Adding a part-time person to the inbox - how do you stop two people answering the same ticket?

Gmail with two humans in it will produce a collision in the first fortnight, and it will be on the ticket where the answers differ. Ask me how I know.

What we did before day one, in order of how much it mattered:

1. Assignment. Every conversation has exactly one owner, visible to both of us, and nobody replies to something they do not own.
2. Twenty saved replies for the common questions, written by me, so the voice starts consistent rather than converging over months.
3. A short page of things we never say. Not tone guidance, actual sentences: never promise a date for a feature, never say it should work, never blame the customer's setup without checking.

The timezone gap is a gift, not a problem. They clear the overnight queue before you wake, you handle your own day.

Numbers from our first month with two people in Gmail: three double replies in week one, two in week two, one in week three, and the customer noticed on all six. After switching to something with assignment and a visible someone is typing indicator, zero in the following six months. That is not an argument that the tool is magic, it is that Gmail has no concept of ownership and you are asking two people to maintain one in their heads.

One person owns a ticket end to end, including the follow up. Handoffs mid-conversation are where customers get told two different things and lose confidence in both of you.

Mild disagreement with buying a tool at 30 tickets a week. Two people and a clear boundary works fine and costs nothing: they own everything that arrives between midnight and 8am your time, you own the rest, and whoever touches a ticket first stars it. We ran that arrangement for over a year with no collisions worth mentioning.

What forced the move to a real tool was not volume, it was the third person and wanting reporting. If your helper is ten hours a week, a rule and a shared label will do until it does not.

Review their first fifty replies before they go out, then their first fifty after that as a sample, then stop. Editing every reply forever is how you end up doing the job twice and resenting the hire. The point of the first fifty is to build the saved replies and the never say list from real cases, not to police them.

The mistake I made was giving the helper my login instead of their own seat. No audit trail, replies that came from me, and when we parted ways I had to rotate everything and could not tell which of the last two hundred replies were mine. Give them their own account with their own name on the replies from day one, even if it costs an extra seat fee.