Has email had its day? You certainly might hope so when you’re buried under a mountain of missives that show no sign of slowing down. In the spirit of openness and transparency, CC and BCC lines are often used to crazy extremes, with everything from the new lunch menu to the latest office appointments to that important new client contract all cascading down your screen at once.
Time for an email overhaul
While email shows no sign of dying just yet, the way we use it at work needs to radically change. It’s a useful tool for one-to-one communication, but not so great when it comes to working together as a team to serve customers. For example, a client that sends an email to a team inbox ends up being bombarded with multiple replies, because there is no visibility into what everyone is doing. Or worse, the email goes unanswered because it’s stuck in the inbox of someone who is on holiday.
The same goes for CRM. Think about how you feel at the end of a long conference, when you’re almost collapsing under the weight of inputting each of your very valuable contacts into your CRM system. By the time you’ve done this, the leads have gone from hot to stone cold.
“Like email, CRM systems are meant to improve transparency, enable better collaboration, and build and manage customer relationships but, used in the wrong way, they can end up having a negative effect,” says Geoff McQueen, CEO of AffinityLive. “Having to manually input information, and a lack of access to archived conversations are two major issues.”
Keep your email and CRM in sync
But there is a way to simplify the communication problems between employees and teams: integrate your CRM system with your email. This is just the problem that apps like AffinityLive Sync, which integrates with Gmail, Outlook, and Office 365, aim to solve.
Brendon O’Sullivan, CEO of online business solution developer Bosweb, explains that AffinifyLive Sync: “automatically tracks and exposes what emails were sent, to which client and how much time it takes to send an email. It has completely eliminated the administrative tasks surrounding email and helped us streamline our processes.”
“We love the way it collects all emails to and from clients, how easy it is to track time, and the visibility it gives us over our whole operation,” adds Trent Allan, Partner Services at Ziller, a specialist online marketing company.
Improve collaboration
Sync doesn’t just reduce the admin burden, it enables better collaboration between teams by tracking not just emails sent, but also attachments. It also allows you to filter emails according to whether they are open, closed, or waiting for a response. The system automatically adds new contact details if they come from the same domain as clients you have previously contacted.
“Working with clients is a team sport, but by default emails are isolated in individual inboxes,” says Geoff McQueen. “AffinityLive automatically brings client email conversations together in one place, getting your whole client service team on the same page. By automatically tracking client emails, important information for your team is available in a user-friendly stream – cutting down on CC hell and the misery of having to constantly copy and paste into CRM and project software.”
The social side of email
The record of these emails are organized in an easy to access way that will be familiar to anyone who has used popular social media sites. “AffinityLive gives users a Facebook-like stream of all of the client activities going on; now you don’t need to call a meeting to find out what’s going on with any client account,” says McQueen.
AffinityLive Sync comes with a host of other useful features, such as the ability to turn an email into a task, integration with Twitter that shows all the Tweets you’ve sent about a client, a Yammer widget that allows you to track activity related to your customer, and integration with Google Calendar and Microsoft Exchange/Outlook so when you schedule meetings in AffinityLive, they show up there as well.
“Email is the number one way to work with our clients – now we have a CRM that works the way we do,” adds Rebecca Angelos,vice president of Operations at HDMZ, a healthcare and life science marketing agency.
This post is brought to you in collaboration with professional service automation provider Affinity Live.
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