that needs it.

Makes sense. Right?

The problem is that email was originally designed to be used by individuals. Sharing credentials to work collaboratively with people to triage and field incoming messages goes against the fundamental behavior of email.

When you try to use email this way, you end up wasting more time due to the inability to know who’s working on what—creating confusion at best and angry customers at worst.

Collaborative email software solves most of these problems by giving them a way to all work with multiple communication channels from a single place while simultaneously maintaining accountability with task management functionality for assigning responsibility, delegation, communication, rules, and other productivity enhancements.

And when more detail and planning is required for effective teamwork, most integrate with modern project management tools like Asana, Trello, and ClickUp.

How Remote Teams Use Email Collaboration Tools

Email collaboration improves communication and understanding between team members. It helps identify potential problems early on, and avoid miscommunication and duplication of effort.

Team collaboration was already hard enough prior to the pandemic, but with more companies choosing remote-first or a hybrid model, the utility and necessity of being able to coordinate and communicate asynchronously are only going to keep growing.

By using one of the best shared inbox software you can start working more efficiently with your coworkers.

Teams that Benefit the Most from Email Collaboration

The magnitude of benefits you can get from a collaborative inbox has a lot to do with the size of your team, the number, and the type of information you have to manage.

Common adopters of shared inbox apps are teams involved in:

• Sales
• Finance
• Customer Support
• Customer Success
• Executives

Sales

Both outbound and inbound sales teams can use team inboxes to keep up with prospects and in-progress opportunities they’re trying to close.

Inbound teams can assign inbound sales requests to a central inbox (e.g. sales@acme.com) using rules like round-robin and others to reduce the time an interested buyer has to wait for a follow up from sales (especially since the longer they have to wait, the more likely they are to contact a competitor).

A lot of companies (both large and small businesses) don’t realize how much revenue they inadvertently lose during the sales process due to poor communication and due diligence.

Inbound Leads

For example, an inbound lead is ready to sign up for your platform but your organization decided it was a good idea to force prospects ready to give you money to sit through a demo and qualification process despite your product having an ACV (average customer value) of less than $2000.

After doing so, your prospect is ready to move forward and become a customer but their sales development rep or junior account executive goes on vacation without setting up any sort of handoff or OOO autoresponder, leaving a potential customer in limbo.

In Missive, you can set your schedule to Out of Office yourself or set it for a coworker’s email account if they forget. You can also create automation rules to send incoming emails to the entire team or send a webhook to store them in your CRM so an active opportunity doesn’t go cold.

Outbound Leads

For outbound, an outbound sales-development rep gets lucky after a thousand emails and finally gets a positive reply from a prospect who wants to learn more about a product or service your company has pitched. The SDR can loop in an account executive on the conversation to give them context prior to a sales call.

They can also create and leverage collaboration email templates that work well for one rep so the rest can use them too.

Customer Success

Customer success teams can proactively work with sales teams during the handoff phase to give new customers a world-class onboarding experience by keeping everyone on the same page about customer expectations, special needs, and those small critical details that make it feel like you’re rolling out the red carpet. Something not always made easy by popular help desk tools.

Customer success teams can also coordinate easily with other teams throughout the organization to understand issues the customer might have—especially whenever they’re pinging support trying to figure out how to cancel their subscription.

Having insight into these sorts of issues without having to deal with the mess of CC/BCCs and a million email threads can make the difference between retaining a customer and having them churn.

Customer Support

Customer support teams often see the most benefit from collaborative email.

With tools like Missive, support teams can receive and respond to support inquiries in real-time from traditional channels like email, but also instant messaging channels like live chat, SMS, and social media thanks to its Twilio and social integrations.

When you try to manage support inquiries from a shared inbox in the traditional way, it’s easy for customer issues to slip through the cracks and fail to get the attention they deserve in a timely manner.

This happens all the time and customer support teams need all the help they can to help customers solve their problems, keep them happy, and reduce churn.

Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) is the lifeblood of the subscription business. Without predictable sources of revenue, it’s impossible to sustain your business over the long term. On the flip side, it’s critical to track churned MRR to assess how customer attrition affects your revenue. If you’re losing customers too quickly, it can seriously hurt your ability to grow.

— Patrick Campbell, Profitwell

How you treat your customers and the value you provide will dramatically impact where you fall on the chopping block whenever economic shifts and markets change.

Failing to address churn by giving customer support (and success) the tools they need while simultaneously investing ridiculous amounts of capital into sales software and more SDRs to spam the market isn’t a sustainable growth strategy.

Finance

Accounts receivable and accounts payable teams can tackle outstanding payments due and vendor invoices quickly and efficiently. Especially whenever an approval process is required or back-and-forth communication needs to occur.

Executives

Executives in businesses of all sizes can get a ton of benefits from collaborative email when working with an executive assistant or chief of staff.

Being able to easily delegate incoming and outgoing emails from multiple emails via an alias can ensure things flow smoothly from the top down.

A good EA can also manage your inbox collaboratively without having to share your email credentials and lose insight into what’s been addressed and what hasn’t. Whether that’s responding to an important customer or helping you achieve inbox zero.

This is especially important for smaller businesses leveraging a VA remotely who aren’t quite ready to hand over login credentials to their email.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

Slack promised to be the email killer—but it’s ~~2022~~ 2023 and email is still here.

Keeping up with what’s going on throughout our organizations both internally and externally isn’t going to get any easier.

As our teams and work, we do become more decentralized our communication needs to become more centralized if we want to continue to keep up with what’s most important and provide the best experience for the customers we possibly can.

FAQ

Why the standard way of doing email fails when it comes to collaboration?

Email was originally designed for individual use, and the standard way of doing email fails when it comes to collaboration. While many companies create shared mailboxes to make it easier for customers to reach them, sharing credentials to manage incoming emails goes against the fundamental behavior of email.

A collaborative email software provides a solution to this problem. It is a type of email inbox software that multiple people can access and use to collaborate on email and tasks. This type of software is most useful for teams that need to work on email together as a group, such as customer support teams or executives who delegate their Gmail account to an executive assistant.

Who benefit from an email collaboration tool?

An email collaboration tool benefits any company, small or big, with a team that needs to manage and respond to emails. This includes customer support teams, sales teams, project teams, and executives who delegate their email accounts to assistants.

By using an email collaboration tool, team members can access and work on emails together, assign responsibilities, delegate tasks, communicate effectively, and set rules to enhance their productivity. This allows for improved collaboration, efficiency, and accountability.

Furthermore, email collaboration tools can benefit remote teams by providing a centralized platform for communication and collaboration, regardless of geographic location. Additionally, team members can access the same information and messages in real-time, making it easier to collaborate on tasks and projects.

Since the 90s, “business communication” and “email” have been nearly synonymous. Email is where communication happens, whether it’s emailing a client request, ticketing for IT support, or onboarding a new employee.

Yet, if we’re being honest, most of us still think our email inbox is where productivity goes to die. There has to be a better way, doesn’t there?

Enter: Missive and ClickUp’s Email ClickApp.

These platforms allow you to take your inbox from a “me” space to a “we” space. And, yes, both of these tools will allow you to explore their email features for the unbeatable price of free.

Yet, if we look under the surface and examine the features and missions of each of these companies, they couldn’t be more different. On the one hand, Missive is a full-featured email client with multi-channel integrations. On the other hand, ClickUp is a work management platform that can send and receive emails, sort of.

So, if we were to compare Missive vs. ClickUp Email, which is better?

As a ClickUp expert and a Missive power user, I want to take you through the day-to-day features that will matter most for your email productivity so you can decide for yourself.

Email Organization & Delegation

Tasks vs. Conversations

It is essential to understand how differently emails are organized in ClickUp Email vs. Missive to start our journey.

Conversations are the core of Missive’s user interface. Scrolling along your left sidebar will feel instantly familiar for anyone who’s used Outlook or Gmail in the past, making the Missive learning curve effortless.

Of course, Missive has more superpowers than your average email client – but we’ll talk about that later.

Meanwhile, Tasks are at the center of ClickUp’s email feature. ClickUp users go directly inside a Task’s Activity panel to compose an email. If your email receives a reply, you’ll see it alongside other updates inside ClickUp Notifications.

However, if no one replies to your ClickUp email, you’ll have to search back through all your ClickUp Tasks to find the email you sent. (Speaking from experience here – it’s not a pleasant process.)

Oh! And just as a reminder before we dive deeper: We’re talking today about ClickUp’s email from ClickUp feature, also called the Email ClickApp, where you can send emails to and from ClickUp. This ClickApp is distinct from ClickUp’s one-way email to ClickUp feature, which only turns emails into one-off Tasks.

Creating Categories to Organize Emails

Have you ever been in your inbox and thought, “Oh! I’ve answered this type of request before, haven’t I?”...and then found yourself scrambling through your Sent emails to find that precious example you forgot to save? If so, you know precisely why inbox organization can make or break email productivity.

Missive helps you organize your inbox through Labels, Team Inboxes, and My Inbox.

• Labels are like tags you can apply to any conversation to file them away for safekeeping. For example, when the snazzy folks over at Missive invited me to write this post, I added the Label “Potential Sponsorship/Collab” to the email so we could easily find this conversation later!

• Team Inbox(es) sort all conversations into a virtual “pile” for relevant team members. For example, we have an inbox for Customer Experience (CX) where we’ll automatically put all of our customer requests.
• When an email is manually or automatically placed in this Inbox, the whole Customer Experience team can see the communication and get to work. Every department can see communication relevant to them without anyone forwarding emails back and forth!

• Finally, My Inbox allows you to manage all conversations that you personally need to take action on.

ClickUp’s email feature, in contrast, doesn’t have its own organizational structure. There is no centralized email inbox in ClickUp (although they’re considering it). The Task you send the email from is where your ClickUp-originated email will always live.

ClickUp’s task-based structure makes it impossible to see an overview of all emails.

Merging Emails & Conversations

Last month, we received an email from a client and that client’s assistant regarding the same request: updating a password. Two separate emails hit our inbox within an hour.

If we were emailing in ClickUp, we would have been stuck! In ClickUp, email conversations (and their replies) cannot be moved, merged, labeled, or reorganized. They’re stuck exactly where they were first sent (or received).

In Missive, we could easily select both emails and click “Merge Conversations.” Magically, the two emails became one Conversation that could be tackled by one Customer Support rep comprehensively.

If your inbox gets as messy as ours does, you’ll probably find the ability to Merge Conversations to be one point for Missive!

Separating Tasks from Emails

Emails often include a mix of information and Tasks. Productive teams know the value in breaking this information apart so no action item is forgotten.

In Missive, you can create a Task inside any Conversation (manually or automatically through a Rule) by selecting the Task icon when commenting. Tasks create little checkboxes inside a Conversation that you can easily assign to one or multiple people.

In ClickUp… well, Tasks are their specialty!

To create Tasks from emails in ClickUp, you’d select “Assign” on any message. This creates an Assigned Comment.

ClickUp Assigned Comments also include more formatting and a Remind Me feature. Because they’re integrated directly into your regular Task List, it’s a great way to ensure no Task is left behind!

Templating Your Emails

Creating Templates of Emails

Email templates are invaluable tools for inbox efficiency. Luckily, both ClickUp and Missive include email template features.

In ClickUp, Email Templates are housed within the “magic wand” icon inside any email composition area as long as you’re on ClickUp’s Business Plan or higher.

Once inside, ClickUp greets you with a robust lineup of formatting options including headers, banners, and embedded content.

In Missive, email templates are called Responses. (I suspect this, in part, is because Missive can handle far more than just emails – more on this later!) Managing Missive’s Responses happens inside the Settings menu.

Once open, you can create a new template as effortlessly as writing any standard email, including text formatting and adding images. The whole experience is slick and included on Missive’s free plan.

The only downside to both of these tools is that neither software allows you to create templated messages written in HTML (yet).

Add Dynamic Variables to Emails

No one likes templated emails that feel like templates. That’s where dynamic variables come in. Dynamic variables allow you to personalize parts of a message based on sender or recipient data.

For example, if we had a dynamic variable for “Recipient’s First Name,” instead of an email saying, “Hi [first name]!” it might say, “Hi Layla!”

If we didn’t know the recipient's name, we might have a fallback value of “there” so, if we didn’t know a first name, we’d say “Hi there!” to cover all our bases.

In ClickUp, dynamic variables are only available for emails sent via a ClickUp Automation. (You cannot set any dynamic variables in standard ClickUp email templates.)

When triggered, ClickUp Automations will pull data from the Trigger Task and use that to send an email automatically.

To work, every Task sending emails must have data filled in through all relevant Custom Fields of a specific data type. Usually, this requires a lot of data entry, but it’s crucial.

ClickUp’s email variables do not allow for fallback variables, so if any Fields are blank when the automation is triggered…your email might look a little bizarre!

In the example screenshot above, we forgot to fill out the Due Date so our sentence reads “Please complete the example task by .” instead of “Please complete the example task by January 1, 2025.” Oops!

Missive takes a much more flexible approach to dynamic variables. Variables in Missive are available for both automated and manual emails.

When creating a new Custom Variable, creators can decide whether to populate this data automatically or manually. Even though Missive variables cannot yet be formatted (all Missive variables are currently strings), these options provide ample space to explain the meaning behind each variable.

Variables, in my opinion, are one of Missives most underrated features.

Editing & Updating Email Templates

Okay, so we’ve built some stellar email templates. How do we keep them all up-to-date? This is where a solid email template management center can make all the difference.

Editing Responses in Missive is straightforward. When you select Insert Response (or are just browsing Responses), locate the Response’s ellipses menu and select Edit. You can alter anything about the Response in seconds. Your edits are immediately saved, and your template just got that much better!

ClickUp’s email templates, as we’ve alluded to before, are a bit trickier to manage. Email templates are not part of ClickUp’s template center and, instead, can only be found by selecting the “magic wand” icon that appears near any email composition area.

Once inside this manager, you can select the pencil to edit any template. Just don’t forget to click Save!

Consistently Branding Email Signatures

First impressions matter, and that’s true for email, too. Both Missive and ClickUp’s Email ClickApp spoil us with the ability to create on-brand email signatures for all users by utilizing either text or HTML formatting.

In Missive, we can define our signatures per email address or set an Organization-wide Managed Signature for our team.

Like Responses, our Missive signatures can also include dynamic variables, such as automatically pulling in the user’s profile image.

The ability to set signatures for the entire Organization makes it effortless for new team members to start with the right look – making employee onboarding that much easier!

In ClickUp, we can also set up Signatures and insert them either automatically or per email, as long as you’re on the Business plan or higher. Like email templates, ClickUp doesn’t include this feature on Free or Unlimited plans.

Unlike Missive, ClickUp doesn’t allow for a Workspace-wide signature setting. Users must customize signatures for each email address used.

Automating & Delegating Your Email Inbox

Send Emails Automatically

Templating email is nice but automating email sounds better, doesn’t it? Fortunately for us, both Missive and ClickUp’s email ClickApp include email automation!

ClickUp automates emails through Tasks. To automatically send an email, the action must be triggered by behavior that is an eligible ClickUp automation trigger.

The most popular triggers include:

• When Task is Created…
• When Due Date Arrives…
• When Custom Field Changes…

ClickUp automations will send an email once conditions are satisfied only once a trigger event happens – either automatically or manually. For this reason, ClickUp’s email automation tends to work best in structured workflows that are very task-centric and don’t have a lot of variation.

Missive, as a platform dedicated primarily to email-based features, has built considerably more power into their automation options!

Missive emails can be sent automatically by defining Rules (only available on Missive’s Productive plan or higher). When all (or any) of the Rule Conditions are met, the automated actions defined on the rule are triggered.

My favorite triggers are:

• If it’s after 5PM on a weekday…
• If a Conversation has been Closed…
• If a Conversation has been sitting unanswered for 24 hours…

But really, this is just the basics. You can create complex conditions by nesting them in sub-groups, and so far, I haven’t run into any scenario I’ve been unable to build into a Rule.

Oh! And I should mention that Missive also allows you to manually schedule emails to be sent at a later time if you want automation with a personal touch.

Assigning Emails

So far, we’ve talked a lot about the benefits of having a collaborative inbox system. Now for a reality check… if an email is just sitting in a team inbox, everyone is responsible for it, right? Wrong. When everyone is responsible, no one is.

Whether we’re managing emails or bringing utensils to the company holiday party, it’s crucial to clarify who’s in charge of what.

In Missive, Assigning is at the heart of email delegation. You can manually assign emails to coworkers or Teams by selecting name(s) in the drop-down menu.

If you prefer a more automated approach, you can also have Missive automatically assign emails based on capacity by enabling Round-Robin assignment or by customizing those handy Rules we mentioned earlier.

In ClickUp, emails are treated just like any other Task Activity. You can assign an email to an individual by hovering over a received email and selecting the Assign option.

There’s no way to assign emails inside ClickUp automatically. It’s a manual process… so project managers beware!

Alias Email Addresses

Of course, it’s a lot easier to delegate and assign emails if the recipient expects that. If an email was sent to alex@, but we reply to emails from the email address melisa@… that’d be pretty weird for the recipient, wouldn’t it?

That’s why alias email address support should be a deciding factor when selecting your email management software.

Common alias email addresses include:

• support@
• hello@
• info@
• billing@

These “general” emails can redirect emails to one or many recipients at the same domain. It sets the expectation that it’s being shared with a department or team and not necessarily with just one individual. Typically, email aliases can be created for free. They do not require you to set up (and pay for!) another email account with your email provider.

In Missive, you can connect any email alias directly to Missive and even allow others to send or receive emails from that alias.

ClickUp, on the other hand, doesn’t allow you to connect alias email addresses to ClickUp at all. You can only integrate and share access to IMAP, Google, or Outlook email accounts. Plus, you’re limited to only two email accounts per ClickUp Workspace if you’re on a Business plan or higher. At the time of writing, each additional account will add the cost of $2 USD per account per month. Yikes!

Other Productivity-Boosting Features to Watch

Email Tracking & Reporting

Does your email communication improve conversions or increase customer satisfaction? To know, we need to pay attention to our data.

At its core, ClickUp remains a task management system. That’s where they started and that’s still their zone of genius. Reporting on email interaction is not yet possible through any of ClickUp’s reporting-centric Dashboard Widgets.

Missive comes with integrated analytics and comprehensive reporting features.

Communicating Beyond Emails

Although email remains the number one way to communicate in business, it’s hard to ignore how influential channels like Instagram DMs, Facebook Messenger, and WhatsApp can be!

With ClickUp, communication is limited to three formats:

• Email
• ClickUp Comments (only for users with access to your ClickUp Workspace)
• ClickUp Forms (allowing users to submit data for one-way communication)

ClickUp does not integrate with any popular communication platforms. This makes sense considering ClickUp isn’t, at its core, designed for external communication – it’s focused primarily on internal communication.

Meanwhile, Missive has built out a robust suite of integrations so you can seamlessly connect with others across:

• Email
• Missive Comments (with other Users in your Missive Organization)
• Instagram
• Facebook
• WhatsApp
• SMS
• Missive Live Chat

If you’d like to meet your audience where they are – whether on Instagram or a Facebook Message – Missive has you covered.

Email on Mobile Apps

If you’re on the go, the last thing anyone wants to do is whip out their entire laptop just to send one email. To effectively manage email, mobile apps are a must.

In ClickUp, there’s no way to send personal emails from ClickUp on the mobile app. Period. You’ll need to have a backup email client on standby to shoot off any quick messages if you’re not on your main device.

Fortunately, Missive can fill the gap. Missive has a slick mobile app for both Android and iOS. While it’s just as fast and orderly as the “main” app, Missive’s mobile version also makes it easier to use thumb-friendly swiping features to save time (and space) on a small screen. Swiping right never felt so productive.

ClickUp Email vs. Missive – Why Not Both?

When you’re comparing Missive vs. ClickUp email, at first, there are plenty of similarities:

• Both have solid core functionality to organize your communication.
• Both let you easily assign emails to collaborators.
• Both allow you to automate email in their own way.

But, when we dig deeper, it’s hard to deny that Missive is the better choice for inbox collaboration. When we consider the mission of each company, it makes perfect sense!

ClickUp’s mission is to build a best-in-class work management tool. ClickUp’s email features? They’re not the top priority. Meanwhile, Missive is determined to create a best-in-class email client, and it shows.

Despite that, it might feel impossible to choose which software you need to add to your tech stack. So… don’t. (I didn’t!)

I’m a ClickUp specialist, but I continue to use both Missive and ClickUp side-by-side for our company. I’m a huge fan of Missive (and writing this article) because Missive is the best software for organizing, collaborating, and managing emails I’ve ever experienced.

At the same time, I’m obsessed with ClickUp because of its strengths outside of email, especially its task management features.

Thanks to Missive’s easy-to-use ClickUp integration and the ability to embed our ClickUp Doc SOPs directly into the Missive sidebar, we continue to use both tools side-by-side.

Missive vs. ClickUp? For my company, it’s Missive AND ClickUp.

What about you?

As a small business owner myself, I still wear a lot of hats and feel like there are always a million and one things left to do.

Keeping things running smoothly depends upon clear communication and collaboration throughout the business. Some tools can help, but there are so many that it’s hard to know which to pick without wasting time or money.

Chances are you searched online at one point and saw a list of 40 of the best software you could use. But trying 40 tools to see if they are the best for you is a full-time job in itself.

So I did it for you instead.

I’ve personally used every app I recommend below and dozens of their alternatives. I’ve also helped several other small businesses find the right set of tools to fit their business.

When deciding which tools are right for you, think about which areas of your business consume more time than they should.

For example, are you spending too much time communicating back and forth with others, finding files, delegating tasks, building contracts, or marketing yourself online?

Once you know where you need to reclaim your time (or your teams) and get more efficient, that’s where you want to invest first. After all, according to a study, better collaboration results in a 27% increase in sales and boosts customer satisfaction by 41%.

My Top Recommendations for SMBs

I selected these apps based on 3 important factors:

•  Usefulness/functionality
•  Ease of use
•  Price

These are my top picks by use case.

Best Communication Tools for Collaboration

Internal & external communications are really important in any business. In fact, 86% of projects fail due to a lack of collaboration and poor communication according to a study by Fierce. With more companies going remote-first, being able to stay up to date with others through asynchronous communication is critical.

These are the most valuable tools we’ve found to do so.

Slack

Slack is one of the most ubiquitous apps businesses of all sizes use to communicate with one another in real-time or asynchronously. You can use Slack for instant messaging, share files, hop on video calls, and receive updates from a host of third-party tools like Google Docs, Google Drive, Gmail, and more.

Slack has channels you can use to separate different types of conversations. For example, you may have a channel where you only discuss items related to operations and another channel you only communicate with your CPA in.

Price

Slack's free plan is more than enough for most businesses with support for unlimited users. The only reason to really upgrade to their Pro or Business+ plans is if you need to maintain a complete history of your message history (the free plan only stores the last 10,000 messages).

Slack’s paid plan scales dynamically based on usage by users. If a paid user isn’t active that month, Slack doesn’t charge you for it.

If you’re a service-based business with customers who work with you on long-term projects, you can add them to Slack but only to a single channel (as a guest) if you’re on the free plan.

If you’re running a business with a high volume of customers, it would be a logistical nightmare to try to add them all to Slack. So you’ll still need to rely on traditional channels for communication like email, live chat, phone, text messages, etc.

That means more subscriptions and more apps to keep up with so things don’t slip through the cracks.

Missive

Missive is a robust email and chat app that small businesses can use to manage internal and external communication without the headache of adding customers as guest users.

Fewer Things to Keep Up With

Have you ever wished all of your customers would send their support questions through a single channel?

Me too.

But we both know that’s never going to happen. Luckily, there’s Missive.

With Missive, a customer can send you an email, text message, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, or WhatsApp and you’ll receive it right within Missive.

There are several platforms out there that will centralize messages customers send you via social, but not across social, email, and chat.

Missive removes the need to switch between apps to read, reply, and delegate to other people within your company or customer support department.

It’s all just right there.

Missive supports internal communication as well.

You can create channels where you can add email threads, chat messages, or a mixture of both to discuss things with other people in your company.

Missive chat rooms are similar to channels and direct messages in Slack. You start with a general room for your organization but can also create rooms for teams, and private 1:1 or 1:M conversations with other members.

Conversations Around Email Using Comments

One of the most useful features of Missive is the ability to add notes and have conversations around email with a coworker without having to forward anything.

This is something we do all the time. For example, when a member of our team needs help with a customer, they just “@” message a coworker and ask. As soon as they do, their coworker can see the email in their own inbox, and both can begin chatting around the email chain without having to send back-and-forth emails or copy and paste links into Slack.

As the head of my company, I’m bombarded all day long with emails. Some can go straight to the trash and some justify a reply immediately.

Between those two extremes, there’s a ton that I can delegate to others to handle for me.

Instead of forwarding them the email, adding it as a task in Asana, or sharing it in Slack, I just tag who I want to delegate it to and it immediately shares it with that person.

I can add details for the person I’m delegating it to so they can either reply as themself or from my email directly on my behalf.

This single feature dramatically boosts my workflow productivity and gives me back several hours per week that I can spend working on the business instead of always in it.

Price

Missive has a free plan you can start with if you want to check it out. We’ve been on the Productive plan for a few years now because of all the time we save using Rules and Integrations.

Missive is by far the most robust and affordable email and collaboration app for small businesses.

In addition to its core features (which work great on mobile by the way), it also supports several third-party app integrations with tools like Trello, Asana, ClickUp, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Zapier, and more.

It acts as our email client, customer support inbox, task system, calendar, and internal communication app, streamlines things and saves us hours of time each month.

Loom

Missive is great for asynchronous text-based communication but sometimes you just need to send a video or screen recording so people don’t misinterpret you.

If that sounds like something you’d like—you definitely want to check out Loom.

Loom is one of the easiest-to-use asynchronous communication tools we’ve tried and easily outclassed alternatives like Vimeo and Vidyard.

Price

The free plan allows you to create up to 25, 5-minute videos per person. Every person at your company can create their own free plan, or you can create one company-wide and invite up to 50 “creator lite” users for free.

Once you finish recording a video, Loom gives you a link you can copy and share with others so they can watch it instead of skimming over your email, misunderstanding the context, and igniting yet another needless back-and-forth email threads.

Zoom Meetings

A few years ago it wouldn’t have been strange to talk to other small business owners who hadn’t heard of Zoom.

I doubt that’s the case anymore.

On the off chance that you’ve somehow managed to avoid Zoom fatigue over the past two years or are still using ancient video conferencing software like GoToMeeting—Zoom is a tool you can use to host conference calls (with or without video), meetings, chat, and webinars.

Price

The free plan is good enough for most small businesses. You can host unlimited calls with up to 100 people but they’re capped at 40 minutes. You can work around this by having more efficient meetings (something we all need these days) or scheduling back-to-back 40-minute meetings if you need something longer.

While Slack supports similar features, with Zoom, you can host calls with people not within your Slack workspace and get screen-sharing options for more than just 1-on-1 calls.

Best Project Management Tools for Collaboration

I can confidently say I’ve used every popular project management app out there and have yet to find a single one that I could recommend as the best.

Every company is a little bit different. What works for a law firm won’t always work for a logistics company, marketing agency, or budding eCommerce store built on Shopify.

You have to figure out which one will work best for your business, your customers, and your team.

I’d highly recommend that you search for and review the product feedback forums/boards for any project management software before you even sign up for a free trial. You can usually find them by searching for things like:

•  [name of the tool] + feedback
  or
•  [name of the tool] + canny board

See which feature requests have been around the longest and have a ton of votes from other users and ask yourself if you really want to invest in a tool if it’s unable to provide its customers with what they need.

That being said, here are a few we’ve used and seen other teams find success with.

Asana

Asana is one of the most popular task management systems available. It has a free plan, but we quickly realized we needed a paid plan to manage operations within our company and get access to the timeline (like a Gantt chart), dashboards, custom fields, rules, task templates, and milestones.

Asana doesn’t have native time-tracking by default though—so if that’s important, you’ll need to integrate it with a third-party application like Everhour or explore other tools that come with it out of the box.

Word of Advice: If you decide to use Asana, let me save you a lot of time and frustration and encourage you not to use subtasks. Most of Asana’s features don’t play nice with them and they’re really meant to be more of a personal task list than anything else.

If you prefer a kanban approach, check out Trello. Asana has a view for that but it’s not nearly as robust.

Price

You can create unlimited projects and tasks and assign them to yourself or other members you’ve invited into your workspace. The free plan supports up to 15 “guest” users with limited features but should be enough for you to try out and see if it’s the right tool for you.

Asana upgrades aren’t the most friendly for small teams, though. When you upgrade you do so by adding “seats” to your plan and have to do so in ranges of 5. If you have a team of 6 people, you’ll have to pay for 10. So keep that in mind.

Monday.com

You’ve probably seen their ads somewhere. We don’t use Monday.com ourselves but we did test it out extensively within our company but ended up passing on it because it didn’t support subtasks at the time (it does now).

Price

Monday has a free plan for up to 2 users that includes unlimited boards for arranging tasks, unlimited docs for taking notes and recording SOPs, and works in the browser, as a desktop app, or on iOS and Android devices.

You’ll need to upgrade to the Basic plan ($8/user/month) if you need more than two people to collaborate on projects though.

Best Files & Documents Management Tools for Collaboration

You are probably already familiar with or already using one of these best documents collaboration tools:

• Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides• Microsoft 365• Dropbox Paper• Zoho WorkDrive

However, you certainly need to share files and documents that aren't accessible with one of these software. That's when a files & documents management tool for collaboration comes in handy.

Google Drive

Google has one of the best cloud storage options out there—especially for file sharing. You can store documents, pictures, videos, and just about any file type in the cloud and access it from any device you can connect to the internet and sign in to a Google account from.

If you find yourself needing access to your files offline—Google Drive supports that as well if you download their app (options available for both desktop and mobile).

Price

Google Drive does require you to have a Google account to use but that’s something you can sign up for and get for free.

The free version of Google Drive is limited to 15 GB of storage so you’ll need to upgrade to one of their paid plans. You can pay for Google Drive storage directly through a Google One subscription (starting at $19.99/year) or by signing up for Google Workspace (sort of like the business version of a Google account).

I personally prefer Google Drive over all other options but that’s because of the suite of Google apps (e.g. Google Docs and Google Sheets) we use so much during our day-to-day operations.

Dropbox

If you’re not heavily integrated into Google’s ecosystem, check out Dropbox. It’s effectively the same thing as Google Drive.

Price

It’s worth noting that while Dropbox does have a free version, it becomes more expensive than Google Drive as your storage needs scale.

Best Marketing & Social Media Tools for Collaboration

Marketing is critical to growing your business. People can’t buy from you if they don’t know you exist. For most small businesses, social media is one of the best channels to generate demand—and also the channel that benefits from back-and-forth collaboration.

Canva

Canva is one of those unique tools that a company of any size can get a ton of value from.

Hiring a graphic designer can be expensive but with a few YouTube tutorials and 15 minutes, every small business can create professional-looking designs and marketing assets to promote on social media and attract more customers.

Price

Canva has a free version and two paid tiers to choose from.

Most small businesses will have everything they need using the free tier. This includes access to a ton of premade templates (250,000+) for a variety of mediums like social media, presentations, brochures, flyers, etc.

You can also invite team members for collaborative work on designs or to relay feedback and suggestions using comments similar to Google Docs.

While the paid version has several nice features, the most common reason I’ve seen people upgrade to “Pro” is to unlock the ability to post from Canva directly to social media without having to switch between platforms or pay for another third-party social media management subscription-like Hootsuite or Sprout Social.

Best Sales & Contracts Tools for Collaboration

Given that over 80% of small businesses have fewer than 20 employees, you might be able to skip right over this section.

If you’re an eCommerce company or a founder filling the roles of the CEO, head of marketing, head of sales, and head of everything else—you don’t need any tools to help you collaborate with yourself.

However, if you’re company has more than one salesperson or that salesperson needs is struggling to collaborate and handoff deals to folks who handle operations—then these tools may help.

Pandadoc

Pandadoc is useful when you need team collaboration features for customizable contracts and sales documents with customers who aren’t local and don’t want to hassle sending physical files back and forth like it’s the 20th century.

Real-Time Editing and Approvals

Two people will sometimes work on a contract at the same time, especially when we’re working on a complex sales agreement with a long-term customer. Additionally, once a contract is drafted, I review and approve it before it gets sent to the customer for review and legally binding e-signatures.

Once it gets sent to the customer, they may request revisions (i.e. concessions) be made. In Pandadoc, they can request those revisions and chat back and forth with us in real time or asynchronously.

This is far more efficient than redlining a Microsoft Word document and sending it back and forth since most people who use Word still seem to forget that you can share and work on them collaboratively just like Google Docs.

Price

They have a free plan for collecting signatures and payments but you’ll need to upgrade to a paid plan if you want advanced features like drag-and-drop designs, pricing tables, and integrations with third-party apps like QuickBooks (for reconciling invoices) or a CRM.

Gong.io for Sales-Heavy Companies

Unless your sales process involves more than one rep per opportunity (because who doesn’t like sharing commissions?), I can’t really think of any CRMs where the collaboration features are worth investing in.

The only true collaborative tool we use in the sales process is Gong.io. That tool is probably the single most useful and impactful piece of technology we’ve invested in to boost revenue.

Gong provides some truly next-level growth opportunities if you’re a business that’s running a high-volume sales team (outbound, inbound, or both).

Gong helps your sales leaders review and coach better sales reps by recording sales calls, transcribing them, and enhancing that data with some artificial intelligence and machine learning to surface what’s working and what’s not across various customer cohorts in a way that can seriously boost your close/won rates.

Price

Gong pricing depends on the number of users and on the license type you choose for your team. You need to contact them for more details.

Bonus: Best Tool for Finance Collaboration

I’ve talked to a lot of small business owners and had quite a laugh when I learned we all had to deal with the same problem when communicating with our accountants:

What was this transaction for $43.52 on February 9th?

9/10, I have no idea and have to go into my email, filter by date, and search for the dollar amount.

Doing it once is tedious and time-consuming enough but it never fails that I have to spend too long each week helping my accountant classify transactions because some companies out there don’t know how to add easily identifiable statement descriptors to their transaction details.

Quickbooks and other accounting software will let you add your accountant as a user but they are definitely not built with collaboration in mind at all.

Collaborating with Your Accountant in Missive

This is where I have to recommend Missive once again. You can grant your CPA access to your Missive account and set up automation rules (another powerful feature Missive has) to automatically share and assign emails related to financials that come into your inbox.

It’s been months since I’ve had to help my CPA classify transactions. Does it save me a ton of time each month? Probably not. But when you’re already bombarded by a never ended list of things to do—every little victory you can get matters.

How to Choose the Right Collaboration Platforms for Your Business?

Collaboration tools are used to increase productivity, reduce time spent on tasks and improve team performance. However, they are not a one-size-fits-all solution.Every business needs to find the right tool for its needs. There are many factors to take into account when choosing a collaboration tool for your business but I have narrowed down some of the most important ones below:

• What is your budget?• Who will be using the tool?• What features does it offer?• How much training is required?

Having in mind the problems you need to solve will help you answer these questions.

Once you found the tools that suit your needs the next step is to try them or request a demo.

The most important thing to remember is to choose software that you and your team will actually use. If the tool is really advanced and requires are hard to use, chances are that people in your team will not end up utilizing them in the end.

FAQ

What Is a Collaboration Software?

A collaboration software is a tool, often a SaaS, that is designed to help teams work together on business various tasks.

The goal of collaboration software is to make it easier for teams to work together, share ideas, and accomplish tasks.

Collaboration software can be used by companies and organizations to improve communication and efficiency.

What Are the Benefits of Collaborative Software for Business?

There are many benefits of collaborative software for businesses.

For starters, it can help with efficiency and productivity. It can also help with a company's bottom line by reducing costs by avoiding errors and duplicated work.

Another benefit of collaboration tools is that information is centralized and accessible to all the employees that need to access it.

In general, collaborative software will create more transparency between team members and allow for more efficient communication.

No matter what system you have for managing your Gmail inbox, we've all received an email from a customer, executive, or direct report that we just can't respond to immediately.

We don't always have all the answers and need to check with colleagues to get their input.

Until we do that, it just sits and lingers in our inbox.

Wouldn't it be great if you could add notes, annotations, memos, and tasks to your emails to give yourself context for when you eventually get back around to responding?

What about being able to have a private conversation with another team member in Google Workspace or add Gmail notes on an email a customer sends you without having to forward or blind-copy things?

Something like Google Doc comments, but for your Gmail account.

Yeah. We'd like that too.

Gmail doesn't offer this sort of functionality, though.

There are some workarounds native to Gmail that can help with scenarios when you need to add notes to Gmail or collaborate with others without creating a mess of FW: chains.

We'll cover 5 (and a half) options native to Gmail and one third-party option that makes it easy to add notes, comments for your team, attachments, tasks, and more without forwarding or jumping through hoops.

What Are Gmail Notes?

Gmail notes are a feature that allows you to save notes and attach them to specific emails. This can be useful if you need to remember something important about an email thread, or if you want to keep track of something related to the email.

5 (and a half) Native Gmail Notes Options

1. Using Google Tasks

You can add an email to Google Tasks to leave notes for yourself in the task description area.

Right-click on the email you want to add notes to and select "Add to tasks." You can also click on the email and use the keyboard shortcut ⇧ + T (Shift + T).

You'll see a task appear in the sidebar to the right of your email message. Click on it and add notes to yourself in the details area.

Click the mail icon below the task to open up the email you've associated with the note.

The Downside: You can't share your Google Tasks with others. If you want to collaborate on an email with a team member within Gmail natively, you'll need to forward the email to them or use Google Chat.

2. Using Google Keep

Google Keep can be used to add notes to email in Gmail.

Open the email in which you want to add a note.

Open the sidebar if it's not already by clicking on the arrow on the left side of the screen.

From the sidebar, select the Google Keep icon. Google Keep panel will appear.

In it, you can add as many notes as you need.

The Downside: No text formatting and poor note organization.

3. Using Google Chat

You can use Google Chat to collaborate with team members—sort of.

To do this, click Google Chat in the left sidebar of Gmail to trigger a chat pop-up.

Add the team member or members you want to collaborate with. Then copy, paste, and send the contents of the email you want to discuss with your team.

It's helpful to add a link to the specific Gmail message thread so you can easily open it back up later.

The Downside: Other team members can't click the link you've added to reference the original email because it lives in your email inbox—not theirs.

If you don't provide enough details, it may not make much sense to the people you share it with.

This causes a lot of wasted time going back and forth. It usually saves more time to forward the email to team members instead.

4. Using Drafts to Add Comments

You can also use a draft to add notes for yourself. Reply to the email without sending it, and your message gets stored in your Drafts.

5. Replying Inline Using Quotes

Step 1. Sign in to your Gmail account, find the email you want to work with, and copy the text from the body of the email you want to reply inline to.

Step 2. Click reply.

Step 3. Click the Quote button to add a quote block in your email reply.

Step 4. Paste the text you copied from the original message next to the gray quote block line where your cursor is.

Step 5. Press Enter and reply with your response below the quote block.

5.5 Using Gmail labels

Now you can't use labels to add a note, but you can use Gmail labels to indicate that a note is needed before a reply can be sent. 

Think of it as very, very lightweight process tracking within your inbox.

How to Easily Comment & Collaborate on Email with Missive

Missive is an email and chat tool that syncs with email platforms like Google and Outlook to make collaboration easy.

You can use it as a native desktop app on macOS and Microsoft Windows or as a web app in browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox.

Here are some valuable ways we use Missive at our company to add private annotations and collaborate with other team members.

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Add Private Comments for Yourself to Emails

You can add private comments for yourself to refer back to them later.

Tag Your Team in Comments on an Email

You can tag other team members in a comment by typing @ + their name. Tagging others will automatically share the email with them (without having to forward anything), so they can see your comment and reply to it.

They can reply with an inline comment or within a thread if they have multiple conversations within the email and want to keep topics organized.

Assign Tasks with Comments

You can turn a comment into a task if you have something you want to delegate to a team member or yourself without having to tab over to a project management tool and bog it down with more tasks.

If you're anything like us, you like keyboard shortcuts. Missive makes it easy to create tasks; just start typing your task description, then switch to task mode by pressing ⌘  + ⇧ + X on Mac or Control + Shift + X on other platforms.

Alternatively, type [ ] or - [ ] at the beginning of your comment. Assign the task to a team member using the @ + their name anywhere in your comment.

Suppose you want to send tasks to a more formal project management tool. In that case, Missive has several add-on integrations with Asana, Trello, ClickUp, Todoist, and a Zapier connector for any others you rely on.

Comment in Style

Missive comments support styling options beyond plain text too. You can add styles for bold, italic, strikethrough, quote blocks, inline code, and code blocks!

Share Attachments in a Comment

Make it easy for people to send attachments to customers without spending 10 minutes searching for them in Google Drive by sending them as a comment. We frequently use this to send zip files, PDFs, links, and screenshots without using apps like Slack, where we lose the context of the email itself.

Use Rules to Automate Comments

If you want to save time and maximize your productivity, you can use Missive's powerful rule feature to automate comments based on various conditions.

Delegating Customer Support to When You're Busy

Let's say you receive a new email from a customer that you can't get to immediately and your organization likes to keep customers happy by responding to them within 24 hours.

You can set up a rule in Missive to automatically move the email to a Team Inbox after a certain amount of time and add a comment that goes out to all members, letting them know you need someone to step in to help.

Respect Service-Level Agreements

You can set rules to apply to an entire team as well.

For example, you can help your team maintain SLAs established with customers by creating a rule that sends a notification to everyone on the team whenever receiving an email during business hours that goes 30+ minutes without a reply.

Automatically Add Reminders about Critical Customer Details

It's not uncommon for individual customers to have important details that your team needs to be aware of whenever they're interfacing with them.

For example, imagine you're a major OTR carrier or 3PL provider and have a particular shipper/receiver who restricts certain types of drivers from their facility.

You can use rules to automatically add reminders as comments to email exchanges involving that customer's domain address (e.g., *@acme.com).

Adding Comments to Gmail from a Mobile Device

You can also add comments, tasks, and attachments using the mobile app for iOS or Android.

This is something I often do when I'm taking a break mid-day to get some fresh air and get drug around the block by my Husky.

Don't Let Gmail Get in the Way of Work

Gmail is great for personal email but comes up short for collaboration. While you can use tasks for meta-level Gmail notes on your private emails, things get medieval again when you need to get someone else's input.

Hopping on Zoom for a quick chat is mentally exhausting and makes it harder to be productive remotely.

Teams should start embracing asynchronous communication and the tools that enable it—like Missive.

FAQ

What Is the Difference Between Gmail Notes and Google Keep?

Gmail Notes and Google Keep are both note-taking apps by Google. While Google Keep was developed to be a personal, simple way to jot down thoughts, Gmail Notes was designed to help users take notes through email seamlessly.

Can I Export Notes from Gmail?

There is no official way to export all your Gmail notes without copy/pasting them individually. Though it’s not a Google-supported feature, it is possible to export notes from Gmail via add-ons.

A list of things tech startups usually go through that we did not.

Warning: This is not a list of things you should not do; it's simply a collection of things we did not.

• We did not do a business plan.
• We did not create a pitch deck.
• We did not spend money on Google Adwords.
• We did not move out of Heroku.
• We did not create a US bank account to save on Stripe fees.
• We did not grow our headcount past four.
• We did not raise venture capital.
• We did not go through an incubator.
• We did not code a native iOS app.
• We did not code a native Android app.
• We did not code a native Windows app.
• We did not code a native Mac app.
• We did not spend money on ads.
• We did not type-check our codebase.
• We did not switch to a new programming language after launch.
• We did not hire a PR firm.
• We were not featured in any noteworthy tech publications.
• We did not win any prize nor apply to win one.
• We did not attend networking events.
• We did not join the local chamber of commerce.
• We did not devote a % of our days to marketing.
• We did not pay for a competitor product to try features.
• We did not focus 100% of our work hours on only one business.
• We did not buy or use an email list to reach potential leads.
• We did not use a CRM.
• We did not track/monitor user behavior in the apps.
• We did not A/B test anything.
• We did not sell the company to a competitor.
• We did not split our codebase into microservices.
• We did not use AWS Lambda.
• We did not apply for the government salary subsidies.
• We did not translate our app or website.
• We did not have coaches.
• We did not ask questions at user signup (What is the size of your company?)
• We did not give discounts.
• We did not offer yearly plans.
• We did not order mugs/socks/T-shirts/hoodies with our logo.
• We did not pay for a LinkedIn premium plan.
• We did not host a page that asks for email addresses to download a PDF.
• We did not have mentors.
• We did not do an MBA.
• We did not present talks at our alma maters.
• We did not pivot.
• We did not setup automated email follow-ups.
• We did not waste money.
• We did not hire a human to do our hero video narration. (Suggested here)

Were we successful because or despite of all of these did-nots?

There are presumably many things there that would have made us more successful. And obviously many things we might do soon.

The takeaway? Don't stress over all the things you are not doing but focus on the few you are doing right.

Missive will soon reach $2M in ARR, roughly one year after the $1M mark.

In the article celebrating this significant milestone, I wrote that we could grow another 100% with the same team size.

We believe we can grow by another ~100% with only the four of us.

I was right. We grew to this point without sacrificing quality to our customers. It is baffling to most people, especially ones from the startup world, to see us thrive with such a low headcount.

Our users love the app and love the customer support experience we offer. They are shocked when we tell them we are just three. Also shocked when they see my basement Office in Zoom calls. 😆

Do I have the most unglamorous working setup?

- Basement ✅
- No window ✅
- Wooden crate + books standing desk ✅
- Kid toys all around ✅
- Apple Studio Display ❌

Who beats that? 🤣#remotework #bootstrap #desksetup pic.twitter.com/M5osCQ5diO

— Phil Lehoux (@plehoux) March 30, 2022

It's not just that we did not raise any money, but we willingly kept the team small. Some critical aspects of our business are just more manageable because of our size, like:

Product Development ❤️ Customer Support

The three of us do all of the support. There is a direct line between the problems and the solutions. Our customers, when they complain, when they voice frustration about the product, we hear them and act swiftly.

We act swiftly to please them, of course, but also to keep our sanity; responding to the same complaints again and again is soul-crushing.

Technology Stack ❤️ Consistency

In seven years, our tech stack has stayed pretty much the same. We don't reinvent the wheel; we don't migrate to new frameworks or languages to please a new generation of developers. We don't have to since we are not recruiting X new developers every month.

Yes, but...

Yes, our revenues have grown at a healthy ~5% month-over-month rate. But this growth came in significant part from the expansion of our existing customers. We have been able to stay small because the rate at which we onboard new customers has remained approximately the same for the last 2-3 years.

In the last year’s post about our $1M ARR milestone, I wrote:

We never spent a dime on marketing; the cost of customer acquisition in our space is crazy high. We can't compete with subsidized VC-backed companies.

This is not true anymore; the business generates a lot of cash flow, and many customer acquisition channels are starting to make more and more sense.

Customer Onboarding ❤️‍🩹 A Tiny Team

So this brings me to the one thing we can not scale indefinitely: good customer onboarding. Each business is unique; each has its requirements, workflows, etc. When people first set up in Missive, that is when there are the most questions, this is when we can tell them where the value is. The more new users we onboard simultaneously, the bigger the team will need to be if we want to keep offering a stellar experience.

Can I predict what our headcount will be in a year? No, but I'm confident it won't be just the three of us.

Most people use a simple and static email signature telling basic information about themself and their company (job title, phone numbers, address, etc.).

Others have more complex usage; for instance, they will gather feedback on how well they answered their customer questions.

What if you could be more creative? For instance, what if you could change your signature copy based on the day of the week? Like adding the sentence "Have a great weekend!" in emails sent on Friday!

Let me show you how, with Missive, the best business email client.

Copy-paste the following code snippet in the signature editor where you want the sentence to appear:

{% assign today = "now" | date: "%A" %}
{% if today == "Friday" %}Have a great weekend!{% endif %}

The first line parses the current date and assigns the day value to the today variable. The second line checks if the today variable is equal to Friday and, if so, outputs the Have a great weekend sentence.

By adding an else statement, you could display an alternative sentence. The below code will display Have a great weekend! on Fridays and Cheers, every other day.

{% assign today = "now" | date: "%A" %}
{% if today == "Friday" %}Have a great weekend!{% else %}Cheers,{% endif %}
Philippe Lehoux

How is this possible? Missive takes advantage of the powerful templating engine liquid.js that allows you to do crazy stuff! Learn more.

p.s. Thanks to Laura Soar, one of our customers, who suggested this cool idea.

Most people reading this article probably have had poor interactions with automated customer support services. Many are badly designed or try to delegate a lot of the work to bots and other forms of automated support. True artificial intelligence is still non-existent and inferior levels of it are very costly to develop. So, how do you fully automate customer support?

Well, you probably shouldn't. At least not entirely. You should aim to automate repetitive and predictable tasks, and leave the tricky stuff to humans.

By doing so, customers will be happier and employees too, since we all know repetitive work is the worst part of most jobs and it's also what machines excel at.

Customer support automation done right

Here are five ways that will help you scale customer support without compromising the customer experience.

1. Use canned responses

Canned responses or templates help you write and reply to emails faster with pre-written snippets. This alleviates the stress of having to type the same text multiple times per day. Employees can start replying to a customer with a customized message and insert blocks of canned responses.

This is probably the most efficient semi-automation method. As far as the customer knows, they got a personalized answer to their question.

It is important to properly name canned responses and be familiarized with the contents. Otherwise this method easily backfires on you if you send unrelated information.

With Missive you can share canned responses with everyone in the company or specific teams! This reduces the danger of sending sales related info to a technical support enquiry.

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We also support variables. With them you can easily customize response with dynamic content like your recipient's name.

For example:

Hi {{ recipient.first_name | default: 'there' }},

… if it matches a recipient.first_name would render something like this

Hi Philippe,

… and if it didn't match anything something like this:

Hi there,

2. Triage support queries automatically

Routing messages to the most appropriate responder or team can be time consuming. This is why you should automate this. The sooner the customer's question is received by a competent team member, the sooner it will be replied to.

It requires some initial work, but after you've finely tuned the parameters, your team won't be wasting time sorting out queries.

In Missive this can be achieved with the creation of Rules. Here are a few of examples of automated routing:

Job inquiries should be directed to HR.

Refunds should be directed to John at the Finance team. He should process all refund requests within 24 hours of reception.

Shipping issues should be directed to Customer Support and show shipper's phone number.

3. Create a robust knowledge base

This is your first line of defense. You should build an extensive repository of frequently asked questions and tutorials on your website. Ideally you can solve 80% or more of the customer's questions by simply directing them to the knowledge base.

At first you will need to think of these questions, but soon it will become user-generated. People will be fast to let you know they can't find this or that in the knowledge base. You simply need to label these conversations and upload new content to the FAQ sections once or twice per month.

In Missive you can label things in a matter of seconds, thanks to user actions. For example, whenever you spot a potential FAQ, simply type "#faq" in the comment bar and the conversation will be labeled "FAQ".

4. Get customer feedback

The best way to improve customer support is by gauging your support experience. This can be easily done by adding a simple satisfaction survey in your email signature.

Missive offers a powerful signature management system. With it, you can easily add customer satisfaction surveys to each of your teammates' signatures in just minutes.

The dynamic data comes from your team's editable member profiles. Some survey collection companies let you generate embeddable HTML code. In this case, you can copy the code and paste it into the managed signature editor.

You can also add custom field variables like in the example above. Learn more about managed signatures.

5. Auto-reply customers with relevant information

Let's face it, customers aren't patient, most want immediate responses. While big companies can offer 24/7 support, most businesses can't. This doesn't mean you have to leave your customer flying in the dark. Auto-replies can reduce customer anxiety and sometimes solve issues without human interaction.

Outside business hours + link to knowledge base

Let people know they've sent an email outside of business hours. It's the best way to manage expectations and let the customer know they won't receive an immediate or same-day response.

You should also include a link to your knowledge base. People might find an answer by themselves.

Outside business hours + suggested articles

If you want to up your level a little, you could create multiple auto-reply responses that trigger with different keywords.