Fragmented tools mean we have fragmented brains

There’s a general motion that email should be killed, that it’s chaotic, and it should be replaced with collaborative tools – our project management, issue tracking and customer relationship apps – with their zen visual overviews and easy team coordination to bring us calm.

The problem is that email is where things actually get done. Fresh ideas swell up, projects ride the wave of communication to completion, and relationships are cemented.

And because there’s fragmentation between the two worlds, it falls to us – the workers – to wrangle information between all our different tools. With each new app in our ecosystem, things become exponentially harder to track. Our brains bear the burden of keeping everything in sync. (This is why employees typically reject any new tool management tries to foist upon them, and rightly so).

Let’s integrate Gmail!

Our plan is simple… make it really easy to integrate your other tools into Gmail, so at any moment in your day, you have a complete picture of what’s happening when you need it.

And, integrations mean your team can work where they want to work. E.g. your sales manager can live in Salesforce, but actual agents can spend all their time where they’re most comfortable: in Gmail.

Today, it’s our responsibilty to wrangle multiple tools. With an integrated Gmail, we have just one place to focus. (Forgive my terrible hand writing – I grew up typing!).

Some Examples

Sales Pipelines

  • Track leads in Trello/Hubspot/etc., and add all your conversations into them. Then whilst writing emails, be able to see the status of your lead from those tools.

Customer Support

  • Enact updates for customers – such as upgrading their account – directly as you read their email.

  • While writing emails, access your help wiki for quicker replies. Or update your wiki with fresh ideas as you get inspiration from talking to customers.

  • Track feature requests, or bug reports in GitHub/Trello/Asana, then be able to go back to all emails upon completion to alert them.

Do you want this, or something else?

In ActiveInbox, there’s now a very simple trial implementation of this: the ability to share an email as a link.

If you want it…
The share button includes a survey, so just vote there!

If you want something else more…
The survey also includes input for different ideas, so you can prioritise them instead.

Finally, don’t miss the Sneak Peek at Read Receipts / Emailing Tracking in my last post.

And of course, discussion in the comments below is always very welcome =)

  

This was written by Andy Mitchell