Shared Inbox Best Practices

Reasons to Create a Shared Inbox

Shared inboxes are best for teams that want to have a centralized area for texting communication. This team-based approach allows you to provide contacts with centralized and streamlined outreach and an efficient workflow allowing for faster responses to the questions that come in. Additionally, shared inboxes allow you to reach larger numbers of contacts more efficiently.

Examples of Shared Inboxes/Workflows

There are several reasons why you may want to set up a Shared Inbox. Examples include:

• Call centers: Having a centralized Cadence account set up for general questions can be very advantageous and allow your team/department to further promote the fact that texting is an available and encouraged means of communication. Multiple individual users can be granted access to the account to bring texting into your call center's approach and outreach.
• General line for your team/department: To supplement the more personal conversations you may have with contacts using your user account, a shared inbox can provide another venue for contacts to send in questions–especially ones that are more general to your team/department and less specific to you (e.g., a dedicated line for checking an application status in Admissions, a line for deadlines/forms in Financial Aid, etc.).
• Ask a current student/peer: Many schools find that having current students available for questions is an extremely valuable resource to offer. Having a shared inbox dedicated to answering questions posed from new/incoming students, managed by current students/peers, and in students' preferred communication method can be a powerful tool.
• Events: Use a shared inbox for all events in your team/department. Allow students to text in questions and confirm/deny registrations. The same account could be used for all events.

Workflow Management and Expectations

Drawing a line between personal communication and the communication that occurs through a Shared Inbox is an important part of managing workflows in Cadence. If you have a personal inbox it should be used for specific conversations with contacts you are working with individually and/or contacts who are assigned to you.

• If a contact sends a text to the Shared Inbox but you would like to respond from your personal account, you can choose to do so, however, ensure that you also write back in the Shared Inbox. If you do not send a reply to a message in the Shared Inbox, there is a chance another user will respond thinking that it was left without a reply.
• When reviewing a message, it is best to not stay in the conversation view if you are not going to respond. The conversation will "lock" when it is being viewed to prevent others from responding and eliminate the chance of two users responding at once. There is a timeout that will automatically remove a user from viewing a conversation if idle. Once removed, any other user will be able to respond.
• Shared Inboxes work best when there are several users with access. After sending a text message, contacts will expect a response as soon as possible. Having a team-based approach and a strategy for checking the Shared Inbox messages is essential.

Shared Inbox Sending Best Practices

Shared inboxes are a great way for your team to text and reach more contacts.  A few considerations as you and your team plan to send messages to larger groups:

• For every message you create from Compose, an estimated delivery duration will be provided so you know roughly how long those messages will take to send. Always make sure to check the estimated delivery duration so that you're not sending messages past your preferred sending time/window. The estimated delivery duration can be found on the final step in the Compose. 
  • From a Shared Inbox, sending a message to 1,000 contacts can take roughly 30 minutes. This delivery duration can help in planning as you build out your segments. 
• Adding an image or gif to your text could add more time to your delivery duration. 
• Give your scheduled messages a "buffer" time. 
  • When scheduling messages make sure allow for extra time between each scheduled message in case it take a little longer than the estimated time to finish sending. 
    • For example, if your text message is scheduled for 8am and the delivery duration says it will take 45 mins to complete, be safe and schedule the next round of delivery at 9-9:30am. 
  • If you’re not scheduling a message, the paper airplane icon in the upper right corner of Cadence will show you the progress of the message(s) currently sending. You can use this as a resource to see when your message has been completed and you can send out your next round of messages.
• Account for “spin-up” time! 
  • Sending to large segments, note that there will be delay in time from when you hit send and when the message actually begins sending out as Cadence is working to process all of the message information. When you hit "Send", Cadence has to process all of the information for the message--checking multiple items around the contacts, mergeable fields, if a template is being used, image/gifs etc.. 
  • As a best practice for these larger messages, plan to send the message a little ahead of your intended start time, just to account for that processing time.
    • Note: Once the messages have fully processed, the paper airplane icon will appear in the upper right corner showing they're sending. 
• For texts going to larger audiences, especially to alumni, end your messages with a “Reply STOP to opt-out”. 
  • There is always a chance you could be sending a message to someone who didn’t opt in to receive text messages when they were students or don’t recall opting in. It is the safest route to take and allow your contacts to know right off the bat that they can choose to stop receiving texts from your institution.