In March we vrijgegeven Inbox, our free, omnichannel customer support tool for businesses of all sizes. Since then we’ve been continuously talking to users, adding new enhancements, and thinking about what business communication means in a world that became suddenly remote-first.

Through our user interviews, we learned that our customers interact with and keep track of their customers through a bunch of different tools: : e-commerce platforms,  CRMs, clever spreadsheets, internal fulfillment solutions, and more.

De diversity of tools and business flows we’re observing with our customers is astonishing.  We love seeing all of the unique ways our customers take advantage of Inbox and we want to keep supporting everyone as best as possible.

Bouwen om iedereen te helpen het meeste te halen uit Inbox

Om ons op zo'n uiteenlopende reeks gebruikers en gebruikssituaties te richten, hebben we een tweeledige aanpak bedacht:

1. For the frequently used tools and use cases we created wizard like integrations - these are available on our integratiepagina, out of the box.

2. Maak aangepaste integraties eenvoudiger en effectiever via Flow Builder aangepaste verbindingen.

Out of the box Inbox integraties

Op basis van veelvoorkomende klantgebruiksgevallen hebben we een reeks kant-en-klare, eenvoudig te configureren Inbox integraties gemaakt die Inbox gebruikers de kracht geven om actie te ondernemen in alle tools die ze gebruiken voor klantinteracties.

• Ecommerce Platform integraties - Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and Magento: Connect your online store to Inbox and empower  your support staff with relevant customer details and order information directly in Inbox 

• Google Agenda: connect your calendar to Inbox and quickly send meeting invites to customers directly in the chat window

• Google Sheets: connect Inbox to Google Sheets to save conversation messages directly in the sheet for further follow up or automation purposes

• CRM's - Hubspot and Pipedrive integrations: synchronize contact information from Hubspot and Pipedrive and display it directly in Inbox when interacting with the customer

• Slack: send Slack messages directly from Inbox as notifications to your team or triggers for further automated flows

De capabilities of these integrations are constantly evolving and we’re constantly working to add support for new providers so keep an eye on our wijzigingslogboeken page for updates.

Custom connections via Flow Builder 

While we build out of the box integrations for customers to get running as quickly as possible, we also want to support customers that need to build custom integrations and behaviors. 

Om dit mogelijk te maken bouwen we Inbox die direct verbonden is met onze automatiseringstool FlowBuilder, die verbinding kan maken met elk systeem van derden dat een API beschikbaar stelt via Http Get/Fetch stappen.

As long as the product you are integrating with exposes an API that allows for API key/username authentication, you can integrate it inside Inbox at 2 distinct points: Voordat een Inbox ticket wordt aangemaakt or Nadat een ticket is opgelost.

Voordat het ticket wordt aangemaakt

Integrating an API before an Inbox ticket is created allows you to pull data from a 3rd party system to  make it available to  the Inbox agent who receives the ticket

A simple example of this type of integration would be pulling data from your CRM system to ensure that the contact information for the customer is up to date before a new ticket is created for them.  Most of our customers are using Inbox to open up new channels of communication to their customers, so a CRM integration is useful to give an Inbox agent full customer details, even if it’s the first time a customer is reaching out on that channel. 

Nadat het ticket is opgelost

Integrating an API after a ticket is resolved allows you to take action based on the ticket that was just resolved. This can be syncing information to 3rd party systems about the particular resolution,  creating reminders/follow up tasks, adding notes about the conversation, and much more.

These types of integrations can quickly get rather complex, especially since API's are involved - so here is an example of how to connect Inbox to  Zendesk.

Conclusie

We’re really excited to continue helping our customers connect with their customers.  Knowing that Inbox is one of many tools that our customers use in those efforts we will continue to build features that make it easier to integrate Inbox with your existing tool set and take action across your business— all through one dashboard.