The shared inbox is where a supplier asks about a late payment, a prospect asks for a quotation, a job seeker sends a CV, a customer complains about a delivery and a bank sends a compliance notice — all in the same list, in Arabic and English, sorted only by time of arrival. Everyone with access assumes someone else has picked it up.
So the inbox gets handled by whoever happens to open it. Easy messages get answered twice. Awkward ones get read, marked unread again, and left. The sales enquiry that arrived on a Thursday evening sits under a pile of newsletters until someone scrolls down on Sunday, by which point the prospect has written to two other companies.
Web forms make it worse. They often go to a different address, or to a person who has since left, or into a CMS notification nobody checks. The business has no single picture of what came in this week, who it went to and whether anyone replied.
The cost isn't the time spent reading email. It's the lost enquiry, the supplier who escalates because nobody acknowledged them, and the manager who finds out about a problem from the customer's second, angrier message. The inbox has no owner, so neither do the things inside it.