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Email in Sell - we want your feedback!
Posted Nov 02, 2022
Hi Zendesk community! We’re conducting research to understand how Sell users use email to organize their work, focussing both on users who have connected their email account to Sell, and users who haven’t connected their email account to Sell.
Questions for users who have connected their email to Sell
- What are the main reasons for you using an email connection between your email and Sell?
- What are your most common activities when using email in Sell?
- Have you encountered limitations while using your Sell-email connection?
- What problems could you solve if you didn’t experience that limitation?
- Is there anything that you would like to change about your email connection with Sell, and why?
- Is there a “must have” functionality that you would like to have, to better help you with your daily work?
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Do you use Gmail or Microsoft email plugins/extensions to improve your daily workflow? If yes, what kind do you use? (For example: an email plugin for Gmail)
Questions for users who haven’t connected their email to Sell
- What are the main reasons why you haven’t connected your email to Sell?
- How do you keep track of your email communication in Sell?
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Do you use, or know about the Sell email BCC address for contacts and deals? (see image below) If yes, what is the main reason you use it?
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Do you use Gmail or Microsoft email plugins/extensions to improve your daily workflow? If yes, what kind do you use? (For example: an email plugin for Gmail)
Here’s how you can help
We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. This conversation will be ongoing throughout November, at which point we’ll close the survey for comments and incorporate our findings into the rest of our research. If you would like to speak directly with a Product Manager on this topic, please indicate that as well in your comment and we’ll follow up with you via email.
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20 comments
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Patrycja Walencik
Hi all, who have jumped into this conversation - one more time I would like to thank you for taking the time to share your feedback and concerns. It helped us understand what you expect from the email domain and better categorize insights. We will update this post once we have more information to share.
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Ben
Not so much a feature to add, but a "please keep this feature"
Per Connecting your email with Zendesk Sell – Zendesk help I would STRONGLY want to know that being able to use your own SMTP server REMAINS a feature and that Zendesk Sell does not become like Zendesk Support which still does not let us use our own SMTP server as per SMTP Email delivery method – Zendesk help (from 2016 until now, still can't)
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Patrycja Walencik
Hi Ben
I appreciate you sending us your feedback. We don't have any plans to change this, and using our own SMTP server will be available. When it comes to Zendesk Support's feature I will pass your expectations to the proper Team, and also I would strongly encourage you to highlight one more time this request in the related post.
Thank you,
Pati
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Kate Woollard
We like the ability to see all of a customers email history within the one place. We have many different employees that would be communicating with the one contact.
We like the ability to use templates and we use sequences for automated email follow ups.
We have found that some conversations with customers need to remain private. For example a discussion around an employees behaviour, or confidential pricing discussions. We don't wish to block all communications, we just wish to mark a particular email threat as private. It would be good to have the ability to let outlook know not to log the conversation in Zendesk when responding to an email in Zendesk
If a contact leaves a company and we wish to delete them, it also deletes the conversation history.
We would like to be able to control email visiablity for non admin users or perhaps by role. For example a manager can set their own settings but subordinates can be set by admin
One of our users has had to make all his conversations private with contacts. This isn't ideal as some of the conversations need to be visual. For example, discussions about a deals progress. The user may have confidential pricing conversations with the contact which he wishes to remain private and not visual to all sell users.
We loose conversation history when deleting a contact that is no longer a relevant to our business
The ability to click "dont log in zendesk" when responding to a contact email via outlook. This will enable managers to keep some contact communication private and other conversations visible to users.
The ability to "deactivate" a contact so the email history stays but the customer is no longer assocated with a company or our business (for example, they have moved industries)
Ability to mark certain conversations as private
No
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Patrycja Walencik
Hi Adam Witek
Thank you for sharing your feedback and product expectations around the email experience. I would like to ask more about two points, you wrote:
Have you ever used notes to manage this task? What is your experience with notes?
---Gmail
Could you specify which plugins exactly you use and why?
Thank you,
Pati
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Patrycja Walencik
Hi Kate Woollard,
Thank you for taking the time to share your feedback with us.
I would like to just clarify, you mentioned: "It would be good to have the ability to let outlook know not to log the conversation in Zendesk when responding to an email in Zendesk"
Does it above equal this below's need?
"The ability to click "don't log in zendesk" when responding to a contact email via outlook. This will enable managers to keep some contact communication private and other conversations visible to users."
Best,
Pati
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Kate Woollard
Hi Patrycja Walencik,
Yes it does, apologies for the confusion
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Russell King
Good morning (from the UK)
I arrived here from another thread I follow relating to a feature not working -
We have connected our email accounts and that works fine however, the issues still remains that we are unable to forward emails back into notes using the BCC email address as described.
As you might expect when closing deals we have numerous calls and emails both directly with the customer and internally with numerous colleagues all with specific and valuable data relating to our clients and customers and each specific deal. When an email is received from a customer and is taken out of the public space, discussed internally (via email) we require those internal discussions to be recorded back into notes. We will then respond to the customer from their original email.
Currently we are having to copy & paste the email string from Outlook back into notes and if you do not delete out the internal email addresses everyone in the string receives multiple @alerts and emails per copy/paste as Zen treats an internal email address as if you have @name a colleague.
This BCC email feature that is "featured" on the record cards does not work, has not worked for several months (if ever) and needs a fix asap please!
I look forward to hearing from you (again) about this matter.
Many thanks!
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Patrycja Walencik
Hi Russell King
thank you for reaching out and taking the time to describe your needs. We improved the BCC feature a few weeks ago and updated the article about using BCC. If you didn't see the updated content I would encourage you to take a look and let me know how it works today.
If you still have issues with that I am open to scheduling a quick Zoom call and checking how we can help.
Have a great day!
Pati
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Russell King
Hi Pati,
Thank you, I appreciate you taking the time, but this is exhausting!
I've seen the updated article and it has been re-written to cover all the actions this feature can do, which has zero relevance to what I have been asking for a response on for several months!
All I have ever asked is for the feature to do what it says on the tin, it's as simple as that;
Your feature states - "To add an outside email to this deal, forward or BCC to:"
Why then would you decide to "BLOCK" me from doing that and why did no one tell me this is what you do till yesterday? I use my primary email to log into Sell and it is what I use to communicate with customers and colleagues alike. There are important instructions and details within those emails that don't make it back into the customer records because your system blocks them.
You are blocking this feature for a reason, so rather than give me the run around for another several months on this issue, can you please just explain why you block me from sending an email from my own inbox into a record of my choosing? It doesn't make any sense.
Salesforce and other CRM's let their customers decide what content they wish to BCC / Copy into their records using the same type of feature and I am struggling to understand why you do not. Please explain.
Thank you in advance!
Russell
P.s. - Link to original discussion for reference of previous replies to reported issues - https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408828858906-Using-the-BCC-email-address-for-external-email-messages?sort_by=created_at
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Patrycja Walencik
Hi Russell King
I am sorry for that, I understand how disappointing it must be for you that you have not been able to use the product as you had planned. I can only recommend a workaround, you can remove all email addresses on the block list until the BCC feature will be re-designed.
Please send a ticket via Get Help (in the upper right corner) If you would like to clean the block list.
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Russell King
Hi Patrycja,
Please can you explain what this will achieve and the implications of removing all email addresses from the block list? I assume you mean all of our internal / my colleague emails that they use to log into Sell? Are there implications with doing so? Any loss of features to be wary of with this work around?
AND - If this will resolve the issue of allowing me to forward emails into the notes from my inbox (emails from colleagues or others) is this not the result that I have been asking for?
Would be good to continue this thread in the public domain so others may also benefit.
Kind regards,
Russell
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Patrycja Walencik
Hi Russell King
I am coming up with an explanation. The blocklisting prevents tracking of email conversations in Sell between teammates. By default, the email conversations that you have with your coworkers (the other users in your Sell account) are not tracked – they are automatically blocklisted. This feature allows you to prevent Sell from tracking email conversations with specific leads and contacts (if you add manually this email to the block list)
When you remove coworkers it means email conversations will be tracked in Sell. To check blocked email addresses go to Communication Channels > Email > Blocklist [picture below]
Here you can find more information about the block list feature.
I hope that helps, but let me know if you have other things that come up.
Best regards,
Pati
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Dave Aynes
The recent user interface changes for "start conversation" on PC desktop is really poor and affecting our ability to use Sell as efficiently as we did in the past.
The area circled in yellow is the "working area" for typing an email in PC desktop. Above that is a useless blank block. We used to see a thread of communications but now it is just this big blank area. Please bring back the old format or fix this one!
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Zoltán Lehóczky
I'd add two things we'd really need, both of which I opened threads about before on the old UserVoice:
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Mitja Kolsek
Hi there,
First of all, thank you for a great product - you're enabling us to stay on top of things with our growing number of sales communication. Now, since you asked, a few issues that we think have room for improvement:
1) Importing email from mail server: We have thousands of emails - and growing -in our inbox on the mail server and we had to reconnect Sell to it twice to adjust connection configuration. In both cases, we ran into the (known) issue that only up to about 1500 emails get imported (separately from "inbox" and "sent" folders), and friendly support folks did some back-end magic to have more emails imported - but never did really all emails get imported. This can be unpleasant because you're replying to an email from a customer who you had a conversation before but Sell isn't showing that and it's kind of rude to show the customer that you don't have your past communication with them at hand. We now have to check for previous communication directly on the email server in case we suspect the customer may have been in contact with us before. I'm not sure where this "1500 emails" limitation comes from but it would be really nice to somehow eliminate it.
2) Android Sell app is great and it does everything we need for on-the-road processing of incoming email - except for one thing: the "Suggested people" feature where one can turn a new incoming email into a lead or contact to make it appear in the Sell Inbox. We're working around this by manually creating a lead/contact in the Sell app and wait for the email to appear, but it would be nice to have this feature there.
3) The new email UI: at some point, replying to an email in Sell moved from the center pane to the narrow right-side pane, which may be convenient on large-resolution monitors but on a 1920x1080p, it provides a really small area for the email reply. Granted it can be "maximized", i.e., expanded to the majority of the right-side pane, but that's still smaller than it used to be in the central pane. Can we please have an option to revert to the previous situation and reply in the center pane? Note that creating a new email (instead of replying or forwarding) is still possible in the central pane.
Thanks,
Mitja
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Julia
It would be nice if you could change the font and color of the text of your emails so that it matches the identity of the company. Now you can only change the look of the signature by adding it as an HTML, but it looks a bit weird with the different font for the rest of the text.
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Kyle Komen
I feel like Reach is super barebones compared to other email sending platforms I’ve used. Some examples:
-Bounced emails continue to be emailed in a sequence. They should be automatically filtered out or deleted (AND refunded credit if I used a prospect credit to get the email)
-Emails can’t be scheduled for certain times/time ranges, and sequence steps can’t be scheduled for certain times/time ranges (for example, send after 8 business days between 2pm-4pm local time)
-There is nowhere to see a calendar of how many emails are going out on what days
-There is no way to cap the amount of emails sent (if I set my limit at 200 emails, and 250 fall on a day, then 50 should automatically bump to the next day).
-There is no way block out certain days for vacations or holidays… as it stands, I could unknowingly be sending emails on Christmas Day…
-There is no way to reschedule or move emails. I should be able to see my emails going out for the day and reschedule some or all if needed
Maybe (hopefully) I’m missing some of these feature and just haven’t found them yet! Please let me know if so. If not, I’d love these to be added to the list of potential improvements. If not, I’ll have to keep my subscription to Growbots to handle email sending.
Thank you,
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Megan Oksendahl
Repeating some of the feedback suggested above. When will color text be available as an OOTB feature in Sell like it is in Support?
Also, interesting to read the following feedback from another customer. We have our lead sales person who has been with the company for years and has never been able to integrate their email with Sell. We've involved our IT and help from Zendesk and Zendesk IT just refered us to microsoft IT for support connecting the email address. We have other users in Sell that connected just fine, but they're newer employees. The following feedback was never shared with us, and based off the size limitation could be a reason the sync is never finishing - a full year later.
1) Importing email from mail server: We have thousands of emails - and growing -in our inbox on the mail server and we had to reconnect Sell to it twice to adjust connection configuration. In both cases, we ran into the (known) issue that only up to about 1500 emails get imported (separately from "inbox" and "sent" folders), and friendly support folks did some back-end magic to have more emails imported - but never did really all emails get imported. This can be unpleasant because you're replying to an email from a customer who you had a conversation before but Sell isn't showing that and it's kind of rude to show the customer that you don't have your past communication with them at hand. We now have to check for previous communication directly on the email server in case we suspect the customer may have been in contact with us before. I'm not sure where this "1500 emails" limitation comes from but it would be really nice to somehow eliminate it.
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Patrycja Walencik
Hi everyone, thank you so much for taking the time to submit your feedback here. We have been monitoring this area and have received sufficient feedback for our purposes. Based on your feedback we have done the ability to pin emails. We will be closing this thread, but thank you again for your welcomed feedback and insights!
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