Mailroom Manages Small Business Mail
Nik Cubrilovic
23 comments »
I am constantly looking for new products that will make my own business more efficient and perform better, and while finding a lot of good solutions for key problems, more often I find solutions to problems that I hadn’t really thought of. The latest solution that I am using now that saves us both time and help us perform better is Mailroom from Sproutit. Mailroom is a web-based small business email management application that allows multiple users to manage multiple email addresses effectively.
The way it works it that you point all your sales, support and general email to your Mailroom account from where you can have multiple users read them, respond to them, assign them and clearly see which emails need attention. One of the really strong points of this solution is that when replying to emails it allows you to drop in standard responses based on the email you have received and previous responses to similar emails. There is no need to setup standard template responses as you can pick and choose which paragraphs you wish to reply with based on what you wrote previously.
With a single place for all emails it means that all your staff can work as a team in replying to emails, and with the response suggestions they can’t really go wrong. If they can’t respond to an email then they simply assign it to somebody who can. This sure does beat having a single email account where you often get into an internal email thread about who is going to respond to it, or worse 2 people respond to it. Also a lot better than routing rules on your mail server, or not having a sales query responded to because your only sales guy was on holidays.
As with all good web solutions, Mailroom was born from Sproutit’s own frustration with handling business email efficiently. Sproutit was founded by Charles Jolley (CEO), Chris Bauman (CFO) and Peter Gohman, (Operations). They are a California company but the trio moved to Prague, in the Czech Republic last September during the bootstrapping phase of the business. They will be returning to the Bay Area in summer but at the moment have another 9 team members living in various parts of the world. Sproutit debuted Mailroom at the DEMO conference recently (you can see the video here) and have had a good uptake of users, to the point that after only a few weeks they had to expand their server setup.
The future looks bright for Mailroom and they are constantly refining and enhancing the product, almost on a daily basis. Over the next few months users should expect more features such as having the ability to have Mailroom to take care of all email, not just support and sales. Pricing starts at $19 per month (100 emails a day – spam not included) through to $199 a month (2000+ a day), all plans allow for an unlimited number of users.
There are a couple of key points with this solution, the first is better email management and in turn better customer management. The second is faster responses which will save you time and overall better customer service. There is a key value proposition here for small businesses who can use the free account to find out just how much hassle it saves them. Getting setup with Mailroom is simple and the pricing is reasonable considering the time being saved in having not only a hosted email solution, but one that saves you time and enables you to serve your own customers better. I didn’t see much from the competition that can compete on ease of use, features, price and value – that’s why we are still using Mailroom and will continue to.
Hi Mike,
This is definitely a product that should go far. It serves a clear need, and a need that pains a lot of SME’s. I haven’t checked it out on their site yet but from your description, this looks like something every small (and growing) business would love to have, specially if the mailroom team is dedicated to upgrading the features.
-gaurav-
Hi Gaurav, I wrote the post. It is a great service that will appeal to a very large small business market. They just need to be effective in getting the word out.
Hi Nik
Apologies :). I should have noted the author at the top.
Exactly, and this word out must be through the right channels. The more I think about it, the more I like it
cheers
Gaurav
Hi Nik,
very nice app. for customer relationship management.
-Andy
They should have gotten mailroom.com . Sproutwhat ?
Nice. Looks like a good start to a cool product. Very obviously influenced by 37signals’ line of sites, but that’s not a bad thing by any means.
No beta tag either. Awesome.
I see this is email management for small businesses, but how will this help with CRM as CRM is usually integrated with customer emails.
-Hari
Nice ! I was looking at some knowledge base + support ticket systems and found some good ones, but this one looks good too. Thanks for letting us know !
Hey Nik,
I’m glad to read about Mailroom. It’s an appealing idea. Are they specifically for sales and support? I see some of the plans allow access to other POP3 accounts.
This is interesting because I’m trying to find a centralized solution with a great interface (like Outlook) so I can access and send my yahoo email and small buz domain email all from one place. Do you know any services that do that?
~ Greg
I just used it and it’s slow(refreshing pages, going to new pages))! We actually use gmail and got spoiled by how fast it is.
Hey Nik:
Thanks for the thoughtful take on Mailroom, including the succinct summation of the value props for small business. As for getting the word out, we’re gearing up, among other things, to launch a multi-author blog that will specifically address the use of web-based applications by small businesses. Web-apps are all over the place but its hard to find expert comment on its use by the 25 million-plus businesses in the U.S. under 10 employees. (We recently discovered that co.s with under 50 employees have most of the same issues, actually.)
Curt
Great idea…any plans to connect this with salesforce.com? Perhaps this could add value as a salesforce.com add-on via their appexchange program?
Rick
Rick, etc - I was initially hired at SproutIt to work on what could eventually become our second app. This app doesn’t integrate with Salesforce.com (though we’ll take a look at that), but the app is very CRMish in its own right.
The idea behind Sprout is that there will eventually be a suite of apps, not just Mailroom. Of course, we’ve gotta get the first product right, first!
Qu’s:
1. import address book facility from other mail clients/Exchange?
2. doesn’t having a single account lead to confusion unless it is very clear internally who’s meant to be doing what?
3. can you set up filters so that say: sales/support ’see’ what they need to rather than having to sift through everything?
4. any plans for fwding to mobile?
BTW- Demo presentation links are dead
Hi:
Curt and Shanti both wrote something, but I wanted to answer a few of the questions also:
1. We currently do not have an address book import function, but its on the list of things to do. However, Mailroom does automatically build an address book from all the emails you receive. When you click on a person’s name, you can see all the messages that person has ever sent you.
2. All email threads are assigned to someone in Mailroom. When you first log in, you see only those emails that are assigned to you and need your attention. If you never choose to look at messages assigned to someone else, this is just like working in your own account. But you probably won’t do that. If someone is out sick or gets buried in email (like we are right now after so many new signups) you can just click over to THEIR messages and help them out.
3. They way you make sure people get what they need is simple: you assign incoming emails to different people and Mailroom should start to follow along and do it for you. It actually looks at the content of the messages to decide how to do this. We are still working on this feature, and we plan to make it even better in the future.
4. As Shanti said, we don’t integrate with Salesforce right now, but we will look into that. We have another product coming later this year that is really going to help out in this area.
5. Mailroom has been pretty fast, but we’ve had a lot of traffic today…we are always working on ways to make it even faster though!
Thanks again everyone for trying Mailroom and leaving your thoughts!
-Charles (and Curt, and Shanti)
This looks like a great solution to one of the most important issues that small companies eventually have to face. After a week or two of testing it out, and seeing how well our customer support personel will utilize the service, our company will most likely deal with all our customers through Mailroom.
Many thanks to the developers of this great project.
- Serge
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This. Is. Awful. Avoid.
We used Mailroom for a number of months, because it seemed like a simple solution for group mail. Biiiiiiig mistake: features were underdeveloped, mail went missing, replies went to the wrong people, and worse than that, they updated yesterday with a new AJAX version that literally refuses to send any mail at all.
I genuinely think web applications are the future, particularly when technologies like Apollo come along - but something like Mailroom is mission critical, and a paid product. They appear to have been treating it like a free beta, and as a result many of their customers will have lost business; we certainly have.