Mailroom Manages Small Business Mail.
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 hadnt 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 cant really go wrong. If they cant 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 Sproutits 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 didnt 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. [TechCrunch]