Integrations with outlook: Full recording of email conversations in pulse/item updates

Feature requests
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We have been adopting monday.com more and more through our organisation and our current aim is bringing our sales team on board. This will mainly be through creating a CRM style board on our Monday account.

So far, everything is going quite well, but a couple of our team have previously used “fully fledged” CRM systems such as ACT! and goldmine and one of the features that they enjoyed and miss the most was the ability to email a client by clicking a button in the CRM program and then it saving the email and subsequent replies under that contacts name (or in Monday’s case it would save it under a pulse update). It would then also save any replies the client sends to the pulse and subsequently any replies they make in return.

I have done a bit of searching and reading through FAQ’s on monday.com and have found a solution to partly address this use case. Currently, I have an email column set up in the pulse, this will then “CC” the pulse’s email ID into the email and so it will add the content of the email into the updates section of the pulse. Here comes my first suggestion

It would be a welcome feature if this could be “BCC’d” instead of “CC’d” as it is quite unusual to CC a random string of characters with an @monday.com email address when communicating with current or potential clients.

On to the next part of our process…

I have set up the new outlook integration (which is awesome by the way). And so any replies that are received from the email address set in the pulse will automatically be added to the updates section of that pulse. Here is where that process breaks down

Unfortunately, because monday.com requires that the pulse ID email address be CC’d into any emails sent by our team, then if a team member subsequently replies to an email sent in from a client, then it will not be added to the updates for that pulse, therefore breaking the record of conversation between our team member and our client.

Here is my suggestion to fix this issue

With the current outlook integration, we can record any received emails that have been sent by the email address recorded in the “email” column to the updates section of the pulse, using the following integration:

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My suggestion is to add the following outlook integration:

When an email is sent to email, add it as an update.

By using this, any emails sent to the client by our team will also be recorded into the updates section of the pulse, thereby giving our entire team an overview of our company’s interactions with the client.

Hopefully, I have explained this well enough, if you require any clarification then let me know and I’ll get back to you. I hope this is something that would be possible, as it would certainly help in convincing our sales team that this is a real solution to the “fully fledged” CRM systems that are currently available on the market.

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Certainly makes sense to me and this would improve our CRM too.

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Hi @scottm!

Thank you for breaking down your workflow. We are working upon improving our CRM capabilities, and I agree that this can be a great addition to the Email integration. I’ve passed this feedback along to my product team to be reviewed :slight_smile:

Lisa

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Hi Lisa,

Anything new?
Can I send email to client when click on email column and all email’s content and attachment files will save in update tab?
Can I reply the update create by automation (when email from email received, add it as an update), it automatically sends out like an normal email?
Can email column can add more than one email? And when I click on that column the email automatically add all email from the email’s column in to receiver on email?

Regards,
Akira

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Hi @akira! Would you be able to use our email integration for this? Is there a reason that wouldn’t work for you? Cheers!

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I already used email integration. You can show my image attachment.
You also show that if I click email column it will create new conversation and when I reply on conversation it is not automatically send email based on email on conversation.

It is very hard for us to following the conversation for each pulse / email subject.

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I too would love to see the email integration track outgoing emails in addition to the current tracking of the incoming emails.
I can suggest a workaround, though it’s a bit “clumsy”:
Add an additional email column, and put the representitive’s email in it.
Add another email automation. on the “email filter” create a rule that the sender is the person that is in email colum A (the rep email), and the reciever is the email address that is in email colum B (the client’s email address), then add it as an update.

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Go to your email settings and create a rule that every outgoing email that you are sending should have your email address in a bcc.
In this way you’re sending an email to yourself every time you send an email. When you send and email to the client that is on email column B, Monday will automatically add it as an update to the relevant pulse.
(Lastley you should add a rule that will take to a hidden outlook file all the emails you sent to yourself. you can add a rule that will delete it all occasionally).
I’m not yet using it bc it’s a little too much of a process, but it is still a working idea… (tested. It works).
Hope I was able to explain it. Let me know if not

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any updates on this?

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Hi Soren!

This item is still on our integration’s team backlog and at the moment we’re unable to provide and estimate as to when they may start analyzing the suggestions, but it is something that has been sent over to them.

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Hi Everyone, I’ve been grappling with this same challenge for a few days and I think I stumbled upon a solution here.

My team wants all emails (sent and received) to show up as pulse updates for the client item. I was about to resort to a convoluted workaround involving Zapier, when I came across this discussion.

NBG’s “clumsy” work around turned out to be much easier than I expected. Essentially, it seems to be working just fine for me without BCC’ing myself. I am using Gmail, not Outlook, so not sure if this makes a difference.

All that I did was follow NBG’s instructions of setting up an additional column on my board that I filled in with my email address for every item. We can call this column “Home Email”. This was in addition to the existing email column, which is unique for each item. We’ll call this column “Client Email”.

I then set up an integration “When an email from this email column is received, add it as an update”. For the first email, I set the filter “Receiver” “includes” “Client Email”.

I set the second part of the rule “from this email column” to “Home Email”.

It seems to be working just beautifully. Only limitation that I’ve identified is that it does not record the update for addresses that are cc’d. They have to be one of the primary recipients. That said, I’ve had no trouble getting emails to post updates to multiple items so long as both “client emails” are included as recipients and not cc’d.

I hope others find this helpful. Big thanks to @NBG for the bones of the solution!

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Hi everyone, I also followed NBG’s work around. It worked but Max’s build on it did not, perhaps because I use Outlook and not Gmail (as Max alluded too).
However, with NMG’s workaround I found the proposed solution also sent emails to all those pulse updates (clients) that did not have an email address listed in their email column (Client email; Some of our leads have yet to have an email linked to them). Obviously this not something that is wanted. To solve this slight issue I put a dummy email into the email column of clients that have yet to be assigned a true email. This solved this particular issue. This is an easy job even for a large number of clients, by sorting on the email column and then using the ‘select’ tick boxes to highlight the rows with blank emails (using shift key to highlight batches at a time) and then insert the dummy email once as a batch. Furthermore, I then used the ‘item default values’ function for the board to ensure all newly added items would have the dummy email added automatically. (this ‘item default values’ button was also used to auto add by own ‘representative email’ to the appropriate column of a new item as required in NMG’s original workaround solution. Hope this helps. . Thanks @NBG, @Max for original discussion.

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Hey Guys,

Wanted to chime into this feed to maybe help provide a solution to this very real issue monday.com faces. I am currently leading a team of developers to help push our monday.com application to the marketplace in the next week or so.

Within this application we offer two features that seem to solve what you guys are facing.

  1. Complete client communication through monday.com updates

    Screen Shot 2020-11-04 at 10.18.57 AM
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    In this screenshot you can see what an email out to a client may look like along with what a reply from a client looks like when added back into your monday.com updates.

  2. The other cool thing my team has created to take this to the next step is custom dynamic footers that can be sent with your emails out to clients.

    Screen Shot 2020-11-04 at 10.21.04 AM
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    In this screenshot you can see where this footer can be changed with custom HTML as well as supports monday.com based user tags so that one footer can fit everyone on your team!

Let me know if this is something that you guys think can fix this problem. When first developing the application this was the main issue we were looking to resolve.

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@Lisa-monday.com what does the Monday.com support team use to manage inbound support requests? From my perspective the user experience is very good. Multiple support team members chime in seamlessly.

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The workaround that I described above oddly seems to only work for us when we set up a “Never send it to Spam” filter in Gmail on all outbound messages. It is mostly still working for us, but has not been a perfect solution. It would be great if Monday offered better native integrations for Gmail & Outlook with this sort of functionality to record inbound AND outbound emails as updates.

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@Lisa-monday.com is there any news on progress for this issue? I am trying to persuade my sales team to switch from their existing deal flow software to Monday but it is essential to them that they can keep a track of email conversations.

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Hi there!

Is there an update on this? I am experiencing the same issue that we dont want the item e-mail to be seen by clients.

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Hello i am following. Is there any update on this? Would really love to use this as a CRM and record all email conversations.

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This is another area I’ve discovered ClickUp outpaces Monday. They now allow you to send and receive emails from within a task/item. You can compose an email, it gets sent to the recipient from your connected gmail or outlook account, and even better when they reply, you’d see that messages as a regular email in your mail client AND the reply thread is magically added to the item because they monitor the conversation in your email box for new replies. This type of functionality is very common in most CRM systems like pipedrive, hubspot etc. It would place Monday at the next level of becoming a true all in one tool that supports sales and customer service use cases more robustly.

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Hi @jk193 they have this now. In beta called communihub. You can ask for demo but it’s not polished yet and Buggy but from what you wrote sounds like the same thing.

I think this can be really nice.
MIT would be also good for an extension in outlook and gmail IMO.

Get an email click add to Monday, box comes up to pick the board abs pulse.
It could auto detect it based on the content and trying to make a suggestion.

20

Hi everyone! As @nealb mentioned, our product team has released an app called CommuniHub that will allow you to send and receive emails from within our platform! :tada:

To find it, simply navigate to your profile picture menu > Apps marketplace and search for CommuniHub. From there, you can install it and try out the included features.

Our product team would greatly appreciate feedback on this as it is a new app, and we want to make it work as effectively as possible for you. Thanks for your patience with us while we worked on this!