A shared inbox is the foundation of any customer support operation. Without one, messages get lost in personal email accounts, team members duplicate work, and customers wait longer than they should. Heedback’s support inbox gives your entire team a single place to receive, manage, and resolve customer conversations — whether they come from the embeddable widget, the customer portal, or direct messages.

This guide walks you through setting up your inbox from scratch and adopting the workflows that keep response times low and customer satisfaction high.

Prerequisites

Before you begin, make sure you have:

A Heedback account at app.heedback.io. Creating an organization takes less than two minutes.
At least one team member invited to your organization (Settings → Team). While you can run solo, the inbox shines with a team.
The embeddable widget or customer portal configured so customers have a channel to reach you. See our widget setup guide for details.

Step 1: Access Your Inbox

Once logged into app.heedback.io, click Inbox in the left sidebar. This is your team’s shared view of every active conversation. New messages from customers appear here in real time — no manual refresh needed.

The inbox shows conversations in three default states:

Open — active conversations waiting for a response or follow-up.
Snoozed — conversations paused until a specific date. Useful when you’re waiting on a customer reply or an internal decision.
Resolved — closed conversations. These move out of the active queue but remain searchable.

Step 2: Handle Incoming Conversations

When a new message arrives, click it to open the conversation thread. From here, you can:

Reply directly in the thread. Your response is delivered to the customer through the same channel they used (widget, portal, or email digest).
Add internal notes by toggling the note mode. Notes are visible only to your team — use them for context, handoff instructions, or investigation details.
Assign the conversation to a specific team member using the assignee dropdown in the top-right corner. This makes ownership clear and prevents two people from working the same issue.
Tag the conversation to categorize it. Tags like “billing,” “bug-report,” or “feature-request” help you filter and spot patterns later.

A good practice: assign every conversation within 5 minutes of arrival, even if you can’t reply immediately. It signals ownership and prevents inbox paralysis.

Step 3: Use Quick Replies to Speed Up Responses

For questions your team answers repeatedly, set up quick replies (also called canned responses). Navigate to Settings → Quick Replies and create templates for your most common answers — things like refund policies, getting-started steps, or known-issue workarounds.

When replying to a conversation, type / to search and insert a quick reply. You can personalize it before sending. This cuts response time dramatically without sacrificing the human touch.

A few tips for effective quick replies:

Keep each template focused on one question. A 3-paragraph wall of text rarely feels personal.
Include placeholders for customer-specific details (name, order number, account info) so agents remember to customize.
Review and update templates monthly. Stale quick replies erode trust faster than slow replies.

Step 4: Collaborate With Your Team

The inbox is designed for teamwork. Beyond assigning conversations, Heedback supports several collaboration patterns:

@mentions in internal notes — tag a teammate to pull them into a conversation without reassigning it. Useful for quick questions to engineering or billing.
Collision detection — if another team member is already viewing or replying to a conversation, you’ll see their avatar on the thread. This prevents duplicate replies.
Real-time updates — when a teammate sends a reply or adds a note, the conversation updates live. No need to refresh or worry about stale state.

For larger teams, consider establishing a rotation schedule. Assign one person per shift as the “first responder” who triages new conversations — assigning, tagging, and handling quick wins — while the rest of the team focuses on deeper issues.

Step 5: Resolve and Learn

When a conversation is complete, click Resolve to move it out of the active queue. Resolved conversations are archived, not deleted — you can search and reopen them anytime.

After resolving, look for patterns:

Are the same questions coming up repeatedly? That’s a signal to write a knowledge base article.
Are certain tags growing in volume? Surface that data to your product team.
Is one team member handling a disproportionate share of conversations? Rebalance assignments before burnout sets in.

Heedback’s dashboard gives you analytics on response time, resolution time, and conversation volume over time. Check these weekly to spot trends early.

Tips and Best Practices

Respond within the hour. Research consistently shows that response time is the single biggest factor in customer satisfaction. Even a quick “We’re looking into this” buys goodwill.
Use tags consistently. Agree on a shared taxonomy with your team and stick to it. Inconsistent tagging makes reporting useless.
Enable push notifications. Each team member can enable browser push notifications in their profile settings so new messages don’t sit unnoticed.
Don’t let snoozed conversations pile up. Snoozing is useful, but a snoozed inbox of 50+ conversations is just a hidden backlog. Review snoozed items daily.
Archive aggressively. If a conversation is done, resolve it. A clean inbox reduces cognitive load for the entire team.

AI Auto-Reply — let AI draft responses from your knowledge base so agents can review and send in one click.
Knowledge Base — reduce inbox volume by publishing self-service help articles.
Embeddable Widget — the primary channel through which customers reach your inbox.
Notifications — configure push and email digest notifications so your team never misses a message.