A Company Without Personal Email

Instead of everyone at your company having their own email, why not just have a shared group email. I.e. instead of having bwayne@example.com and ckent@example.com, you would just have hello@example.com.

To me this makes sense for any business that deals with consumers. Why make your customers know multiple emails at your company. If a customer wants to get ahold of you they should only need to contact one address and the message will get dealt with internally to get to the right person.

This also benefits the company because you will have a shared history of contact with this customer. It doesn’t matter who in the company responds to the customer, it’s just a response from the company. In the future anyone in the company should be able to pick up the conversation and see the entire history of the relationship.

I’ve begun testing this in some of my own businesses. Without personal email, much of the internal communication system changes. Instead of sending an email and cc’ing everyone, employees can post a group message in Basecamp or Slack.

It’s not without its problems though. User accounts for employees can be an issue sometimes. Email has become pretty universal when setting up any online service. So, if you do use a cloud system to manage your shared email (Zendesk, Helpscout, etc.). You’ll still need some kind of employee email to set up their accounts on the service.

Are there any other business owners out there doing away with individual emails and moving to a shared inbox?