Hi,
We are evaluating Zoho CRM and email integration is very important for us.
I have tried the IMAP integration to Zoho CRM and would like to know if the system could be configured in such way that when an email is received to our inbox on the imap server (gmail), it stays visible in Zoho CRM contact even when the particular email gets moved to a predefined imap folder on the server.
Now, when the original email gets moved to an imap folder on the server, the email disappers in Zoho CRM view.
The use case:
We have an inbox email for all inbound emails.
When a customer email request is received, our sales people check the CRM for context and amend the communication in CRM (contact/opportunity), reply to the client and move the original mail from inbox to the imap folder named "/done" .
This way we can easily practice ZERO INBOX policy and where there is a forgotten email in inbox, we see it and process it. Like with a service-desk.
All our sales people reply with the
info@company.com return address and a name (Joe Doe <
info@comapny.com>) and we are happy with the email communication being public in our team.
Without email integration with Zoho CRM we have to manually enter each piece of email received/sent to Zoho CRM, which is time consuming and obviously people forget to do that and we are loosing context.
After testing the imap integration feature of Zoho CRM I've realized that it works well, but to keep the ZERO INBOX policy we face a problem, when an email gets moved to the /done folder at which point the email record now sadly disappears in Zoho CRM.
POP access isn't an option for us, because a) when processed messages are left on the popserver without deletion, we can't practice ZERO INBOX policy and can't easily tell if a given email was processed or not. b) if we set delete on server upon processing we can get into serious problems, because it could get lost as well.
Desired behavior:
We prefer to let our sales people work with the mail client on inbox (not from the Zoho CRM integrated mail client which doesn't fit our needs).
We want to have received and sent email in inbox to be visible from within Zoho CRM contact/opportunity view to keep all communication context in the CRM.
We want to be able to move the processed email in imap inbox to a defined imap folder "/done" without loosing the record in Zoho CRM.
This way we would have the best of the two worlds - our sales people would be using email and all this communication will be automatically visible under appropriate contact/opportunity in Zoho CRM. All emails will be either in inbox (the new ones) or in /done folder on imap and in Zoho CRM.
Please could you help how to achieve this scenario?
I see a solution in allowing company specific imap folders to be set in the Zoho CRM imap integration. This way ZohoCRM always shows the emails even when moved between set folders on the imap server.
Thank you,
Petr