Why

50–200 claims a month across a 2–3 person team is exactly the volume where a normal email client breaks: two people reply to the same claimant, threads get buried, and nobody can tell at a glance what's open vs waiting on the insured. Email-only and claims-shaped means your real job is shared ownership, status, and SLA — not lead scoring or deal forecasting. The right tool turns your shared mailbox into assignable cases with a status field. Currency assumed USD based on your IP in Cape Town — tell me if you bill in ZAR and I'll re-price.

What you actually need

1. HubSpot Free (Service Hub / Conversations Inbox, $0) — basic ticketing, shared inbox, and live chat are available without cost, tracking incoming requests in a shared inbox that keeps your team organized. The Free plan is available for up to 2 users and includes shared inbox with team email, a basic ticketing system, contact management, and one deal pipeline. For a third seat, Service Hub Starter is $9 per seat per month at a promotional rate, normally $15 per seat per month, billed annually — check current pricing.
2. Hiver Free or Lite (~$19–$25/user/mo annually — check pricing) — if you live in Gmail/Outlook and don't want to leave your inbox. It turns any Gmail or Outlook address into a shared inbox where the whole team sees all emails, lets you assign emails to colleagues with one click, and warns you if two people reply to the same email at the same time. Paid plans require a minimum of 2 seats.
3. A status habit — every claim email gets exactly one of four labels by end of day: New / Awaiting claimant / Awaiting insurer / Closed. The tool only works if the labels are honest.

Do this today

Pick one — HubSpot or Hiver — sign up, connect your claims@ alias, and assign the last 20 emails between the 2–3 of you with an owner and a status. 30 minutes, one person.

What to ignore

Skip Salesforce, Pipedrive, and HubSpot Sales Hub — Sales Hub Professional starts at $500/month for 5 users, built around deal stages and forecasting you don't have. Ignore Zoho Bigin and Capsule too: pipeline CRMs assume each contact is a prospect moving toward a sale, not a claimant cycling through documents and approvals.

What doing nothing costs you

Duplicated replies, claimants chasing you for status, and one missed email per week turning into a complaint — at 50–200 claims/month with 2–3 people sharing an inbox, the math gets ugly fast even if the per-claim hit is small.

Where this leaves you

You get: (1) one place every claim email lives with an owner, (2) a status field so anyone can answer "where are we on claim X?" in five seconds, and (3) basic response-time visibility so you can defend your SLA. The contrarian beat: the salespeople calling this a "CRM problem" are wrong — it's a shared inbox problem, and the free tier solves it.

When to revisit this

When you cross ~300 claims/month or hire a fourth person — that's when free-tier seat caps and the lack of real SLA automation start hurting.