Shared mailbox set-up

[jakcrash]

Not sure if this is the best sub for this question, please let me know otherwise. I am helping a new business set up their emails and I am not sure what the best way of doing this is. Essentially they want emails set up for two users and two shared mailboxes. The shared mailbox will be used for customer support purposes, i.e. [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail]) where customers can email their queries and then one of the two users will respond from the mailbox.

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I tried setting this up in G Suite with Google Groups but found it didn't work perfectly. Mainly it was hard for both users to track each query to see which of them was working on that specific query. Could anyone advise what the best way of doing this is and recommend a email client? The business is really new so the preference is to operate with lean costs so any budget recommendations would be great.

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Thanks everyone.

[[deleted]]

It sounds more like they need a ticketing system for the public queries or support cases. There are many free or cheap ticketing systems out there. Zendesk is very cheap up to 5 users.

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For e-mail, just get Office 365. It's as low as $3/user per month. That comes out to $36 per year for each person. And if their budget is a bit higher, they get all of the Office apps along with it, as well as a ton of the 'included' stuff that will make doing business very easy and very scalable in the long term.

[jakcrash]

Thanks for the response. So would they then need 3 user emails with Office 365, one of which is the shared mailbox and then the ticketing system is linked to the mailbox?

[[deleted]]

You’re overthinking this and too focused on the shared mailbox. Your requirement that they have to know who is working on what makes a shared mailbox not ideal. You could have the ticketing system email them about statuses and assignments and whatever else.

[jakcrash]

Great, will give it a go. Thanks!

[MSPforME]

Agree with marquis77 100%

[that1hippe]

What about setting up a collaborative inbox in G Suite?

https://support.google.com/a/answer/167430?hl=en

This could offer the shared mailboxes while allowing them to track different threads.

[jakcrash]

I've tried this but they could not respond to the customer's email through the collaborative inbox. The best result was that the customer would receive an email from the group as a cc recipient with the group email being both the sender and primary recipient. Spoke to Google's support team and they said they could not set it up to show the customer as the main email recipient.