Musing multiple mails…

I have spent the last few weeks of searching. Not in a spiritual sense, but soul-searching and seeking enlightenment nevertheless.

My grail? A solution to my customer relationship and e-mail management woes.

Now if I had said CRM, or group e-mail as a single entity, my search would have been pretty simple. But note, I have both of them in the same line, and that makes things slightly more complicated.

Essentially what I wanted to be able to do, is to have one place (in the cloud) where we could track conversations with customers, by phone and by mail, as well as keep their updated contact records. Not just have these two systems working in tandem, nor via a one-way plug-in, but a very holistic approach to group e-mail, company wide contact management, and instantaneous tasking.

It’s somewhat of a side note, but in an analogue analogy, we could imagine how an office operated in 1970… When the mail arrived, it was the receptionist who opened each letter. If the telephone rang, whoever was nearest would pick it up, deal with the initial part of the conversation, then ask a colleague to walk over and take the handset. If a fax arrived (did faxes exist in 1970?) then someone would pick it up, read it to decide what it was, and hand it to the relevant person.

I wonder if “the problem” is that today’s office environment, is almost the exact opposite?

Our e-mails are now private, seen only on our computer screen. phone calls are auto forwarded to that person’s extension, even if they are not there. We each keep various bits of the customers contact details on our computers, and we no longer have a filing cabinet in the middle of the office…

So where am I going with this…? essentially it’s just chit chat, but I really to feel that there is a groundswell of businesses that are well aware of the cracks in their “system”, but are not yet sure of the solution.

Equally, I know that there are an increasing number of companies like ours, and even though I’m probably looking at some functionalities that may only be used by 5% of customers, it’s not because I’m especially clever, or my company is superior to yours… (simply put, we have some added complexity that we need to deal with offices looking after different countries, agents looking at specific regions, wholesale or retail customers… is a list gets pretty confusing pretty quickly..)

But I do feel that those 5% are out there, and at current there is (almost) nothing available that really services their needs. It is quite possible that they themselves don’t yet know they have needs that need to be serviced….