Earlier this week I had the opportunity to catch up with Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software to discuss Email Center Pro, a web solution that tracks and analyzes multiple email address conversations. Check out our conversation below:

[Manoj]: Can you briefly describe your inspiration behind developing Email Center Pro?

[Sabrina Parsons]: We went through the classic build vs. buy decision when we were looking at tools to improve our communication with customers and partners. We had built a very basic Web-based email product, which we all called “the email center.” About five years ago we knew that we either had to find a new solution, or rebuild the basic solution we were using, as our sales volume went up and we needed a more stable way to communicate via email with our customers and partners. At that time we researched the marketplace and just did not find anything that provided the features we needed. There were customer service help desk options that provided the ability to “ticket,” and there were large CRM solutions that provided too many features we did not need at too high of a monthly cost. So we turned back to our basic email center and re-vamped. We added more of the features we needed, such as the ability to add internal notes to an email, and the ability to assign emails to a certain person. We also rebuilt the system to make sure that it could handle enterprise level email, and of course was secure and redundantly back-up.

[Manoj]: How will Email Center Pro make individuals more efficient?

[Sabrina Parsons]: Email Center Pro is built for efficiencies and for improving work flow. Take your web site, Web Analytics World. I noticed that you have placed your personal email, mjasra@gmail.com as the contact email for people who want to advertise with you. Right now I assume that you handle all the email, and respond to any incoming inquiries. Imagine if you decided you wanted to hire an outside sales person to handle advertising requests. You would have several options:

1. Leave the email address as is, and forward incoming requests to the ad sales person. This way you could know about all the requests coming in, and then you would forward to the sales rep. Not efficient.
2. You could make advertise@webanalyticsworld.net the contact email, and then both you and the sales rep could get those emails. You would then need to triage any email that you felt needed special handling or that you wanted that rep to have background information. You would have to forward the email with your message, and then hope the rep responded in a manner that pleased you. There may be a time when an email comes in from a known associate for instance, and you answer it right away – not realizing that the rep has also already answered. Because you both live in your separate email clients you get no visibility into how fast the rep responds, what the answers look like, and whether this rep is representing you well. You could ask the rep the bcc you on every response – but this would clutter your email client even more. Definitely not efficient
3. You can use Email Center Pro (ECP. You create the advertise@webanalyticsworld.net and either forward it into ECP or use pop access to pull it into ECP. You then create 2 users accounts allowing both your rep and yourself to login and monitor emails. You can create some templates with responses to frequently asked questions — and thus have far less training time for the rep, and make sure you are represented the way you want. You can monitor all out going messages, and you can add notes to any message that the rep can see and reply to — but are always kept internally. You could set expectations about the speed to respond to a request, and using our metrics easily see the reality of how fast responses were sent out. You would no longer have to deal with all the spam associated with an email address that lives on a web page, and you would have all the visibility into your business without the extra email fatigue. Ahh. See how efficient that is!

[Manoj]: How does Email Center Pro integrate with email clients such as Outlook?

[Sabrina Parsons]: Yes. You use Outlook – if it is your client of choice for all the email you deal with exclusively. All email coming into your name@yourcompany.com should go to whatever client you prefer. Email Center Pro is used for general. shared email addresses. ECP can be set up to send alerts (daily or hourly) to your Outlook to inform you when there is a message that you want to know about, or a message is assigned to you. Outlook has some collaboration features if you use Exchange, but for the small business Exchange servers mean extra cost, and lots of IT nightmares. ECP is simple, fast, efficient and VERY cost effective. ECP is an “aside to Outlook” solution for those that want to manage more than just email, but also reduce productivity costs, improve customer email communication and increase ROI.

[Manoj]: Are there any types of reporting metrics available for Email Center Pro?

[Sabrina Parsons]: Yes!! Lots and Lots. Here is a list of the key metrics we provide to ECP account holders:

1. Mailbox Traffic Distribution- Do you get more email on Mondays than Wednesdays? Do you send more messages in the morning or the afternoon? This bar chart shows average distribution of traffic received and sent by time of day, day of the week, or month, for the mailbox and date range selected.
2. Mailbox Response Time – This table and chart shows the response times for any mailbox during a given time period. Customize by user, mailbox, and date range. This is an essential management tool. Mailbox Traffic Timeline – Gives a detailed, interactive timeline of mail sent and received for a particular mailbox for the date range selected. See detailed data for a single day, or for the entire time you have used Email Center Pro.
3. Mailbox Breakdown- This pie chart shows the breakdown of unassigned and assigned messages (by user) for a given mailbox. You can customize this by mailbox, or choose “Any Mailbox” to see assignments across all Inboxes.
4. User Activity- Shows specific data for each user for the mailbox and date range you choose, such as the number of conversations assigned, number of messages sent, and average response time.
5. Conversation Tracker- Track starred conversations. See most recent activity on the conversations you care about most.
6. Account Usage- View a summary of your account usage, in terms of storage, emails received and sent, and your plan level.
7. Recent Actions- See what’s going on right now in your account, including the most recent logins, responses, notes and tags added, and assignment of emails. Click the conversation or message link to see the full details.
8. Saved Searches- Saved Searches let you quickly locate conversations that match criteria you choose, using keywords, assignee, mailbox, date received, and more. Click any Saved Search name to see its matching conversations.
9. Mailbox List- Displays a list of all mailboxes and a count of all conversations in the inbox. div>

[Manoj]: Is Email Center Pro capable of handling a large email load in the case of larger organizations?

[Sabrina Parsons]: Yes. We use it here at Palo Alto Software with over 40 users and thousands of messages in and out every day. We have accounts that have users in the 30′s and 40′ with an enormous amount of incoming and outgoing mail. The service is built to handle enterprise level mail volume, and is hosted on the Cloud using Amazon Web Services. It is secure, redundant, and backed-up with a 99.99% uptime.