Front Office Box

“What’s That” you may say. “The business world goes around on email”. And of course it does, but that makes it technology which displaces paper (until somebody prints it) and paper certainly isn’t a business system – just a technology.

The reason I bring this up is so many people mistake a technology with the way they use it. Using it for business doesn’t make it a business system.

We’ve been struggling with integrating email with our business system for a couple of years now. Email and Front Office Box combined enable an extremely useful workflow but any attempt to properly integrate them comes up against real problems. Understanding this is easier when we look at how it gets used.

In our process at least we forward emails to our xxxxxxxx@frontofficebox.com address and they show up in our dashboard – requiring some kind of action. We’ve sent it there because a) we need to keep a copy where we can find it or b) we need to do something, driven by it. We cc’d, bcc’d, forwarded or sent the item. Each of those can make a big difference in what shows up in the To, From, and About fields. The very flexibility of email makes it impossible to sensibly hook it up to a system which by it’s nature has to be structured.

Then we have the problem of the “Reply”. The email might be leading a trail of a dozen or more related items.

Contacts from the email system are every bit as difficult to integrate. The technology isn’t a problem – .csv is easy, cheap and well proven. The problem is the data.

I’ll ‘fess up first. My contacts file is a mess. Some people have first and last names, some only have first. Some have companies and some don’t. One contact may have ABC Inc as the company while another has ABC. Some have several phone numbers and some have none. There’s a bunch of contacts who have no relevance to my business, and some are out of date. Is yours any better?

Reading that little lot into a business application which stores companies, people, plans, schedules, correspondence and documents in comprehensive profiles is impossible – a perfect example of garbage in, garbage out. But the challenges here pale into insignificance when we try to do it for teams of people. Everybody in the team will follow their own conventions, which they’ll ignore in their own ways.

After years of real use experience, and having gone around the “how can we handle that” loop far too many times, we’ve decided it can’t sensibly be done. This is how we’ll do it.

Users will send emails to their dashboard where they’ll have tools to create plans and acttions, assign the file to companies and people, edit To, From and About fields and even delete the incoming as appropriate.

And we’ll continue our practice of providing import templates which users can populate with clean, complete data to upload to our Relationships records.

Email and business system integrated by people.

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October 6th, 2009 - Posted in CRM  |  Add a Comment