
Why your company should have a single email address - revorad
http://blog.asmartbear.com/one-email.html
======
amirmc
The problems the post describes are not really about email. They're actually
about the difficulty of setting up a proper CRM system.

All incoming and outgoing email should be stored in a way that anyone can
easily see the conversation history (and people should be checking it before
they respond). As I see it, that's the problem the post is actually
describing. Having one email address is a method of trying to achieve this but
IMHO it's not how it _should_ be done.

The problem with CRM systems as I see them is that most of them require users
to click _away_ from the email to read the full conversation history. Even
worse than that, employees usually have to manually add a conversation to the
CRM to begin with.

A better solution might be to automatically save incoming email to the company
CRM and also append outgoing messages to the appropriate contact. That way,
no-one has to remember to add records. The next step would be to expose that
information directly in the email client so employees don't have to go hunting
for info (if they can even be bothered).

I don't think most customers actually care _where_ their reply comes from (e.g
info@, sales@, bob@...) as long as they get a response and their issue is
resolved.

Edit: I agree with the post that customers should not have to figure out which
address to use from the website. Just give them one

~~~
StavrosK
Isn't that what Zendesk and the CRM mentioned in the article do? I haven't
tried them, but that's the impression I get, because it looks like people send
emails from within Zendesk when replying to my support enquiries in various
companies.

~~~
amirmc
I haven't tried them either but from my first impressions there's still a wall
between the conversations people are having via the support system and those
that people _remember_ to add to the CRM. e.g. the sales guy trying to up-sell
someone to v2.0 may have no idea that the customer already has two open
support tickets from the 2.0 beta program.

The problem here is that these are fragmented systems, each trying to solve
specific needs for the _company_ (tracking sales/prospects, tracking support
queries) rather than looking at the customer's perspective.

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Shenglong
This is a really good point. I feel a lot of the time, I end up having to
think which email I should email someone at. When a contact page has 8 emails
on it with contact@, info@, support@, sales@, etc, it gets really confusing. I
usually just end up emailing sales@, since I remember when I was working at
Admiral, new customers got better treatment and response times than existing
customers.

~~~
ydm
Agreed. It's why we only have one friendly public-facing email address at our
company - hi@

~~~
fastfinner
That's a really inviting email, I love it! Feels much more welcoming than
info@ etc.

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linker3000
I don't buy it. If a pre-sales technical enquiry comes into multiple
addresses, including 'support@...', 'sales@...' etc. and the sales & support
teams do not talk to each other or share business intelligence, then there has
been a failure of internal process, or a lack of proper systems, rather than
it being the case that the email address design and structure is broken.

It's not hard for a Sales team to circulate a regularly- updated list of
current prospects and their pipeline stage, or to have this as an Intranet
page etc.

~~~
michael_dorfman
It's also not hard to have a single public-facing email address. In fact, that
sounds a lot easier for the Sales team than remembering to circulate and
regularly update that list.

I agree that the issue is one of internal process and lack of proper systems,
and I don't see why you exclude email address design and structure from those
categories.

~~~
linker3000
Well, we have an Intranet page that's updated dynamically from our CRM system
- no need for anyone to remember to update or circulate anything.

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jinushaun
I dealt with this recently. Emailed info@company.com and got a response from
sales@company.com. Some time later, I emailed the same company at
sales@company.com and got a response from sale2@company.com.

WTF?

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wnoise
I'm not entirely convinced by the arguments here. I think I'm more inclined to
think this is a good idea because it does remind me of companies that
partition their websites into shards for "personal", "small business", and
"large business", because their sales force is divided into these categories.
This is absolutely infuriating to navigate. I know what I want to buy: let me
look at what you have to offer and let me buy it without having to care about
how you structure your sales force.

------
jen_h
I think this is a real YMMV subject - using a single email address can be a
little dangerous if your startup has a chance of "going big" (and don't they
all??). Even 50 extra messages a day can be overwhelming and you may find
yourself skipping over important messages as you struggle to move them off
your plate quickly. Even worse if it all lands in your primary inbox folder,
distracting you from focused work (this is _especially_ important if you're
"two guys/gals in a garage" where productivity & focus really, really
matters).

I actually set up multiple email addresses for support in this way on purpose,
based on platform. I find I'm far more efficient if platform 1 goes into
folder 1 and platform 2 goes into folder 2. No need to make giant cognitive
leaps in jumping from one message to another, and you can sit down and respond
to everything all at once, not interrupting your flow...you're more
productive, less overwhelmed, and contacts get their answers faster (and their
emails don't get buried in your overwhelmed primary inbox).

If you are a consumer Internet startup and have a single downtime, you will
completely understand where I'm coming from here...

~~~
StavrosK
I don't know, if that's too big of a load just use a CRM with email
integration and have people pick new emails according to their position, or
have an assistant/secretary route the emails to the appropriate address.

That sounds much more reasonable, not to mention that you won't use _your_
email address as the single contact, rather you will set up a different one
that will act as a dispatch.

~~~
jen_h
I actually find Groups within Google Apps mail to be pretty easy to set up and
effective for our needs--setting up private groups is a really cheap & easy
way to sort mail for free. I have groups like:

\- productA-support (which is really just "support@")

\- productb-support

\- info/hosting/privacy/twitter/etc (not all aliases are publicized, but tend
to match what people would make up when attempting to send email to us)

The support aliases forward to me and to a dedicated support account. I always
use the "Send As" feature so that nothing has my name on it unless you're nosy
& look at the headers.

The info and other aliases go to both myself and to my partner. We both want
to catch biz dev inquiries and any special snowflake requests, but I handle
all support to ensure morale stays high.

If we add staff, we can add them to the groups pretty easily. Though at some
point thereafter, we'd likely need some solution for determining what's been
handled. It's a little hokey, maybe, but cost-to-benefit works well right now.

~~~
StavrosK
Ah, good idea, I forgot about that function. However, I would be a bit worried
about who handled what, since (as you already mentioned) there's no good way
to say "I've got this one".

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JoannesVermorel
Concerning the questions / concerns raised here and within the comments of the
original post, I posted a quick follow-up at
[http://vermorel.com/journal/2011/7/4/why-your-company-
should...](http://vermorel.com/journal/2011/7/4/why-your-company-should-have-
a-single-email-address-guest-po.html)

------
8ig8
A long time ago when I was setting up my first business website, I listed
email aliases for a bunch of fake departments: sales@, support@, press@,
jobs@, etc. At the time I saw this as what bigger businesses did, so to
legitimize my new business, I followed along.

A decade later, I'm now just using hello@ for everything even though my
business has grown a lot since then.

It's much easier to funnel all incoming emails through a single point of
contact than juggle a bunch of aliases.

Our replies come from the same hello@ address even though the actual person
replying varies. Each email has a code to group threads together.

Only when email goes personal does it get pushed to a specific person's mail
account. The vast majority of our emails are centralized. It's great.

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impendia
The OP also recommends against using "hellish" webforms, and I wholeheartedly
agree... one "oops" with my browser and the message I was writing is gone.

But I see them all over the place, and they take some work to implement
whereas posting your e-mail address doesn't. Is there some argument to be made
in favor of these which escapes me?

~~~
ggchappell
Good question. Perhaps web forms are thought of as a kind of CAPTCHA, the idea
being that any ol' bot can send e-mail, but it takes a human -- or a bot
specifically written for the site by a human -- to fill out a form.

 _Note: I'm not endorsing this thought; I'm just trying to get inside the
heads of the people who make these awful things._

EDIT: Another possibility is that they want a way to easily tell how to route
a communication from a customer. And web forms can contain those menus that
tell the reason for the communication. (Tragically, those menus rarely work
for me; my reason is not usually not on the list.)

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shadowhillway
9:30 Club in Washington DC uses "human@930.com" as their single address. I
haven't seen that anywhere else. What a great idea.

------
g123g
If I ever have a company, I will have one email address -

thebuckstopshere@mycompany.com

I will then use a service like Amazon Mechanical Turk like to distribute the
emails to proper internal addresses.

~~~
jmonegro
Using MT to sort email sounds like a terrible idea. You don't know what kind
of sensitive data users send along with their support e-mails, you don't want
to risk one of the mechanical turkers exploiting that.

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drivebyacct2
This has nothing to do with how many public email addresses are exposed and
honestly... solving it in this way shows a lack of understanding of the
problem. The problem is maintaining effective communication across sectors of
your business. A conversation between an external user and your company should
be transparent... but not from an email address standpoint. As long as you can
log into your CRM software and see the history of my conversation... who cares
what email address it came in on.

Having one email address just changes the problem. Now instead of having no
context for the conversation you have a jumbled email chain that you're having
to centrally monitor, distribute, pass around to other people... if anything
it seems vastly inferior than having a new email to billing@company.com
causing that customers email history and a notification from being sent to the
billing support supervisor.

~~~
mattmanser
Seriously, learn how to punctuate. Ellipsis are not used this way and your
placement of them makes no sense whatsoever.

~~~
rewind
Have you not seen how much improper grammar and spelling is on this site? Who
cares? Don't be such a jerk.

~~~
jasonkester
We use correct grammar, spelling and punctuation here for the same reason we
refrain from making silly jokes and calling each other names. It's part of the
culture that we're trying to maintain, and it has value.

The grandparent could have simply downvoted the distractingly punctuated
comment (as a few people have downvoted your namecalling), but he chose to
help the user out instead by pointing out what he'd done wrong.

