Why your company should have a single email address
blog.asmartbear.com
blog.asmartbear.com
All incoming and outgoing email should be stored in a way that anyone can easily see the conversation history (and people should be checking it before they respond). As I see it, that's the problem the post is actually describing. Having one email address is a method of trying to achieve this but IMHO it's not how it should be done.
The problem with CRM systems as I see them is that most of them require users to click away from the email to read the full conversation history. Even worse than that, employees usually have to manually add a conversation to the CRM to begin with.
A better solution might be to automatically save incoming email to the company CRM and also append outgoing messages to the appropriate contact. That way, no-one has to remember to add records. The next step would be to expose that information directly in the email client so employees don't have to go hunting for info (if they can even be bothered).
I don't think most customers actually care where their reply comes from (e.g info@, sales@, bob@...) as long as they get a response and their issue is resolved.
Edit: I agree with the post that customers should not have to figure out which address to use from the website. Just give them one
The problem here is that these are fragmented systems, each trying to solve specific needs for the company (tracking sales/prospects, tracking support queries) rather than looking at the customer's perspective.
> A better solution might be to automatically save incoming email to the company CRM and also append outgoing messages to the appropriate contact. That way, no-one has to remember to add records. The next step would be to expose that information directly in the email client so employees don't have to go hunting for info (if they can even be bothered).
We've been working on http://noosbox.com/ to solve exactly this problem. It integrates directly into GMail (on Google Apps) or outlook to allow you to save conversations against a specific contact.
It's not hard for a Sales team to circulate a regularly- updated list of current prospects and their pipeline stage, or to have this as an Intranet page etc.
I agree that the issue is one of internal process and lack of proper systems, and I don't see why you exclude email address design and structure from those categories.
Of course one email could become a bottleneck if triage falls behind, but mapping information flow does become easier.
WTF?
I actually set up multiple email addresses for support in this way on purpose, based on platform. I find I'm far more efficient if platform 1 goes into folder 1 and platform 2 goes into folder 2. No need to make giant cognitive leaps in jumping from one message to another, and you can sit down and respond to everything all at once, not interrupting your flow...you're more productive, less overwhelmed, and contacts get their answers faster (and their emails don't get buried in your overwhelmed primary inbox).
If you are a consumer Internet startup and have a single downtime, you will completely understand where I'm coming from here...
That sounds much more reasonable, not to mention that you won't use your email address as the single contact, rather you will set up a different one that will act as a dispatch.
- productA-support (which is really just "support@")
- productb-support
- info/hosting/privacy/twitter/etc (not all aliases are publicized, but tend to match what people would make up when attempting to send email to us)
The support aliases forward to me and to a dedicated support account. I always use the "Send As" feature so that nothing has my name on it unless you're nosy & look at the headers.
The info and other aliases go to both myself and to my partner. We both want to catch biz dev inquiries and any special snowflake requests, but I handle all support to ensure morale stays high.
If we add staff, we can add them to the groups pretty easily. Though at some point thereafter, we'd likely need some solution for determining what's been handled. It's a little hokey, maybe, but cost-to-benefit works well right now.
A decade later, I'm now just using hello@ for everything even though my business has grown a lot since then.
It's much easier to funnel all incoming emails through a single point of contact than juggle a bunch of aliases.
Our replies come from the same hello@ address even though the actual person replying varies. Each email has a code to group threads together.
Only when email goes personal does it get pushed to a specific person's mail account. The vast majority of our emails are centralized. It's great.
But I see them all over the place, and they take some work to implement whereas posting your e-mail address doesn't. Is there some argument to be made in favor of these which escapes me?
Note: I'm not endorsing this thought; I'm just trying to get inside the heads of the people who make these awful things.
EDIT: Another possibility is that they want a way to easily tell how to route a communication from a customer. And web forms can contain those menus that tell the reason for the communication. (Tragically, those menus rarely work for me; my reason is not usually not on the list.)
thebuckstopshere@mycompany.com
I will then use a service like Amazon Mechanical Turk like to distribute the emails to proper internal addresses.
Having one email address just changes the problem. Now instead of having no context for the conversation you have a jumbled email chain that you're having to centrally monitor, distribute, pass around to other people... if anything it seems vastly inferior than having a new email to billing@company.com causing that customers email history and a notification from being sent to the billing support supervisor.
Jesus guys, I was on the mobile site and ellipses are faster when I'm already feeling limited by my thumb's tapping ability to have to go hunt for the comma. I didn't realize it was such an issue that it spawned 6 comments about my style and zero comments about the content of my post or the article.
I mean, do I explicitly need to write: "I'm so sorry, I know I should have used commas but I didn't and it wasn't easy for me to proof-read on my device"? Good lord, even the original post is being crucified without response.
The grandparent could have simply downvoted the distractingly punctuated comment (as a few people have downvoted your namecalling), but he chose to help the user out instead by pointing out what he'd done wrong.
The parent's comment seemed well written overall and I wasn't personally put off by their use of ellipses.
However, I do think that the one email address is a better solution IF there is routing logic on the company end that gets the right emails to the right people and allows individual employees to have individual email conversations with customers from their single work account. I'm not imagining a shared company Gmail account -- I'm imagining a conversation between Victoria and Victor all intermediated through contact@example.com.