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Best Practices for Clients with Specific Email Address Requests

  • 19 August 2022
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Curious what your best practices are for situations where customers have specific requests for what email address you use for certain types of items. We have a number of customers that would like us to email them to their personal email addresses for specific items, and business addresses for other specific items, but it is not cut and dry. We are not emailing ‘all personal items’ to their personal email address, and ‘all business-related items’ to their business email address. This seems to be most specifically when someone else may have access to their business email address, so they want something business-related sent to their personal email address.

It is quite difficult to manage these requests across customers, despite our best efforts, and aside from adding notes to every work item or the timeline there’s no super clear way to add this information that will be accessible when a colleague is emailing that customer, an inevitably we don’t do a perfect job at choosing the correct email 100% of the time. 

I don’t know if it would ever be possible to tag each email address associated with a client for the types of items each email address should receive. In the meantime, how are you best dealing with this issue (if it is something you are faced with)?

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Best answer by jens 19 August 2022, 16:31

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Userlevel 6
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Thank you everyone! So many great ideas here! Glad to know we are not alone in our struggles :)

Userlevel 7
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We leave notes like this in the description area of the details tab for all clients.  We also label the emails with tags like:

Johnsmith@whatever Husband

Joansmith@whatever  Wife (preferred personal contact)

smithinc@whatever - business requests

If there is a specific client that wants emails sent to specific places, everyone on the team knows to check the details tab before sending.

We also make Groups.  We have one contact couple where you are only allowed to contact the wife for X companies and the husband for Y companies.  They also have personal tasks and companies that either can respond to.  So we have a master group called Smith Group where everyone is listed and then subgroups Smith Group - John, Smith Group - Joan, and Smith Group - John & Joan. Check the group tag and details tab to see where you need to send information.

 

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@Victoria Peters I like your idea with the * in the name and work order.  That’s very creative!  You have my brain working now!  If you utilize this, I’d love to hear how it works for your team.

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@Kim Clemmer This gives me anxiety!  We don’t deal with it often but when we do we will have a slip up along the way, almost guaranteed.  

@Victoria Peters 100%! 😫

Userlevel 7
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@Kim Clemmer This gives me anxiety!  We don’t deal with it often but when we do we will have a slip up along the way, almost guaranteed.  

I do find that the drop down list of suggested contacts to email is helpful when creating an email but you still need to know exactly who to pick.  Max’s suggestion is a great work around.  

It feels like it is more of a process thing more than something that could be sorted through the Karbon platform beyond having the information available - we don’t always remember to check the information we have available.

Unless, and I am just thinking out loud here - you added your own kind of tag to both the email and item.  

  • Clients preferred email has a * after his first name and the work order title also has a * so your team knows that whenever they are emailing from that work order they choose the email with the *.  

Hmmmm, maybe could work...

 

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@Kim Clemmer We ran into a similar issue with one of our clients and handled it just like Max mentioned. Our situation was a little more consistent though. They wanted all financial information sent to only their personal address and all other info sent to a business address checked by an admin assistant. We added additional info to the contact names in Karbon to differentiate them. They looked like this:

  • John Smith - Financials
  • John Smith - Meetings
Userlevel 7
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Hi @Kim Clemmer, this isn’t something we deal with on a regular basis.

One option you might have is to create multiple person contacts for the client and attach the work to the appropriate client and connect clients and work to a client group for tracking. No an elegant solution, but it may help.

I’m curious what others suggest.

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