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How to Manage Emails?
Hi
Sorry if this is covered elsewhere - I have looked.
Assumption
Can I start with the assumption that all emails sent or received by a user are business related (and they should be in my view - if people want to send personal mails then they can hotmail).
I think these are the business requirements:
* All emails and attachments to and from a user should be captured *automatically* into the CRM so they become a true and complete record of interactions with a customer.
* The CRM should advise that an email has arrived and track that the user has responded to it. It should be easy to reply to emails.
* Ideally, email follow ups should be grouped with the original mail so the full story can be seen. The CRM should track that a group of emails as a whole are closed.
How to do this?
Option 1 - use SugarCRM only.
I can use blendo to import all emails and attachments and associate them with clients / accounts etc and the user. Unfortunately, there is no way of alerting the user to the email and there is no status against the email so this won't help me really manage emails.
If I add some code to blendo to create a case for each new email and assign the email to it, then the open case will prompt the user to do some work. Any replys can then be associated with this case. If I put the case ID into the subject of replys then I can also associate responses to replys with the original case by again altering blendo.
To reply, the user can select Compose Email from the case and this will relate the created email to the case. Unfortunatly the contact who originally sent the email has to be selected from this list again (all contacts are shown even though the email is associated with a particular case) and the history must be pasted in some how. I dont feel this is usable, so instead, I need to write a reply button from the email list on the case screen which will open up a new email and default the subject (with case ID), contact and message.
Option 2 - use Outlook.
The user receives and sends emails normally using outlook or whatever client.
The mailbox is configure to send a copy of all items to a SugarCRM inbox which is blendo'd into SugarCRM. This is easy for incomming (forwarding is a common option in many hosted email accounts) but harder to do with outgoing (any ideas on how to do this automatically?)
Blendo loads up the emails, using the subject text to group them. this will be tricky as the id won't be there but there is probably a fuzzy way to do this.
The user will then need to switch between outlook and SugarCRM to close the actual cases. I don't think this is very usable.
I think this option could be used to automatically store emails but it won't help 'manage' queries to completion.
Option 3 - use the Outlook add-in.
As emails must be selected by the user this is a backwards step from the previous option - it won't automatically capture emails. There is nothing in the tool to help 'manage' emails either.
Thanks for reading this far, here are my questions...
1) Is my business need really a CRM task - do I need to be looking at another service management / helpdesk tool?
2) Are there other options for automatically capturing and managing emails?
3) Does anyone use SugarCRM as the primary email tool? If so, how do people cope with no reply button?
4) Does anyone think Option 1 is realistic and would they be willing to collaborate?
Any other obserations would be welcome. This is my first implementation and I feel the email integration is the only big problem.
Thanks in advance
Patrick
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Re: How to Manage Emails?
Originally Posted by ftreml 
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