Calculator
What does your shared inbox cost?
Every mail in a shared mailbox has to be read, matched to a file and passed to the right person. Enter your own numbers and see how many hours that takes each week.
How the number is built
Follow-ups per week are your mails per working day, times five, times the share that belongs to a file that is already open. Their hours are those follow-ups times the minutes each one takes to place. Creating files by hand adds the new claims per week times the minutes it takes to set up one file.
Hours per person spread the total over the people who work the mailbox. One full-time person counts as the number of working hours per week shown under the results. The defaults are an illustration, so change every number to match your own mailbox.
Nothing is stored while you use the calculator.
Where the defaults come from
The sliders start at values we hear in conversations with insurers and brokers. Every figure below is anonymized and rounded. They show what is typical, so replace them with your own numbers.
Mails per working day: 40 to 200
Claims desks at small and mid-sized brokers and insurers tell us they get 40 to 50 mails a day in the shared mailbox. A five-person office counted about 50 the day before we spoke, and a larger team puts it at around 200. Most of those mails are not new requests. One broker counted 40 to 50 mails a day, of which about 10 were real requests. The default of 120 sits between the small teams and the larger ones.
Follow-ups on an existing file: well over half
Teams describe a file as a conversation. One insurer sees six to seven mail exchanges per file, and the broker above counted about 10 new requests in a mailbox that gets 40 to 50 mails a day. Both point to a share well over half for mails that belong to a file that already exists. We start at 50%, a round figure on the low side of what we hear. Count one day of mail to find your own share.
Minutes to place a follow-up: about 4
Nobody gave us a stopwatch figure, so 4 minutes is our estimate. The steps they describe are the same everywhere. Someone reads the mail, looks up the file by reference, licence plate or client name, finds out who handles it and forwards it with the reference added. One handler called this a big waste of time. In one shared mailbox we looked at, a single person forwarded about 160 mails a month this way.
New claims per week: about 10 to 135
A team of three at a small broker opens around 50 claims a month, so about 12 a week. Another team handles 1,200 files a year, about 23 a week, and a larger office with five or six people handles around 7,000 files a year, about 135 a week. The default of 30 sits between the small teams and the larger ones.
Minutes to create a file by hand: 10 to 20
Handlers tell us that opening a new claim from an incoming mail takes 10 to 20 minutes. They read the mail, save the attachments, look up the client, create the file and ask for what is missing. One customer put it at about 15 minutes, which is our default.
People who work the mailbox: 3 to 10
A small broker has three people on claims. Larger offices tell us that five to ten people work the shared mailbox, depending on the mailbox, and one claims mailbox has six or seven. The default is six. The number does not change the total hours. It spreads them, so you can see what the inbox asks of each person.
Every mail should land in the right file
Penbox reads each mail, finds the file it belongs to and gives it to the right handler, so nobody searches for the file by hand. Book a demo to see it on your own mailbox.