Inbox 360 – Outlook and CRM

View a recording of introducing Tall Emu Inbox 360

Go here for full transcript. Please note that the transcript is not 100% perfect and will contain errors of spelling and grammar and just incorrect heard words.

In this video, I’m going to show you Tall Emu’s Inbox 360, which is our Outlook integration with our CRM. What you’ll see straight away on the right-hand side, I’m running Outlook here. I’m running it as a use called “Jeff Vader”. This is just a set of test data, and I’m just going to show you through some of the features. On the right-hand side here, you can see what we call the “sidebar”, and the sidebar shows us data from within Tall Emu CRM instantly in Outlook. If I move between these two emails here, we’ll see any data that we have in CRM. The only one I’ve got data for is this Mike Nash record.

If I look over here, I can see a few bits and pieces of information, so obviously, the person’s name, a little indicator to see whether or not they’re inside CRM, their phone number, which we can have click to call, their website address, which we can have clickable to go visit them, whether they’re elite or a customer. If they are a customer, what grade they are if you use customer grading, and when we first and last had contact with them as a business. We’re also showing whether … Which people in the business are working with this particular company.

Then, down here, we start … Again, this is some more interesting data, so we can see the lifetime value of the customer, their current balance, do they have open quotes or sales orders, opportunities, support tickets, and we can drill into this data just by looking in here. We can see this particular client has a couple of open invoices overdue because it’s highlighted in orange. These are things that have been purchased recently, and you can see the overall sales chart for the last little while.

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In the Influence tab, we can see there’s a $5,000 opportunity called “Sales”, which is at the quotation stage. We can only see that Mike from Tall Emu referred as … To A-Z Stationary Supplies as a [00:02:00] customer. Moving along here, we can see any open tickets, so we have a ticket here. Trays are wet in the cafeteria. It was on the 24th of the 7, so it’s a brand new ticket. Last but not least, we see down here the communications that we’ve had, so these can be email communications, records of phones, meetings, tasks, but also things like visits to the website and web forms that have been filled in.

The purpose of this sidebar really is to give the user of CRM immediate insight when there is even email from one of your clients. Straight away from here, I can see this customer owes me $500. I don’t have to go into my accounting system. I don’t have to go into my CRM system and hunt around for that data. It’s just really being put there right in front of my face. One other nice feature of this little sidebar aside from clicking to call is that you can actually hyperlink from here into CRM.

For example, if I go into the Influence section, I’d exactly look at opportunities. I can click there. It will open up the opportunity from within CRM, so it does provide some fast access. That works with opportunities. It will work with these items here, so I can click here, and I’ll get the Mike and Mr. Stevens meeting, which is planned in CRM with Jeff Vader and myself. I can even go back, or I can get the email that I sent to Jeff just to set up really for this demo.

Again, what this lets you do is you get an email from a customer, say, similar to this one that says, “Please call me as soon as you can,” and you’ll see when I open up the email, I see the sidebar as well. What’s nice is straight away, “Please call me as soon as you can,” I can have a look. I can see there’s an open opportunity, there is a support ticket. I can pop in there. I can see the trays are wet in [00:04:00] the cafeteria, there’s a $5,000 opportunity, guy owes me a few hundred dollars. Right away, I get like a little bit of insights into who this person is and what the current status of their relationship is.

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The other thing that our Inbox 360 does allow us to do is when we get an email like this, we can synchronize it to CRM. Now, we’re not going to synchronize all emails to CRM because you get an awful lot of noise. Even just trying to arrange a meeting, you may go through 5, 10, 15 emails backwards and forwards between people, “Is this time good? Is that time good?” We recommend that you synchronize emails more selectively to keep the signal-to-noise ratio in your CRM to the right level.

We see here a Tall Emu menu has been added. I can click there, and what I can do is synchronize the email. That will grab this email with any attachments, and it will just copy it straight into the CRM. If I hit “Sync Email”, I get a little dialogue. It’s from Mike Nash at Tall Emu. It’s to Jeff Vader, and I can hit the “OK” button. Now, it’s asking me. Do I want to associate “tallemu.com” with the company Tall Emu? You would usually want to say yes to that because that means that I don’t have to think about which particular company an email address belongs to. If it’s “tallemu.com”, it would associate it for a Gmail or a Hotmail. You would know. Just because of the way I’ve got my demo set up, I’m going to say no to that, so it will ask me every time.

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What just happened there, I don’t know whether you noticed, but there’s a little blinking flash. That just means the sync is done. It’s now inside the Tall Emu CRM database. If I wanted to, I could get rid of this email. You can only see here two more buttons. One is “Create Opportunity”. One is “Create Support Ticket”. These do pretty much what you would expect. If I create an opportunity from here, what it’s going to do is it will make a new opportunity record inside the CRM. It will look [00:06:00] for the Mike Nash record. It will try to find it by its email address. If the Mike Nash record doesn’t exist, it will create it.

Once we have a Mike Nash record, it will then go and create the opportunity. Link it all up. It will copy the body of this email into the opportunity, and what it will then do is synchronize the email to that opportunity inside Tall Emu CRM all in one quick operation. The same sort of thing happens with a support ticket. You click “Create Support Ticket”, and straight away, boom, you’ve got a support ticket inside the CRM with everything attached to it. It’s just a very, very fast operation indeed.

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If I come back to my main menu inside Outlook, I can click on the tab. There’s a meeting here with Mike and Mr. Stevens. That’s actually synchronized out of Tall Emu CRM. I created a meeting in there earlier on, and what we want to do to synchronize our calendar, simply go to the menu, and we can click “Synchronize Contacts and Calendar”, and it will do it. Now, if you have this set up correctly, this will work from anywhere where you have an internet connection, so you’re not required to be in the office to perform the sync.

Let’s say, for example, at 5:00 in the evening, we had a meeting, which was a personal meeting, so let’s make a new meeting inside Outlook, and let’s just say “Some Personal Meeting”. Maybe a doctor’s appointment or something like that. Maybe it’s happening in the middle of the day. It doesn’t really matter. What we can do is we can hit the privacy flag here inside Outlook. I’ll mark that as a private meeting, and I’ll hit the “Save and Close” button. Now, I have our meeting, which I synchronized in earlier from CRM, and I have my personal meeting down here. I’m going to hit the “Sync Contacts and Calendar” button. In the background [00:08:00], that’s going to start synchronizing with Tall Emu CRM. I’ll open up CRM in just a moment or two, and we’ll take a look at that.

While we’re in Outlook still, I will also just quickly show you synchronization from the inbox. Before, what I did was I opened up an email, and I used the Tall Emu menu here to perform a sync. If I already know what the email is, I can grab the email, and I can hit “Sync” just there. It does exactly the same. But if I wanted to sync three or four emails, I could multi-select them, and I can click “Quick Sync Email”, and what that will do is that will just synchronize the email directly into Tall Emu. It’s not going to ask me any questions at all. It’s just going to do it, put them in there, create contacts, and the job was done.

What I’ll do is I’ll just drag over the CRM. We can see the meeting with Mike and Mr. Stevens in the cafeteria, which matches up with Outlook. Down here, we see our private meeting. It just says “Private”. That’s it. Let’s move CRM back out of the way. We can also set a couple of options inside here. If I grab my Tall Emu menu, I can go here, “Options”, and there’s a few things that I can choose. I can choose how far back to sync my calendar. Normally, you only want to go back a month or so. It just speeds things up a little bit.

I can do a one-way calendar sync, so only meetings created inside CRM will go to Outlook. Generally speaking, you don’t want to do that because you want the flexibility of creating meetings either on your smartphone or inside Outlook and having them sync. “Auto-Sync Calendar” pretty much does what [00:10:00] you would expect it to do, and you can set a time interval there. We can choose here where inside Outlook we want to save our meetings and our contacts. That’s if you have multiple contact folders, you can select which one is the most appropriate.

One that I would generally recommend that we do once it’s turned on is use the one-way contact sync from CRM to Outlook because you want to have CRM being the main source of truth if you like and pushing data out to all of the Outlook devices. That’s really it for the basics of the Outlook plug-in. As a quick recap, we have the ability to synchronize our calendar. We can synchronize our contacts. We can view, put in data within Outlook, synchronize emails, create support tickets, and generally, get a real nice view of where we are simply by receiving an email.

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