In the first installment we discussed why it is so important for your CRM system to not only be integrated with Outlook but to be WELL integrated with Outlook. We also learned that I use both the for Outlook client and the Salesforce.com client on a daily basis which puts me in a fairly unique position to be able to compare the effectiveness of each. Which brings us to…
Reason # 2 – Linking Emails to Contacts
Email is a primary means of communication for our CRM users to communicate with customers and others, so it is very important to be able to quickly and easily attach an email to CRM contacts and other related records. If it is not quick and easy our users won’t do it, and if our users won’t do it the effectiveness of our CRM system goes spiraling downward.
In the Salesforce.com integration to Outlook, a user hits the ‘Send and Add’ button in order to send an email while relating that email to CRM. A form pops up with 4 tabs to fill out, the first of which is ‘Names’. In this tab, the form will automatically search for each recipient in the emai andl return their Salesforce.com contact record. So if you sent your email to 3 Salesforce.com contact recipients, all three recipients will appear in the form.
Here comes the weird part.
The form instructs to you select one (and only one) of the recipients to relate the email to in Salesforce.com. That’s right – even though you communicated with 3 people in your email, you will not be able to see that you communicated with 2 of those people by looking at their Salesforce.com Contact records. This is because you can only relate the email to one of the three recipients.
Contrast this to . When a user hits the ‘Track in CRM’ button on an Outlook email, the email record is AUTOMATICALLY related to EACH and EVERY recipient contact record in Dynamics CRM. That’s it, one click.
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