CRM - Capturing Email Communication
It looks like there's been discussion and ideas surrounding this, but thought it was worth sharing my opinion on the CRM email functionality...
I'm converting from Salesforce and feel that with a couple additions / enhancements, email handling within the CRM can be definitively superior to Salesforce. I believe one of the fundamental tenants or goals for any good CRM system is to be the single-source, system-of-record for all communication with customers and potential customers. Customers should expect that historical communication with the company is known, or at least readily available to the current rep serving them -- including email.
Here are the scenarios in which I think (unless I'm missing something) Zoho falls just short of the above goal:
1) I love the concept of the mail-addon. I don't have to worry about always attaching or bccing an email or thread to the crm - it just appears. However, it's a temporary association - following are the common problem scenarios I see:
a) Common to have part-time, temporary or transient support staff interacting with customers - when their employment expires, one has to keep their email account active to maintain communication history - not ideal. So maybe I create a generic service email, but that has its obvious drawbacks
b) Contact email changes - all history is lost
c) How to support company email address like support@blah.com, interest@blah.com, etc. - should be a way to pull these emails into the CRM even though they don't relate to a CRM user. Okay, could create a comparable CRM user, but now it's difficult to track who (in terms of an actual person) has communicated what.
2) Even in the absence of the auto-association tool like the mail-addon, there should be an easy way to permanently attach email to contacts or leads for users not using Outlook. We could always, by policy, send email to contacts/leads directly from the CRM tool, but that still leaves incoming customer email to deal with. I'd guess the best place to start is the Zoho mail client itself - an "attach email to contact/lead" button (like in the Outlook add-on). And a bcc functionality to attach emails from any email client. This extra effort is not ideal, but without the functionality described in #1, at least it's a way to get the job done.
3) Leads and contacts should be able to support multiple email address, with a single email designated as the "best". It's a very common scenario for people to be using different emails when communicating with a business and the business/CRM shouldn't have to maintain separate contact records to capture this communication
That's my 2 cents - would be interested in how others deal with these issues and the Zoho development plans related to these issues.