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Why Shared Inboxes Don't Cut It: The Chaos of Team Email Management

  • Writer: Claire Roper
    Claire Roper
  • 4 days ago
  • 4 min read

Many marketing and communications teams still rely on a shared email inbox to handle incoming requests—often combined with staff’s individual emails. While it may seem convenient, this approach breeds confusion, inefficiency, and lack of accountability.


What Goes Wrong with Shared Inboxes

With multiple people accessing a shared inbox, it quickly becomes unclear who is responsible for responding to what, leading to duplicated efforts, delayed replies, or worse, critical messages slipping through the cracks. This lack of visibility can frustrate both team members and stakeholders. As the saying goes, “When everyone is responsible, no one is truly accountable.”

A survey by Freshdesk found that over 52% of support teams using a shared inbox reported missed or delayed responses due to confusion over task ownership.

A person looking stressed at a laptop, surrounded by flying envelopes. Background is orange. Books are stacked on each side.

Why This Is Unsustainable for Comms & Marketing

Without a proper system, management lacks the visibility needed to hold themselves and their teams accountable. In inbox-based workflows, there’s no easy way to monitor where requests stall or what remains unresolved. Conversations often get duplicated, lost, or buried in long threads. Without a centralised system, it becomes nearly impossible to track the status of work or identify bottlenecks. The result? Wasted time, frustrated staff, and missed opportunities.


In fact, employees spend an average of 2.5 hours per day searching for information or trying to clarify communications, according to a McKinsey report on productivity.


A ticketing system enables regular reporting, which not only ensures accountability but also helps identify skill gaps, inefficiencies, and workload imbalances. This insight allows managers to optimise team performance, align work with business goals, and forecast future needs, whether it’s planning for upcoming campaigns, allocating budget, or scaling the team.


In short, without clear reporting and structured workflows, management is essentially flying blind.


Impact on the team

Flying blind creates a chaotic and stressful environment for staff. Messages get buried, duplicated, or missed entirely, leaving team members confused about who’s responsible for what.


The average professional receives 121 work emails per day, and 94% report email overload as a problem. About 63% believe work-related email is a major source of stress, and 72% feel overwhelmed by email volume.


With multiple emails flying into your inbox, teams can spend up to 2.6 hours per day simply sorting emails rather than acting on them. And the impact on overall productivity is staggering, with ProofHub saying employees lose an average of 3 hours per week due to poor collaboration and unclear processes, issues that ticketing workflows directly address. This lack of clarity leads to constant context-switching, miscommunication, and the anxiety of potentially overlooking important requests. As workloads increase, so does the noise, making it harder for staff to focus, prioritise, or feel confident in their work.


Over time, this disorganisation erodes team morale, contributes to burnout, and makes it nearly impossible to deliver consistent, high-quality results.


The Power of Ticketing Systems: Metrics That Matter

  • 90% of organizations using ticket systems report improved customer satisfaction.

  • Leading platforms like Salesforce and Rezolve estimate that up to 40% of administrative work is eliminated through automation in ticketing systems

  • According to Sobot, automation helps resolve 22% of tickets at virtually zero cost, while 76% of businesses now use automation to standardize workflows, significantly reducing manual tasks

  • 82% of service desk agents agree that automation, typically baked into ticketing systems, has improved their efficiency

  • A McKinsey–backed report shows that machine learning and AI in support systems reduce resolution time by up to 40%, cutting workload and minimising backlog


“Ticketing systems help keep your team organised, ensure each interaction is tracked, and build a clear audit trail, eliminating confusion over who replied to what.” Apps365, on the benefits of ticketing technology rezolve.ai

What to Do Next

  1. Implement a ticketing system or helpdesk tailored to your team

  2. Auto-convert shared inbox emails into tickets, assign them to team members, and set priority levels.

  3. Use built-in metrics dashboards to monitor volume, response rates, and unresolved requests.

  4. Share reporting with team leaders and executives, so everyone understands workload and performance.

  5. Train your team and enforce usage policies, if emails arrive outside the ticket system, they’re not



Top Ticketing Tools for Marketing & Comms Teams

An intuitive help desk that unifies email, chat, social media, and phone into a single ticketing system. Known for its automation features, customer self‑service portal, and built‑in reporting.


2. HubSpot Service Hub https://www.hubspot.com/service

Perfect for teams already using HubSpot CRM. Offers shared inboxes, ticket pipelines, automation, playbooks, and deep analytics tied to customer records.


Feature-rich, omnichannel ticketing platform with AI assistant “Zia” for smart routing, sentiment analysis, and automated responses. Excellent for multi-team collaboration.


Well-suited for growing teams needing multi-channel support, custom workflows, reporting dashboards, and integration with business systems.


Simple, email-based ticket system with shared inboxes, internal notes, and customer satisfaction surveys. Ideal for small teams that value clarity over complexity.


Tailored for B2B environments, combining ticket workflow with a shared customer database and advanced SLA tracking.


Cloud-based help desk solution featuring powerful ticket automation, customizable queues, internal collaboration tools, and multilingual support.


Collaboration-focused platform built around shared inboxes and message workflows. Teams can assign, collaborate, and automate ticket routing—all visible in one interface.


Embedded within Gmail, Hiver turns a shared Google inbox into a full help desk: assign tickets, track responses, detect collisions, and measure SLAs.


10. Zammad (Open Source) https://zammad.org

An open‑source ticketing tool that supports email, chat, Facebook, Twitter, and telephone channels. Great for teams seeking self-hosted control and cost transparency.

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