The shared inboxes seem like a low cost alternative to help desk/support software and would be likely outgrown quickly by an organization with the budget for premium email.
Can anyone discuss their usage of it?
For this use-case Front has been really awesome. Each side project has a different domain and each project has several role-based emails (one for clients -> support@domain and one for content stuff team@domain). Plus Facebook and Twitter.
Email arrives at the person who sent the first email, and I can easily assign emails written to me to a team member. The internal chat functionality is clear (in Zendesk the UI was a bit confusing so sometimes we inadvertently wrote the internal message to the client - nothing bad, but still unprofessional).
I tried Freshdesk, Zendesk, Intercom and some others, but always had some trouble with one of the requirements. E.g. can't use different outgoing signatures. Or a second domain requires a second account or the Enterprise upgrade (for 20 emails a day?), or there were so many different filters and views that I got confused.
Probably for enterprise level you might need something else and you need all the rules and automation stuff, but for my use case it's been great. It's not the cheapest, but it's worth it, because we've been able to answer to support inquiries faster and I have less work to do.
I have been the most impressed with their response to feature suggestions. I raised a few points for improvment using the general help chat in the interface and to my surprise saw my suggestions released as a feature a few weeks later. Granted, they were minor interface items, but the fact someone actually took the time to consider it and slot it in for dev time means something to me, being on the other side of that usually.