The inbox you already have
Microsoft 365 and Outlook shared mailboxes, Google Workspace groups and delegated inboxes. The CRM it updates is one of the systems on the integrations list: HubSpot, Salesforce and the rest, up to three in a First Agent.
Operations · AGT-13 Inbox Triage
Shared inbox automation, with a person still in charge.
The shared inbox is where a small business loses its mornings: sales@, info@, accounts@, the one everybody can see and nobody quite owns. Messages get answered twice, or late, or not at all, and the decision about who owns each one is made again every time it arrives.
Inbox Triage is the agent that reads that inbox first. It sorts, it drafts, it assigns, and it holds anything it is not sure about for a person. It does not send.
01 / The workflow
Receive, identify, assign, draft, approve, record.
Six steps. The agent takes the first four. A person keeps the fifth. Hardy writes the sixth down whether anybody asks or not.
01
Receive
Every message that lands in the shared inbox is read within a minute of arriving, including the ones that come in at ten past six on a Friday. Attachments are opened and read too.
02
Identify
What is this? A new enquiry, an existing customer, a supplier, an invoice query, a complaint, a job application, spam. The categories are yours, written down in the audit, not a generic list.
03
Assign
Ownership rules you set, applied the same way every time. Sales enquiries to whoever owns that territory. Invoice queries to accounts. A complaint to a named person, straight away, by name.
04
Draft
For the routine messages, a reply in your house voice, from your own approved answers, with the last thread and the account record already found and attached. Nothing is invented. Where the answer is not on file, the draft says so.
05
Approve
A person opens a queue, reads each draft, and sends it, changes it or bins it. That is the whole of their job here, and it is the part that stays theirs. Anything urgent or unusual has already been escalated to them by name.
06
Record
Hardy logs what arrived, what the agent decided, what the person did with it, and when. The CRM is updated from the same record. Nobody has to remember to log it, because logging is not optional.
02 / The boundaries
What it cannot do
Four things Inbox Triage will never do on its own authority.
- It does not send. Every outbound reply waits for a person. Not a sample of them, all of them, until you decide otherwise in writing, category by category.
- It does not delete. Spam is labelled and moved, never removed. A message it cannot classify is held, not dropped.
- It does not promise. A draft never quotes a price, a date or a commitment that is not already in your approved material. Where the answer is not on file, it says a person will come back to you.
- It does not reach beyond the inbox. It reads the mailbox, the CRM and the folders you name in the audit, with the same permissions your team already has. It cannot change who has access to anything.
Anything outside those rules waits for a named person.
03 / A test run, labelled as one
Test scenario, not a customer result
What one morning looks like, on a test inbox we built for the purpose.
We do not yet have a permissioned customer case to publish for this agent, so here is the next most honest thing: a test we ran ourselves, with the inputs stated, so you can judge the shape of the work. When a client agrees to be named, their measured result will replace this.
The test inbox, one weekday morning
Inputs: 38 messages, 6 categories, 3 owners, house voice from 40 past replies
- 06:00:00 Butler Read 38 messages received since 17:30 the day before Mailbox, read only. 4 attachments opened. Nothing sent.
- 06:00:41 Butler Classified 38: 11 new enquiries, 9 existing customers, 7 suppliers, 5 invoice queries, 1 complaint, 5 spam 2 marked uncertain and held. The 5 spam labelled and moved, not deleted.
- 06:01:02 Butler Assigned 31 by the ownership rules, drafted 24 replies Last thread and account record attached to each. 7 had no approved answer on file; those drafts say a person will reply.
- 06:01:05 Hardy Escalated the complaint to the named owner, by name Reason recorded: complaint category. Clock started.
- 08:12:30 A person Approved 21 drafts, amended 3, sent; took the 2 held messages Named in the ledger. The 3 amendments kept beside the originals, and the agent learns from them in the next tuning round.
A test inbox we assembled from anonymised message types, run on 4 September 2026. It shows the format and the division of labour. It is not a measurement of any customer's inbox, and the counts are not a forecast of yours.
Measured on, when it is live for you: time from a message arriving to a first reply, messages answered twice, and messages that reach the right person first time. The audit sets the baseline before anything is built, and the quarterly evidence reports against it whether it flatters us or not.
04 / Fit
Two things, both written down in the audit
The categories and ownership rules as you actually apply them, and a body of past replies the agent can learn your voice from. Forty is enough. A mailbox with no history is a harder start, and we will say so.
When we would advise against it
Under about twenty messages a day, a person is faster than an approval queue. Regulated correspondence where every reply needs a qualified sign-off is a different build with a different price. We will tell you either in the audit.
The audit first, then a fixed price
A £1,500 two-week audit, credited in full against the build. Inbox Triage is normally a First Agent at a fixed £6,500, live in three to four weeks, then from £450 a month to run and watch it, plus £40 to £200 a month paid directly to the providers. Not VAT registered, so no VAT is added. The full price list.
05 / Next step
Tell us about the inbox that never quite gets cleared.
Roughly how many messages a day, which mailbox it is, and who is supposed to own it. That is enough for a first conversation, and we will tell you whether Inbox Triage is the right first agent or whether another one is.