Route mail to a person, not a folder

Filing is not routing. A message correctly labelled and left in a shared inbox has not moved any closer to being handled; it has just become tidier while it waits.

Routing means a named person knows it is theirs, somewhere they will see it.

Write down who owns what

This is the part that does not exist in most companies, which is why the shared inbox exists in the first place.

For each recognisable kind of message, name the owner and the channel. Billing questions to whoever does billing, in the finance channel. Anything from a named account to the person who owns that account.

Where you cannot name an owner, that is worth discovering now rather than during an escalation.

Hand off in the channel, not the inbox

Every 30 minutes, check new mail against our routing rules document.

For each message with a clear owner:
  label the thread in Gmail with the owner's label
  post it to their Slack channel: who it is from, what they want, how
    urgent it looks, and a link to the thread

Post once per thread. If a thread is already routed, do not post again when
a new message arrives on it unless the owner has changed.

If no rule matches, label it AI/Unrouted and leave it. Do not guess an
owner.

"Post once per thread" is the line that keeps this from being hated. A chatty customer on a live thread will generate eleven Slack messages otherwise, and the channel that was meant to route work becomes a channel people mute. One handoff, then silence.

The unrouted pile is the actual output

Whatever falls through is the honest map of what your business receives and has not decided who owns. In most teams it is two or three recurring categories, and each one has been quietly costing an argument every time it arrives.

Add rules for them. The pile should shrink and then hold steady at genuinely novel things.

Do not let it answer

Routing and answering are different jobs with different risks. Keep this one to labelling and handing off; if you want replies drafted, that is a separate employee with a separate brief.

What good looks like

A message reaches its owner within half an hour, in the place they work, with enough context that they do not have to open the inbox to decide whether it is theirs.

The measure is how much smaller the unrouted pile gets in the first month.