Fully Featured Communication Center
M
Mark Balsam
The ability to send and receive (sort of) emails through a connected google workspace or outlook account in the communication center was a tremendous step forward.
My suggestion/request is to now make the communications center a fully featured email inbox.
- Emails sent through automations should behave the same way as emails sent manually in the communications center. Currently you can only get automated emails to display in the comments section, not the email section. By contrast, with the manual email functionality, not only do the emails log to the email section of the com center in the record, but the recipients response also logs to that record. Not the case with automated emails currently.
- Would be great to be able to receive NEW emails into the communications center or a central communications recent (think the MY task section) and then apply it either manually or through automation to the correct records where it would log as an email in the communications center. Some of this can be done via the automation features, but not all of it. I also worry about automations being eaten up by incoming emails.
- Would be great to be able to send emails from a central comms center (again, the My tasks section is pretty close) and associate the email to the desired record as part of the process of composing and sending the email.
Jon Darbyshire
Hey Mark Balsam, thanks for your feedback! I have a few more questions for you:
- Can you provide more details on how you envision the process of associating an email to a desired record while composing and sending the email?
- Could you elaborate on the limitations you're experiencing with the current automation features in handling incoming emails?
- What specific features would you like to see in the 'fully featured email inbox' that are not currently present in the communications center?
M
Mark Balsam
Jon Darbyshire if I want to manually send an email to a contact, I have to jump to the relevant solution and record and email from there. I'm envisioning not doing away with this, but rather adding another method which is centralized inbox/outbox (just like any email system) which would in some way allow you to pick the solution and record from the email compose interface and proceed that way. It would be really cool if you could pick multiple solutions and records to associate one email with. In other words I might want to associate it to a project record and to the contact record associated with that project. I think it would also be great if you could assign inbound emails to a record (records) manually in addition to through automation.
As far as the automations, right now when you send an email OR receive an email via automation, you have the ability to associate that email with a record but only as a comment and not as an email. The result is that if a client emails me for example, their email is logged as a comment and I cannot as such reply to the thread through smartsuite. Similarly if a client responds to an email that I sent through automation, the best you can do is append their response as a comment and not an email. This makes it hard to have an ongoing email thread with the client.