Combining Shared Inboxes Into Consolidated Channels

Yes, depending on your team and customer structure it would definitely make sense to consolidate some of your Outlook inboxes (Front channels) into fewer Front inboxes. You can continue to use rules with your customers’ Front accounts (or the “to” address of the inbound email if you’re keeping all of those addresses in Outlook) to assign or tag emails as needed. Are there any concerns you have about making a change like that?

@moe_corona I agree with @samsheridan that combining channels into fewer inboxes is often a good move for efficiency and building additional workflows! When you have the same channel type (all email channels, all SMS channels, etc.) and the same group of people working on those messages, it’s typcially a good candidate for consolidating into one inbox. We have a section in our Front Academy course that walks you through this consolidating exercise if you’d like to check it out (free) - see the section called “When to create a new inbox”: https://academy.front.com/app/courses/3331d5d0-f466-4ef6-b66e-a994de1ff808 

Logistically speaking, making the actual moves is pretty simple — Front has a built-in feature to automatically move the channel and all its associated history into the new destination inbox. This is the guide here: https://help.front.com/en/articles/2079. One callout is that if you’re moving the channel to a different workspace, some resources like tags won’t move; but everything else will be retained (assignees, participants, etc.). If you don’t have multiple workspaces, then you don’t need to worry about that at all. The other thing to note is that if you have any conversations that aren’t technically associated with that channel (such as conversations you manually moved into the inbox from another inbox), those conversations understandably won’t move since they’re not part of the channel you’re moving. You would manually move those remaining messages after moving the channel. 

@moe_corona BTW if you’d like some additional help, we have office hours every week! there’s one tomorrow if you want to talk through this organization and move: https://academy.front.com/app/training_events