Property teams commonly use email to handle customer issues and communicate with prospects. However, since email wasn't designed for team collaboration, individual inboxes create several challenges:
- Lack of transparency and accountability
- Duplicate replies by teammates
- Slow to no replies at all
- Poor organization
If these problems sound familiar, you're not alone. Poor communication management directly impacts lead conversion and renewal rates.
With Aptly, you can create shared inboxes like residentrelations@ or leasing@ to manage communication as a team, route messages to the right people, and get more done.
Shared inboxes offer the most efficient way to communicate as a team, and setting them up is straightforward. Just connect your existing Gmail or Outlook inbox—or create a new one—and invite your teammates to access it.
6 Reasons Your Property Team Should Use Shared Inboxes in Aptly
1. All of your communication channels in one place
Your team can access every conversation in your shared inbox through a unified view. Aptly shared inboxes go beyond email—you can add a phone number to handle SMS and voice communication in the same place. Best of all, Aptly integrates with your individual inbox, letting you manage both personal and shared communications from a single app.
2. Clear ownership and shorter response times
An Aptly Shared Inbox lets you assign conversations to teammates, preventing embarrassing duplicate responses. With all conversations visible to the team, it's simple to cover for colleagues who are out of office or on vacation. Customers will appreciate your quick response times—made possible by response time goals that ensure your team maintains consistent communication standards.
3. Fewer Forwards, CCs, and BCCs
Managing individual inboxes makes team communication challenging. Since email was designed for one-to-one messages, it doesn't suit modern collaborative teams. When using forwards, CCs, and BCCs, even simple questions can create confusing, hard-to-follow threads. Aptly's shared inbox transforms team communication by offering clear context and full visibility for every conversation.
Rather than creating scattered threads through forwards or CCs, teammates can collaborate efficiently using Aptly's internal chat tool. Simply @mention a teammate in the original conversation—they'll get notified instantly, see the complete conversation history, and access relevant contact details from your property management software.
Aptly's Contact Alerts feature lets you add important context for your team. These alerts show critical information above specific contact conversations, visible to everyone on your team.
4. Better organization with Topics
Property teams often create complex systems of tags, folders, and filters to organize their individual inboxes. This leads to inconsistent organization across the team since everyone manages their inbox differently.
With an Aptly shared inbox, your team can use a single, efficient organization system. Aptly automatically categorizes conversations with shared Topics, eliminating manual labeling. Topics help your team streamline organization, prioritize issues, and collect valuable insights.
5. Consistent communication across your team
With an Aptly shared inbox, your team can streamline communication using communication templates to automate replies and reduce response times. Each template automatically personalizes content for recipients using merge fields from your property management software. If included in your plan, Aptly's AI can even generate customized responses based on email content.
6. Increase customer satisfaction
A shared inbox enhances the customer experience. Through Aptly, you can measure every resident conversation using customer satisfaction surveys—providing valuable insights into resident happiness. These metrics help you improve resident experience, enhance training procedures, and boost your bottom line.
