Are you an Outlook pro user? Great! But don’t rest on its laurels. Those who have used Outlook for years often neglect the new trends which might save their time and make the workflow smoother. And since we’ve got one that’s fresh and still warm, we want to tell you all about it. We sat down with Jan Lalinsky and discussed our new software version eWay-CRM 8.1. An update, which makes email management and sharing even more painless. Keep your inbox tidy thanks to our tips.
Both individuals and teams working with Microsoft 365 can look forward to the improvements in email sharing. Honza, could you tell us why automatic email saving and importing of older messages is so useful?
Our eWay-CRM team has always focused primarily on the integration with Outlook. The possibility to save and share emails inside a company is indeed a key feature. More and more people use web or mobile versions of Outlook nowadays. That’s why we incorporated the possibility of saving emails manually also in eWay-CRM Online. The good news is this feature works in all Outlook versions.
This feature is popular among users mainly because it allows them to have the saving under control. However, many companies look for ways to save emails into CRM automatically.
For example, they aim to save emails from their personal inboxes to the company ones. Just imagine that the sellers are often in the field. And can’t take care of everything from there. So, they need the help of the sales support team from the office.
Or it could be an inbox of this type: [email protected], where the inquiries are received as well, and it’s needed to process them as soon as possible.
eWay-CRM Online masters this perfectly. It can be connected to many different Microsoft 365 accounts and save emails automatically. No matter whether the inbox owner is online or offline.
A very interesting innovation in email management is the possibility of saving emails received from any contact. Not only from those who are already on the address list. Why did you decide to enhance this feature?
When developing eWay-CRM we always listen to the wishes of our customers first. And one of them was the possibility of saving emails from contacts which are not on the address list.
When do companies use this new feature the most?
Some of them receive tens or even hundreds of inquiries daily. However, only 1-2% of them are turned into deals. In such a situation a company does not create a contract for each of the inquiries received, so they’re not paired. What does that lead to? Companies miss most of the communication with their potential customers.
The second scenario happens to the clients who don’t use eWay as a CRM but rather as a simple helpdesk system. They need to take care of the company inbox and all the emails that come into this inbox. Then, they are forwarded to individuals.
In practice, they set an automatic tracking of the inbox of type: [email protected]. And all delivered emails are then automatically saved into eWay-CRM. Of course, a spam filter is activated, too.
People who are responsible for this inbox can then open the Emails module in eWay and dive into answering the messages, task creating, delegating, etc.
Automatic email saving is closely connected to ignored domains. Could you tell us more about this feature?
The feature “ignored domains” prevents emails from certain senders to be saved in eWay-CRM.
Companies can add to this list their own company domains or for example domains of the accounting firm they cooperate with. The ignored domain feature is useful because it assures you that no sensitive internal information will be saved in the CRM.
Let’s say you’ve got an urgent email from your client. You saved it into the system, but you must also forward it to your colleague ASAP. Thanks to the integration of eWay-CRM and Microsoft Teams it’s possible to send them a link to the email within seconds. Could you tell us why MS Teams is better for forwarding emails than Outlook?
I think all of us know this really well. When you open Outlook, it’s like a jump into deep waters. There are so many new emails one must go through.
When opening one by one I often find out that most of these are only forwarded messages from my colleagues. They either forwarded them or put me into CC. This is extremely time-consuming and even tiring for me - opening tens of emails every day and reading each of them with attention to find out whether I’m the one who should react to them or not (and often I'm not).
If you use eWay-CRM, you don’t have to bother about any of these. Emails are saved from Outlook directly to eWay. Then, they’re sorted according to the email address, contact, deal, or project. And when I want to send a certain email to my colleague, I don’t have to add another drop in the inbox sea. I can easily share it with them via MS Teams. You do it by clicking on “Share to Teams” in a preview bar that is above the open message. eWay will automatically create an email link in Teams which I send to my colleague.
I think this is a much easier and more effective way to communicate inside the company than to spam each other’s inboxes. Our clients also like this option of sharing emails. They’re happy they can keep their inboxes tidy thanks to eWay-CRM.
Now, we have no unread emails in our inbox, so let’s move to eWay-CRM Online where, for example Board view underwent some changes. Some users might be curious because they haven't tried it yet. Could you give us an example and explain when it’s better to work with Board view than with Grid?
Board view shows data differently than Grid. It shows them in columns. These differ according to the parameters we set.
If I want to look at deals for example, and see them according to their status, Board view shows me these nicely in columns.
It works similarly to the lists of grouped data. However, in Board view, the data are classified more neatly. The user sees individual items in a vertical lineup. And they can move with them easily with drag and drop. They can move them up and down to see the most important ones on top. Or from side to side to change their status.
Board view is popular and we can find it in many other tools. Such as Trello or Microsoft Planner. We introduced Board view in our older version, and we keep working on its improvements.
One of the innovations to the latest version of our system is the possibility to put custom boxes into labels. That allows us to decide whether we want to see in the deals label a notice or a custom field.
There is so much new in eWay-CRM Online. My attention caught, for example seemingly easy and attractive features such as showing a company on Google Maps. What can users look forward to in the version 8.1?
Many of our clients wished to see their companies on Google Maps. They also asked for graphic highlights of important dates. Therefore, we decided to highlight the missed deadlines with red. And those that are in the future with green.
We also added icons to the mobile numbers and email addresses. We designed them to be clearly perceived as actionable. If you click on them, you dial the number.
We paid attention to revision as well as to the unification of items in the context menu. We wanted the users to see on a right-click the same options in all; the list of deals, Kanban, and eWay-CRM Online home page. This update might not be that conspicuous, but I believe that the system became even more intuitive as well as user-friendly thanks to it.
I know how much you care about personal development and getting more productive, so my last question will be related to this topic. Which of the new features of eWay 8.1 do you perceive as the most useful?
I like the most the feature of postponing the task for tomorrow. You do it by a right click. It’s also possible to grab tomorrow’s task and schedule it for today. But that does not happen that often. (laugh)
