Shared inboxes are the hidden cost centre
info@, sales@, accounts@ and the rest. Nobody owns them, everybody checks them, and the same message gets read three times before anyone acts.
It is unglamorous, high-volume, low-risk work — which makes it very good ground for automation.
Four things worth automating
- Classification and routing on arrival, with a label and an owner
- Thread summaries for anything over four messages
- Draft replies for the routine categories, saved as drafts
- Data extraction — orders, enquiries, changes — into your systems
The fourth is the one people forget and the one that pays. An enquiry that becomes a CRM record without anyone retyping it is pure saving.
Do not send automatically
Draft, do not send. The reputational cost of one wrong automatic reply exceeds the time saved by hundreds of right ones.
After six months of measured acceptance rates on a narrow category, automatic sending becomes a reasonable conversation. Not before.
Handling the awkward cases
- Complaints escalated immediately, never drafted automatically
- Legal or regulatory language routed to a named person
- Anything mentioning money owed, flagged rather than answered
- Out-of-office and bounce noise suppressed entirely
Practical setup
Works with Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace through their APIs. Nothing needs to be installed on anyone's machine and nothing changes about how they read mail.
Typical build is two to four weeks, and the classification alone usually justifies it.