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It turns each request into a record with an owner, a state and an age. That is the entire difference from a mailbox, and it is a larger difference than it sounds.
Everything else — queues, SLAs, macros, reporting — is built on those three properties. Without them there is nothing to route, measure or escalate.
It has no owner, so everyone assumes somebody else replied. It has no age, so the request that has been waiting four days looks identical to the one that arrived this morning.
And it has no history: when somebody leaves, their folder structure and their knowledge of what was promised leave with them.
When requests are missed or answered twice. That is a shared-ownership failure, not a volume one.
Every request you are accountable for. If it needs an owner and a clock, it needs a ticket.
Usually the main one. The ticket is the record behind it, not a replacement for it.
Half an hour with your own data usually saves reading three of these. The guides will still be here afterwards.