What Is Unified Intake? (And Why It’s Replacing Shared Inboxes)

Shared inboxes and scattered forms feel familiar, but they aren’t a system. Unified intake replaces them with one endpoint and one decision engine that scores and routes every request before it becomes work.

What unified intake means

• One endpoint: every source posts to the same Intake API.
• One decision engine: AI scores intent, priority, risk, and ownership.
• Many sources: email, forms, CRM, chat, compliance reports, internal tools.

Why shared inboxes break

• Rules live in people’s heads, not code.
• Manual triage creates delays and inconsistency.
• Context is lost between channels; duplicates spread across tools.

What changes with unified intake

• Email, forms, CRM events, chat handoffs, and compliance reports flow through the same AI decision layer.
• Every payload is normalized (subject, body, source, account tier, attachments), deduped, and scored.
• Tickets are created only when action is required, with owner, SLA, and audit trail.
• FYI/feedback is stored as signal, not work, so queues stay clean.

Implementation essentials

• Single /api/v1/intake with HMAC auth and timestamp to prevent replay.
• Classification: intent, priority, sentiment, VIP/account tier, action_required.
• Routing: queues/owners by intent + priority; escalation for VIP/outage/security.
• Guardrails: dedupe open work, enforce allowed IPs, expire tokens, log every decision.

Outcomes

• Faster first response and cleaner queues.
• Lower cognitive load for engineers and ops.
• Better auditability for compliance and postmortems.

We built a unified intake brain so every request—email, form, CRM, chat, or compliance—gets the same smart triage. See how the Intake API works.