Get started with Loop in 10 minutes

This guide will show you how to invest just 10 minutes today to set up Loop and create a system that will save your team time, stop messages getting missed and give everyone clarity into who’s handling what. 

Loop is an all-in-one team inbox. Whether it’s messages from customers, partners or your internal team, Loop simplifies and organises all your incoming work communication into one inbox and gives you and your team back order, control and focus. 

We’ve onboarded thousands of teams like yours, so here’s what we’d recommend you test during your free trial to find out if Loop could be the right tool for your team: 

1. Orient yourself in Loop and try out the core features
2. Invite 1-2 people to help you test out Loop
3. Connect a shared inbox to start taming the chaos
4. Organise emails in your shared inbox
5. Make your job easier with automated Rules & SLAs 
6. Get your whole team onboarded
7. Test everything fully for the duration of your 14-day trial

Step 1: Orient yourself in Loop and try the core features

Loop has been designed with the familiarity of an email inbox, so you and your team will feel right at home. Here’s the basic structure you’ll always see: 

Within Loop you can ensure that everyone in the team has oversight of what is going on and who is working on each item. Assigning emails helps to manage workload, prevent overwhelm and provide clarity and ownership for all team members. When tasks have been completed they can be resolved. Both actions are visible to all members of a shared inbox or team. 

Go ahead and try assigning an email to yourself in your personal inbox, reply to it and then mark it as resolved.

Step 2: Invite 1-2 people to help you test out Loop

Loop is optimised to be a team inbox, and therefore it works best in a team. The quickest way to truly play around with all the functionality is to get 1 - 2 of your team members to join you and help you experience the power of the delegation.

The best people to invite tend to be:

• Your ‘right hand (wo)man’ - someone you work closely with who you can get on board to test this with you 
• Another stakeholder - anyone who will need to sign off on implementing a new tool for your team
• Someone who has a knack for setting up systems and automated workflows

Easily invite people using the ‘Invite People’ link at the bottom of the sidebar.

Step 3. Connect a shared inbox to start taming the chaos

Shared inboxes are great for any public facing email address such as info@, support@ or finance@yourcompany.com.  You can have multiple people all access the same inbox but without the confusion you’ve previously experienced with your email client.

With Loop you avoid...

1. the uncertainty and overwhelm of being unsure who is working on each email. Have more visibility and accountability by assigning emails to individuals. 
2. getting caught up in confusing trails of forwarded messages when trying to ask other team members for help. You can easily have internal conversations about an email with anyone from your team without it getting caught up amongst any external messages to your customer. 
3. having to switch between multiple tools. Your emails, chat messages, calendar and shared files can all be accessed from the same place - Loop! 
4. multiple people logging into the same email account to access messages. Once someone has been added to a shared inbox it will be easily accessible to them from their own Loop account.

Watch our 2 minute video to see how to connect a shared inbox 

We want to assure you that when you connect your shared inboxes that your emails will remain in your email client as expected. Any incoming or outgoing messages will still appear in your inbox/outbox. If you move items to an archive or delete folder in Loop, then they will also appear in the corresponding place in your email client. 

Step 4. Organise emails in your shared inbox

You can use shared inboxes in many ways. 

Some examples are as:

• a help-desk for Customer Support Teams to manage customer queries.
• a place for Sales Teams to manage new prospect enquiries. 
• an inbox for general enquiries which can be picked up by multiple people working on different shifts throughout the day and across different time zones. 

We know that when multiple people are all working out of the same inbox it can become very confusing and messy. Loop’s shared inboxes stop this from happening.

The Loop trial gives you access to full functionality so you can see exactly what you’d get on our top plan. We want you to fully experience Loop and get a real feel for it.

You can easily:

• keep the team on top of tasks by assigning emails to each member.  You can do this manually or by setting up a rule. 
• see when tasks have been completed by making them as resolved. Be sure to encourage your team to do this so that everyone has an oversight of what has been finished. 
• ensure your inbox is kept tidy by creating a rule that archives emails once they have been replied to or marked as resolved. This will help to keep your team focused and see what needs to be actioned.
• save your team time by setting up canned responses for those common questions. You can save templated responses which everyone can access, edit and send in just a few clicks.
• stay focused by muting any channels you don’t need to receive regular updates from. You can still view all emails and chat messages but won’t be notified unless someone mentions you directly.
• set up shifts to ensure that messages are only assigned to individuals working during specific time periods or time zones. You can do this using rules.
• filter messages to see any emails that have been archived, deleted or assigned to a specific person. 

Step 5: Make your job easier with automated Rules & SLAs

Now that you have the basic structure in place for your shared inbox, it’s time to look at automating and optimising some of your core workflows so that Loop can work for you and your team in the background.

There are two quick things that you’ll want to do:

1. Check and edit the pre-set SLAs. These are internal nudges that can be sent automatically when...
1. a user fails to respond to an assigned task within X days
2. a user fails to resolve an assigned task within X hours
2. Create a few basic rules

Here are examples of some of the most popular ones:  

• assigning using a round-robin system to ensure work is delegated across the team
• assigning using workload management to make sure that no one has too much or too little on their plate
• assigning emails from VIP customers to specific team members, e.g. Team Lead or senior members of the team
• automating emails based on different shifts that your teams may work. To ensure that emails are not assigned to someone who is not working you can allocate emails based on the day and/or time.

Step 6: Get your whole team onboarded

Once you’ve had a go at figuring out some of your workflows:

• set up some more rules to get Loop ready to run as smoothly as possible for your team. 
• see Loop shine by getting your whole team onboarded and using the app.
• try adding some Teams for specific groups of people, current projects or simply for being sociable. 

Whilst you and your team become familiar with Loop don’t forget that we are here to help you along the way. 

Feel free to:  

• book a demo with us
• chat directly to one of our team via Loopbot (who you’ll find under People in the sidebar)
• use our Help Centre to access self-service guides and videos or 
• reach out to us via email at support@intheloop.io

Step 7: Test everything fully for the duration of your 14-day trial

To get the most from Loop we recommend that you truly immerse yourselves in it for the duration of the 14-day trial.

Be sure to:

• answer your customer emails from Loop
• set up a shared inbox 
• set up a team
• invite 1-2 team members to join you to see how the shared inbox and team could work for you
• assign and resolve messages
• test out canned responses
• experiment with different rules

So now go ahead, open your Loop app, and spend 10 minutes getting your workspace set up. And happy looping!