Here’s the thing: I’m very fond of my email client. Not everyone in the office uses the same email client here, either. My preference for a long time has been Eudora. For various reasons in the past I decided to opt out of using the most obvious choice: Outlook. Partly because Outlook was unstable on one of the computers I once tried to install it on (it wiped out my email several times). And because back in the good old days, Outlook was either suffering from a lot of virus and trojan attacks or Microsoft responded with draconian measures, such as blocking email attachments it decided you weren’t sufficiently ‘responsible’ enough to handle.

One of the interesting features of Eudora in later versions, was the keyboard indexing feature. Meaning that the hundreds of thousands of emails on file at our company could be searched nearly instantly for any combination of keyword matches. Now while this is convenient and useful, this didn’t solve a fundamental problem: organising communications via email software is very free form and unstructured. Unless you can think of the right keywords to use, you may not be able to find what you’re looking for, and even if you do find that email reasonably quickly – without having to wade through too many non-relevant matches – there is very little additional information that can then be easily linked to that message.

And this is what got me to appreciate the CRM based approach to email – and information – management. CRM based information either forces you to better structure the information you have, or organises that information in many useful ways automatically for you. I’ve now been using CAPITAL Sales Force Manager (the CRM companion to our CAPITAL Office suite that we’ve been working on for sometime) exclusively for many months now, and through this experience I’ve come to realise some of the practical deficiencies of traditional email software. And yes, that has meant letting go of my fondness for Eudora.

A case in point was a conversation today I had with one of our helpdesk staff. We wanted to identify who was responsible for the configuration of the computer server that our application software was running on at a particular client site. I started off by typing in the name of the company (just as I would have done had I been using Eudora) but after that, things got a lot more useful.

I located the contact I was after – the IT consultant of this company was on the list of contacts associated with this business, and I could then query the email send history, the date of last contact with this person, this person’s other contact details (such as their mobile number), notes I had made in addition to the email I’d sent, and several documents I’d linked to the account. Had I needed to, I was also only a few clicks away from checking the account’s terms, contract information and other business information.

That’s not to say that traditional emailing software doesn’t have it’s place–it does. Not every message I send or receive needs to go inside the company CRM system. But let’s just say I’ve seen the light and won’t be going back to doing things the old way.