In March we released 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.
The 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.
Building to help everyone get the most out of Inbox
To target such a diverse set of users and use cases, we came up with a 2 prong approach:
For the frequently used tools and use cases we created wizard like integrations - these are available on our integrations page, out of the box.
Make custom integrations easier and more effective via Flows custom connections.
Out of the box Inbox integrations
Based on common customer use cases we created a set of out of the box, easy to configure Inbox integrations that give Inbox users power to take action across all of the tools they use for customer interactions.
Ecommerce Platform Integrations — 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 Calendar: 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
CRMs — 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
The capabilities of these integrations are constantly evolving and we’re constantly working to add support for new providers so keep an eye on our change logs page for updates.
Custom connections via Flows
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.
To enable this we build Inbox directly connected with our automation tool, FlowBuilder, which can connect to any 3rd party system that exposes an API via Http Get/Fetch steps.
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: Before an Inbox ticket is created or After a ticket is resolved.
Before the ticket is created
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.
After the ticket is resolved
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 APIs are involved - so here is an example of how to connect Inbox to Zendesk.
Conclusion
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.