Guide

How to triage and assign emails

Basic assignment

Missive offers an intuitive assignment flow. Out of the box, any conversation can be assigned to yourself, a teammate or multiple teammates.

Note Assignment is ideal for customer support emails, but can also be powerful for internal chats.

When a conversation gets assigned to you, it appears in your Assigned to me mailbox as well as your Inbox.

Every conversations can be assigned
You can easily assign conversations to anyone.

Assigned conversations can be closed from the same menu. Upon being closed, conversations are moved to the Closed mailbox for future reference.

Triage

For small teams, the above may be enough. Assignment is done by anyone, directly from the inbox. But when dealing with a lot of requests, it can be counter-productive for everyone to see all emails all the time. You may want to add a triage step where some teammate(s) dispatch emails to the relevant people. In Missive, this is done through the Unassigned mailbox.

Unassigned, Assigned to me and Closed mailboxes

The only setup required to enable this flow is to set your shared account or address to show new emails in the Unassigned mailbox instead of the Inbox.

Enable the assignment flow in the Email sharing tab of your organization settings

Let’s say we enable Show emails in: Unassigned for the account info@missiveapp.com. Everyone with access to the account can now see incoming emails in the Unassigned mailbox.

When the person doing the triage assigns a conversation, the conversation is removed from Unassigned and appears in Assigned to me and Inbox for the assigned user(s). Replying to an unassigned email will automatically assign it to you.

Send & close button
Replying to an assigned conversation will show Send & Close.

Finally, if a new reply is received in a closed conversation, the conversation will be moved away from Closed back into the assignee’s Assigned to me and Inbox. Those replies will only be seen by the assignees, which is really useful to reduce the amount of interruptions your team faces daily.

Tasks

For conversations that are used as projects, granular assignment of tasks can also be used. You will get the same consistent experience whether an individual task or a whole conversation is assigned to you: the conversation will appear in Assigned to me as well as your Inbox.

Last updated on January 4, 2017

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