February 2008 Archives

Starting today, Mailroom is available with PayPal support.

Nope, I am not talking about us accepting credit cards via PayPal. What I am talking about is the ability for Mailroom to provide you with a summary of your user’s PayPal transactions with you, while you are answering their support email questions.

This is very useful for anyone who currently does use, or is thinking of using, PayPal to process their credit cards on their site. Since this is more geared towards business use, we have designated it to be available on our $19 plans and up. So, if you have a Basic, Plus, Premium, or Enterprise plan, you know have PayPal support built right in.

Now, to get it to work, you will need to login to your PayPal account and change some settings, but it shouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes to do it. You can see what needs to be done here – http://sproutit.com/support/paypal This is a set of step by step instructions on how to set it up.

So, what is in this summary? You are going to be able to see how many times someone has purchased from you in the last year, and what the total of all of their purchases amount to. This should help you know if your support email needs to just answer a quick first time purchase question, or might include some ‘upsell’ ideas as well.

So, go ahead and give it a try. The way we see it, the more you know your customers, the better.

Vote to make Mailroom one of the top 100 web apps of 2008! How? Click here to vote

Wednesday morning I awoke to an email from the editor of Webware.com congratulating us to being selected as a finalist for this year’s 2008 Webware 100.

Over 4,600 Web 2.0 services were nominated by Webware readers over the last couple of months and Sproutit Mailroom was selected as one of 300 finalists.

While we are going against some big names in the ‘Communications’ category, I think that you’ll agree that Mailroom is one of a kind one that list. Voting starts today at noon, and will continue until March 31.

So go ahead! Vote for Mailroom and tell everyone you know. In fact, send them this link – http://www.webware.com/html/ww/100/2008/vote_comm.html?compid=103374 so that they can help put Mailroom into the top 100 web apps of 2008!

Just a week after Super Tuesday, our country still seems to be undecided as to who will compete in the fall for POTUS (President Of The United States). Seems this country is very focused right now on that single election. But, what about all of the other positions that will be up for re-election? Most people think, “there can’t be that many seats opening up this year….” Try this one on for size. It is from Vote-USA.org.

For the 2006 General Elections there were slightly over 13,000 candidates competing for 7,724 U.S. Senate, U.S. House, State Senates, State Houses, and other State-wide offices.

Nearly 8,000 seats that were up for re-election. Many of them that will have a far greater impact on our daily lives. Take the numerous city council, school board, and state assembly positions that there are in your state alone. These are the people that can fix your children’s school, your roads that you drive to work on, or create that public transit service that your city needs.

Email has become used more and more for these most recent campaigns, but it seems that they are focus on just sending you emails that tell you what a candidate wants you to hear. That’s politics. And many of the candidate websites will have a place to enter your email address to ‘join the list.’ But, what happens if those candidates never speak to your concerns? Will they ever respond to you?

Over the next few weeks and months, I will be bringing facts to the table as to why email is going to be the number one way to increase participation in our elections and the people’s way of getting their candidate into office.

How about you take a stab at this question and answer int he comments. I will tell the answer next time.

How many emails does a state assemblymember receive during their campaign?

Does this mean you are taking credit cards via PayPal? NO IT DOES NOT.

For years, enterprise systems have been able to provide integrated support that ties into their billing and sales system, allowing their support staff to know what their customers had purchased before they respond to their customer emails. But, the price tag was huge! We thought, “Why not bring it to life with the number one credit card payment processing system in the world?” Thus, the idea of bringing PayPal support tied into Mailroom was born.

In a few days, Mailroom will be the first, web-based email help desk that integrates PayPal support.

How useful is this? When a customer sends you an email, Mailroom is able to reference your customer’s order history and show of summary of how many transactions, how long they have been a customer, and how much they have purchased from you.

For example:

Imagine that you sell running shoes online, and one of your customers emails you and asks about your shoe return policy. When the PayPal summary shows you that this customer purchased a new pair of sneakers about 6 months ago at about $50. As any good show pro knows, running shoes should be replaced every 6 months or 500 miles to keep your legs healthy. As you answer their question about your return policy, you also remind them about the 6 month, 500 mile idea, and that easily segues into your current promotions for 10% off for the month of March. You’ve just turned your support response into an upsell.

So, if you are looking forward to providing yet another level of support to your customers, get ready…. It will be released before you know it.

From time to time I get a chance to actually meet in person, some of our clients. When that happens I am very eager to hear what they have to say about Sproutit, Mailroom and how they tackle the inevitable job of support. So, I sat down for a bit of fish ‘n chips with Ryan MacCarthy, co-founder of Uloop, and picked his brain.

What is Uloop?

Uloop is an online classifieds platform for colleges.

Classifieds? But, what makes you different than every city’s newspaper online classifieds?

We have created a college specific classified site that thousands of students are using to sell textbooks, find roommates, events, housing, full-time and part-time jobs, internships and even rides home. Take textbooks, for example. Not too many people using the local Herald, or Times will be needing the same biology text book.

So, what are the audiences and customers that you deal with

99% of our support comes from students. It is a mixture of feedback, suggestions, comments, and problems. We also work with employers to provide college specific job postings and housing management to provide housing listings for students.

Do the responses that you provide take on a certain tone and feel?

Absolutely. We make it a point to respond to every single email that we get. We try to be very straight up with students and respond with a casual, and youthful tone. Many of the ideas we build in, come straight from the student feedback. But, if we don’t think an idea is beneficial to more than one person, we’ll let them know what we think.

What do you think is the best feature of Mailroom? Why?

By far it is the multiple user support. This way, we don’t have to have a specific support person, but we can share the load. And, this also closes the gap between the students making requests and the team that creates new features. Less is lost in the middle and keeps our whole team more connected with our users.

Got a favorite company for support?

I like Apple. It fits they way I live.