Transcription
Google Groups gives you this interface to manage it. I can reply here, everyone can see my replies. I can star a conversation. If I star a conversation, then it's going to sit in the starred folder. I can mark them as spam if I want. I can effectively do some basic triage of emails here.
I want to set up Google Groups for my team to work collaboratively on emails. I know how to set it up, but how do we use collaborative inboxes? Do we need to access emails at group.google.com, or can members access them from their personal inboxes? Because where will there be a notification?
So, there's two different places to access emails if you are using a collaborative group. Or if you want to access emails, one way is to actually use the Groups service. And so for that, you would use a distribution list, but effectively, you still set it up in a Google Group. I'm going to show you what that looks like, and then I'll show you the second method for a collaborative inbox as well.
So, the first thing you want to do is head along to your admin panel. And then once we're in, we're going to go to our directory and then groups. And this is where we configure what's known as a distribution list, but is effectively a group email. I've got one here that's probably a good example, which is our feedback group. So, if customers are not having a great experience, they can email feedback at itgenius.com, and that goes to a few key people in the business: myself, our CEO Scott, and one of our operational executives, Red. So, the three of us are members of this group, and the group email is feedback at itgenius.com. Now, effectively, that becomes a group email address.
Now, importantly, if you want to set up a group like this, you need to allow people outside your company to send emails to that email, right? So, if that was info at or sales at or some other kind of shared mailbox inside your business, to set that up, you would first go to the Groups service. You would create a group. Now, I generally tick the security button to make any group able to be used as a security group. Group doesn't really matter in this instance, but here we have the group permissions. And important, who can post to the group? That basically controls whether or not people can email this email address from external accounts. So, you definitely want to make sure that that is ticked to external because that means that people can email that external email address, and the responses are going to come into the group. You've got some other options here, and I've got other videos on setting up groups on what the different options do. You don't necessarily need members from outside your organization because that just controls who can see the group. You just need to have who can post, make sure that's open to external. And then I typically lock down groups to only invited users, so I can control who, uh, who gets access to that.
But then once the group is actually set up, if you go to groups.google.com, it'll show you all the different groups that you're a part of. Now, some of these are going to be security only groups, but you will be able to see the new group that you just created. Now, I'm going to show my production feedback group here. So, here's what the group service looks like. You'll see a list of different conversations, which are emails that are coming in. You'll see obviously if they're in the queue, that basically means active and able for someone to respond. And I'm going to open up a spam email here. And this spam email has come in, and basically, I've got the option here to reply. Now, I can reply to author, which is going to just reply to that person, or I can choose to reply to all, which is going to reply, and it's also going to give me an email alert out to everybody else who is a member of this mailbox, right?
This is one way of managing your emails. Google Groups gives you this interface to manage it. I can reply here, everyone can see my replies. I can star a conversation. If I star a conversation, then it's going to sit in the starred folder. I can mark them as spam if I want. I can effectively do some basic triage of emails here. Now, you're limited to the features of the Google Groups service. I don't think there is a labeling feature. I can certainly mark it as spam. I can assign it to someone if I want. There's an assigning button here, but it doesn't have all the same features of using an actual Google mailbox.
And I mentioned using a Google mailbox because that's the second method of sharing an email address with multiple people. So, the second method is called the delegation method. And for the delegation method, you actually need to pay an additional license for an extra mailbox. We create an additional discrete mailbox, and again, we'll do that in the admin panel. We're going to go to users, going to add a new user, and this is going to be our shared mailbox. So maybe it's feedback, maybe it's orders, maybe it's info at, whatever it doesn't really matter. We're going to create this mailbox, and we're going to do something called mailbox delegation. I'm not going to set that one up from absolute scratch. I'm going to allow you to rely on some other videos on the channel because we've got a whole bunch of videos on how to set up the delegation. If you head to our channel, check out our channel for the videos on mailbox delegation, and that'll show you all the bits and pieces of how to set that up.
But I want to show you what it looks like at the end once you've configured it. So, I've got my mailbox here. This is my Petoria mailbox. You can see all my my email is sitting in my inbox here. And if I decide that I want to access a mailbox that's been shared with me, in this case, it would be the group email address or the shared email address, I can just click on my profile picture, and it will show me any delegated mailboxes. And this is where you will have either a support mailbox, orders at, info at, or something that you want to share with multiple people. So, I'm going to open up the admin mailbox, and that's showing me looks like a lot of emails in the, uh, in the inbox here, but that is the shared mailbox that I have access to.
Now, this one operates more like Gmail. If I open an email here, I can choose to move this into a label if I want. If I wanted to assign this to someone, I could assign it to a person using a label for assigning. If I respond to this, it's going to look exactly the same for the customer. They're going to get an email back from the email address that they sent an email to. So, whether you're using the groups method or you're using this delegated mailbox method, the customer experience is going to look pretty much the same. The only thing that's different is the cost and the features. The delegated mailbox method, which is this one, you need to pay for a license because this is consuming a mailbox. The group method doesn't consume a license because it's using a distribution list. So, some advantages and disadvantages there.
Now, there is a bonus third option, and that would be to add third party software. We're partners with Hiver, and Hiver will connect to your mailbox and give you an overlay on top of a shared mailbox. So, you've got to use the mailbox method, not the distribution method. But what Hiver does is it allows you to do things like delegation to a person, so you can assign an email to a person. But it also lets you do things like customer service and satisfaction. So, customers can give you a rating on what their experience is like. You can have SLAs, or basically, you know, guaranteed response times, and you'll get reporting on those response times. You get reporting on how happy your customers are, reporting on how quickly your staff are responding, reporting on how many issues your team have, how many hours it takes to resolve a customer query. And that all sits over the top of your Gmail inbox. So, that would be an additional commercial option.
If you're interested in something else, we happen to sell Hiver as well. So, if you're interested in getting some help from our team, then our team will happily help with that. If you're interested, just click the link down below this video, and you'll get access to a consultation with our team, or you can even do a systems health check if you want a health check on your whole Google Workspace account and small business technology.