It’s Monday morning (or for that matter, any day of the week) and you’ve opened up your escape room’s inbox. If you’re like most, you can expect the usual mix of booking enquiries, questions about the rooms, a player or two asking if they left an item there last weekend, and a corporate booking looking for space for 50 next month.

For escape room owners, email management isn’t just about keeping a tidy inbox. It’s one of the main lines of communication with your players, from making sure every potential booking converts into an excited team, that every inquiry gets a prompt response, and that no important emails fall through the cracks. So how do the successful escape rooms keep up?

We spoke to a number of different escape room owners around the world to find out exactly how they tackle this challenge. From clever automation tricks to smart delegation systems, here’s what we learned…

The most common types of emails

The responses were fairly similar when asked what types of emails escape rooms receive, meaning most escape room owners face similar challenges day to day. Many daily emails are a mix of:

• Booking inquiries and availability checks
• Corporate event requests
• Questions about accessibility and age restrictions
• Lost property queries
• Post-game feedback and reviews
• Cancellation and rebooking requests
• Technical support for online booking

Common escape room email management strategies

Shared Inbox Approach

Many escape rooms start with a shared inbox that all customer inquiries feed into. This is then handled day to day by the team member who is on reception. The most common platforms for this are Gmail, Outlook and Apple Mail, and seems to work best for businesses who get a low level of enquiries a day.

Single User Approach

Another response we saw commonly was that emails were handled entirely by one member of staff. Often, but not always this would be a manager or director. But depending on the size and scale of the business, this could be one dedicated person. One escape room business explained,

“We've always had a full-time employee coverage for managing the contact phone and contact email. Roommasters had shifts on these, recently we picked one to have a full-time job as a Front Office Coordinator, who handles all the customer emails and calls.”

The Assignment System

Another approach is to use tags or a folder system to assign emails to specific team members. This includes breaking down emails into folders like:

• Customer Service (In Progress)
• Customer Service (Actioned)
• Booking Confirmations
• Charity Enquiries
• And so on…

This is done in equal parts within in-build email clients like Gmail, or by using an out of the box ticketing system such as Zendesk, or Freshdesk.

Tips for email efficiency

After speaking to a number of escape rooms, we noticed a few tips and tricks that some of the most successful business owners were implementing, and wanted to share them here.

Email Template Responses

Many escape rooms have a library of pre-written snippet responses for common questions. Often, these can be to direct players to your FAQs, or a simple walkthrough of the booking process. A few common ones look a little like this:

For age restrictions:

"Thanks for asking about age restrictions! Our [Room Name] is suitable for players aged 12 and up when accompanied by an adult. For younger players, we recommend our family-friendly [Room Name] which is perfect for ages 8+..."

For corporate bookings:

"Thank you for your interest in corporate team building! We can accommodate groups of up to [X] players across [Y] rooms. Our most popular corporate package includes..."

In email, these template responses are called “Templates” and can be set up by following this guide, or by heading to “Advanced Settings”, enabling Templates, and then saving any snippet of text from your emails to a new template to use at any time. In a similar way, Outlook’s Template feature does a similar thing, and “My Templates” is an additional app that can be easily added to any inbox by following this tutorial.

If in doubt about whether your inbox or ticketing tool has templates, check out their helpdesk and search “template” or “default response” to find out more.

Clear Response Time Goals

Some of the most successful and largest scale venues we chatted to have clear standards for email response times. Some common response times followed this pattern:

• Booking Inquiries: Within 2 hours during business hours
• Corporate Requests: Same business day
• General Questions: Within 24 hours
• Complaints: Priority response within 1 hour

But ultimately, it comes down to each individual business, and as many explained - all emails are urgent!

“One employee gets notified of emails on his phone, he will handle very urgent emails. But most emails we get are relatively urgent in the sense that our average booking is $250 and people have other options, so the quicker/better our response the better the chance is that we land that booking.”

Priority Flags

Many venues use a simple status system to flag important emails up the chain of command. This might look something like this:

🔴 Urgent - Needs immediate attention

🟡 In Progress - Someone is working on it

🟢 Resoved - Completed and ready to be archived

⚪ Follow Up - Check back in a few days

Gmail doesn’t have an in-built “priority flag”, but has several smart tools users can check out when flagging important emails, including sorting emails by priority and “urgent” markers. They explain all in this helpdesk article. Outlook’s system is a little more robust for priority flags, with multiple levels of “Importance” that can be toggled on per email, as they explain here.

How does Buzzshot handle incoming email?

Whilst we at Buzzshot are not an escape room company, as an all-in-one player management system, we do work very closely with a lot of escape rooms. That means a lot of emails for us too!

At Buzzshot, we use a platform called Front to manage our incoming emails. To be sure, this article isn’t sponsored or paid by Front, we’re just happy customers sharing how it works for us.

Front transforms the inbox into a customer communication platform where different members of our team can assign emails to each other, share notes internally, and use shared templates to maintain a consistent voice. Plus we can turn emails into trackable tasks and set up automatic rules. One of the coolest features is that we can see each other replying to emails in real time - super helpful for a distributed and remote team, and we can see how a feature like this would work well for an escape room at scale.

On the other hand, if you’re interested in looking at solutions for how to automate and send emails, we have an in-build email broadcast system that’s available for free for all Buzzshot customers. You can read all about this feature and how to use it in this blog post.

Thanks to everyone who helped us by chatting to us about their email systems, and thanks so much for reading!