ArkaliQ: I have questions about email / messaging features down the road.
It looks like right now I cannot email clients directly from the system, nor will I see (in-system) emails they send to me. And I get that you want to focus more on the in-portal / in-system messaging system, but that looks like it's also problematic. Clients just get an email saying they've been sent a message or sent a private message, and they then have to leave what they were doing (sorting email) and log into the portal just to see what the message was. That's going to be annoying for them. From my side of the desk, it means I'm going to have to spend a lot of time flipping between my email client and SuiteDash, so it's costing me time and complicating my process as opposed to saving time and streamlining. Do you have any plans to work on this aspect?
I'm going to post a question from Andrea here that she asked in another thread, so I think you may have missed it, but it mirrors my concerns and I'd really like more info on this, as it's a huge part of how I work.
----------From Andrea:----------
Hi Mike,
Can you let us know about EMAIL functionality within the platform?
Specifically, if we tie our Gmail account to the system, send emails to clients from within the system to a customer, a customer responds from their email account (not their client portal) is the response going to be imported/logged in SuiteDash?
Currently, for example with Dubsado, we can attach our (admin) email to our account. Send emails from Dubsado to a customer - any responses from the customer (even emails sent from the customer to us that are NOT responses but come from the same email address we have for them in our CRM are brought into our Dubsado). Is this possible? I don't want to miss emails from customers that may hit the "create new email" button in their email account in a rush and not respond via their portal or whatever. Some customers don't bother with portals, some do. I need to receive their emails into the CRM either way and assign them to their respective project.
Thanks a bunch!
----------END Andrea's Question----------
Anne again. So after playing around with SuiteDash, it looks like the answers to Andrea's questions are "not right now." But Andrea is 100% correct that some clients like portals and some don't. I don't want to force them into using the portal for simple messaging if they don't want to, and I also want to be able to send people emails directly from the portal instead of my email client when I'm already in the portal. Additionally, I don't want to have to track down client communication in two separate areas.
Please let me know. If this is something that you're planning, even if down the road, I can wait. But if it's probably never going to happen, I'd like to know that.
Hi Arkali,
Thanks for the question!
As a HIPAA compliant platform we have to protect sensitive information as it moves oh, so that is why by default the content of your message is not included in the email notification when sent from our secure messaging feature.
However, we do provide what we call 'Convenience Mode' which is designed for those who do not need that kind of compliance, and in that case, when your client receives the email notification, the message that you typed them is included there I was just as if they received an email from you.
In addition, if they reply to that email then we parse that email message and include it back into the thread of the messaging feature, and you are sent an email notification and includes that message as well. This way, the client can only work out of their email and not have to access the portal, but also the conversation stays threaded inside the portal for easy access, accountability and organization.
Yes, the next level will be the integration of actual email in the way that you may see on other platforms.
We definitely plan to do that, and we even know exactly how we will do that, through a company called Nylas which exists solely to provide an API that allows to oAuth into any email address (Google, Office365... all the big ones) and pull those into your platform using just that single API. We've had several meetings with them and understand the technology, so now it's just a matter of where it falls in our roadmap.
Hope that helps!
Hi, Mike,
Thank you so much for the detailed message--that's super encouraging to me. I'll dig around for the simple messaging option and reach out to Help / Support if I can't find it. I also have another question that you kind of answered the other day, but I'll ask in another thread so that people browsing the questions can easily find it.