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Shared Inbox vs Team Inboxes

Shared Inbox vs Team Inboxes

Helpin gives you one Shared Inbox out of the box, and lets you create any number of Team Inboxes. Choosing between them is mostly about visibility and ownership.

The shared inbox

The shared inbox is:

  • Workspace-wide — every member with Support access sees it.

  • The default destination — new conversations land here unless routing sends them elsewhere.

  • Always present — it cannot be deleted.

Use the shared inbox when your team is small, everyone should see everything, or you want a catch-all before you formalize routing. It is also the standard fallback mailbox when no routing rule matches.

Team inboxes

A team inbox adds three things the shared inbox does not have:

Capability

Shared Inbox

Team Inbox

Visibility

Everyone

Members only

Assignment mode

Manual

Manual or round-robin

Routing prompt for AI

No

Yes

  • Members-only visibility keeps unrelated queues out of each other's way. The Billing inbox stays invisible to engineers.

  • Round-robin assignment automatically distributes new handoffs and routed conversations across the inbox's members.

  • A routing prompt (for example, "Billing questions: invoices, refunds, plan upgrades") gives the AI a crisp description of what belongs in this inbox.

When to split

Create team inboxes when at least one of these is true:

  1. Different people own different conversation types.

  2. You want auto-assignment (round-robin) for a specific queue.

  3. AI routing needs a clearly scoped destination ("billing stuff goes there").

  4. A queue should be hidden from most of the team.

If everyone works everything, stay on the shared inbox — fewer moving parts.

Typical setup

  1. Start with the shared inbox for your first week or two.

  2. Notice the recurring categories in your conversations.

  3. Create one team inbox per category, each with its members and a one-sentence routing prompt.

  4. Turn on AI routing, watch where conversations land for a few days, and refine prompts.

  5. Keep the shared inbox as the fallback for unmatched conversations.

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