A shared inbox for email, Viber and chat: every enquiry has an owner

Short answer: a shared inbox is one place where every customer message arrives — email, Viber and website chat — so that each conversation has one owner and a reply deadline, and the history stays with the customer rather than in someone's personal mailbox or phone. In NG CRM routing rules assign a conversation the moment it arrives, the deadline is counted in working hours without public holidays, and the conversation is linked to the customer, with a lead, activity or ticket one click away.

What is a shared inbox?

A shared inbox (or team inbox) is a view where the team works on the same stream of messages, with clear rules about who takes what. It is not the same as:

• an info@ address forwarded to everyone — everyone gets a copy and nobody knows who replied;
• a shared password to one mailbox — there is no record of who sent what, and every departure means a password change;
• Viber on a company phone — only whoever holds the phone sees the messages.

In a good shared inbox every conversation has an owner, a status and a deadline, and the reply leaves from the company address the question arrived at.

Why do enquiries get lost in personal inboxes?

Rarely through carelessness. Far more often because the process does not say whose enquiry it is:

• “I thought a colleague had replied.” When everyone sees a message and nobody owns it, everyone assumes someone else picked it up.
• Holidays and sick leave. A customer writes to a rep who is away, and the message waits in a mailbox nobody else opens.
• Unwatched channels. Website chat goes to an address nobody monitors, and Viber messages sit on someone's phone.
• Replies from the wrong address. A colleague answers from a personal account, and the rest of the thread disappears from the company's view.
• No link to the customer. A rep walks into a meeting without knowing the customer sent a complaint the day before.

Who replies to which enquiry?

Ownership should be decided before anyone reads the message. That is what routing rules are for: conditions that decide who a conversation belongs to. In NG CRM rules run in order, and the first one that matches picks the owner. Conditions can be the account the message arrived at, the channel, a tag, the priority, the customer owner or keywords in the message.

A practical rule of thumb: existing customers go to their owner, new enquiries go round-robin in the sales team, and a complaint recognised by a tag or keyword goes to support. Write rules from the most specific to the most general, because the first match wins.

How fast should you reply to a customer enquiry?

No single number fits every company, but two rules do. First, the target should be written down, not assumed. Second, measure two things:

• first response time — how long the customer waits for someone to confirm the question has been received and picked up;
• time to each next reply — so the conversation does not stall after the first “we'll look into it”.

Expectations differ by channel. Someone writing in website chat expects an answer while still on the page; a Viber message feels like a conversation; email allows a little more time. An example policy your team can adapt:

In NG CRM the deadline for the first and every next reply is set in minutes and counted in working hours, excluding weekends and public holidays — a message that arrives on Friday evening is not “late” over the weekend. A reminder comes before the deadline and escalation after it. Deadlines are your team's internal targets, not a contractual promise to the customer. Viber adds its own 24-hour reply window, which NG CRM respects — one more reason a Viber enquiry should not wait until tomorrow. Marketing messages on Viber follow separate consent rules, covered in Consent and opt-out in email and Viber campaigns.

How does a conversation link to the customer and the deal?

An inbox becomes part of the CRM only when every message knows which customer it belongs to:

1. Automatic link. When the sender's email address or phone number exactly matches a contact, the conversation links to the customer on its own. Otherwise the Inbox suggests a link.
2. A new sender becomes a lead in one click, and the message becomes the first entry in their history.
3. Follow-up from the conversation. An activity (call, meeting), a lead or a support ticket opens straight from the conversation, with the customer and contact already attached.
4. The quote in the same thread. When a rep sends a quote from their connected mailbox, the customer's reply lands in the same conversation, linked to the quote, the deal and the customer.
5. Internal notes. A colleague is brought in with an @mention in a note the customer never sees, instead of a forwarded email.

The result is history that stays with the customer. When a colleague is on holiday, their conversations are not locked in their mailbox, and a rep sees everything the customer wrote before a meeting — within the permissions you set. How a quote the customer accepts on a link fits into this flow is covered in Quote on a link.

Website chat with an AI assistant: what can it do?

Website chat captures enquiries outside office hours and answers recurring questions. In NG CRM it is added to your site with a code snippet and a list of allowed domains, and the AI assistant in it has clear limits:

• it answers only from documents you have marked as public;
• it writes nothing to the CRM;
• it is clearly labelled as an AI assistant and never poses as a person;
• it hands the conversation to a person when the visitor asks, when it is unsure of the answer, when it reaches a limit, outside office hours or when AI is unavailable.

The reply deadline starts at the moment of handover to a person, not at the visitor's first message.

Personal or shared mailbox?

Both have their place. The only question is who sees what:

Keeping personal mailboxes private builds trust in the team, while shared mailboxes hold everything that belongs to the company.

How to set up a shared inbox in 5 steps

1. List every entry point: company addresses, reps' personal mailboxes, the Viber number, website chat.
2. Connect the channels. Email over IMAP/SMTP, Viber through your company's Mailbook account, chat with a code snippet; we connect Microsoft 365 and Google mailboxes and calendars during onboarding.
3. Write the routing rules — from the most specific to the most general, because they run in order.
4. Set working hours and deadlines for the first and every next reply.
5. Agree on team habits: internal notes instead of forwarding, every conversation linked to a customer, every reply sent from the Inbox.

Channels, routing rules and access rights are described in detail on the Inbox page, and how a conversation becomes a ticket and moves across the support board on the Support page. For monitoring there is a ready-made Inbox dashboard, one of the eight ready-made dashboards described on the Analytics page. NG CRM Inbox channels are email, Viber and website chat; calls go through your phone and are logged as activities.