Lots of things can happen when a job is done well. Here are a few:

1. Personal satisfaction
2. Sales for your company (or yourself)
3. Preservation of the natural “buying-selling” ecosystem
4. Unsolicited praise from your client base

This particular post is about number four. Every once in a while, a user of your product or service might find themselves so overwhelmed by the quality you provide that they decide to take matters into their own hands.

It happened to Email Center Pro the other day. One of the service’s users ( Jennifer Haubein of Websites 2 Grow) decided that telling us how impressed she was no longer sufficed. She wanted to tell others in her circle of influence.

Here’s what she said:

And here’s why she said it (in other words, here are some simple rules for soliciting unsolicited praise. Please note that simple doesn’t mean easy.):

1. Customer Service: If this sounds cliche to you, then you’re not managing it correctly. It’s not a cliche, it’s the bottom line. Customer service can look very different depending on the situation at hand. At all times, however, keep the customer in mind. Zappos did; they just sold for nearly $1 billion. I’m just saying.

2. Customer Support: The customer is using your product/service, you’re meeting their service needs and then something goes wrong. Do you hide and distribute the blame? Or do you step up and meet their need at every turn? (Please note that this can blur quite appropriately with customer service.)

3. A High-Quality Service/Product: This speaks for itself — somewhat. You certainly can’t get away with a sub-par product or an inconsistent service, but just know that even good (rather than amazing) products/services can enjoy success if attention is paid to the other numbers in this list.

4. Did I Mention Customer Service?: This can’t be understated. Be remarkable. It works. The most uplifting emails and calls received at Palo Alto Software are by those who were even more impressed with our service and support than with our product.

Happy soliciting!

Jason Gallic
Product Manager for Email Center Pro

Tags: customer service, Email Center Pro, evangelism
Posted on August 12th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

Today, Palo Alto Software got a taste of good business practice (and you just got a bad taste of pun).

The team at FormSpring not only integrated our customer email management service, Email Center Pro (a process we’ve been working on for a couple of months), but they sent us a cake from the best bakery in Eugene, OR, to announce it.

That makes this short post about three things:

1) Good business etiquette: Both companies have worked diligently to connect FormSpring and Email Center Pro. Now that the integration is complete, sending a gift — particularly a cake — makes an impressive statement.

2) Solid marketing approach: FormSpring sent a cake. Here’s the blog post to prove it. You can also find chatter about it on Twitter. And the buzz around the office is not due exclusively to the chocolate. Want to have an impact, be remarkable.

3) A very useful integration: FormSpring is an easy and efficient way to collect data online using customizable forms. It’s a terrific way to begin — or continue — a relationship with a customer. Email Center Pro is a customer email management tool, and serves as a tool for developing relationships. Together, they create a powerful solution. Learn more about it here.

All that said, I’m not 100 percent sure that free cake is good for productivity. I considered being more eloquent in this post. Then I realized that there’s cake here.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager
Email Center Pro

Tags: Email Center Pro, FormSpring, partnerships
Posted on August 5th, 2009 | 4 Comments »

Email is one of those things that people talk A LOT about fixing. It makes a terrific virtual water cooler topic because it meets the following requirements:

1. It’s draining
2. It’s incessant
3. Almost everyone has a suggestion about how to manage it

I’m going to go out on a limb and postulate that you’ve faced a few email issues of your own. How do you manage it, both personally and professionally? How do you use it to provide the kind of customer service you’d like to be known for? How do you support your brand with email?

These are all big questions, some with intuitive answers and others that require a bit more thoughtful digging. If that’s not digging that you’re interested in doing, you’re in luck. We’re handling that for you at the Email Center Pro blog.

Of particular interest might be a recent series we completed, entitled “Stop the Madness: Manage Email to Grow Your Business”. The posts provide insight on things like brand identity and the value that you provide through email. If you’re trying to figure out how to make better use of the time you spend wrestling with this communication channel, the Email Center Pro blog is the place to do it.

If you just want some interesting insights and a bit of a light-hearted look at email, you’ll find that there, too. We’d like to think that we’re a full-service solution.

Jason Gallic,
Product Manager, Email Center Pro

Tags: Email Center Pro
Posted on June 4th, 2009 | 1 Comment »

It’s nice when Guy Kawasaki writes about/alludes to/makes cursory mention of the product or service into which you pour a significant portion of your waking hours.

It means more than enjoying an influx of traffic to your website (a handy side-effect, no doubt). It’s also an encouraging validation that you’re taking some steps in the right direction. This is especially true when the praise comes for the method of evangelism as well as for the actual product or service.

Guy has built an ecosystem of success based as much on evangelism methodology as on the services he creates. Truemors, for instance, is a cool concept. But the story of how it came to be might actually be better known. Kawasaki built, developed and registered the site for a few thousand dollars.

So it’s nice when he folds your technique into his own as he did in this article that features Email Center Pro.

It’s an added bonus when the topic at hand is something about which we’re so passionate: Telling the story of our service as quickly, succinctly and creatively as possible. This is something on which every small business should focus. The marketplace is more crowded than ever. It’s vital to explain in two minutes or less what you do and why that matters.

Jason Gallic
Product Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: email, Email Center Pro, Guy Kawasaki, Marketing, video
Posted on March 20th, 2009 | No Comments »

Every so often (a rather ambiguous date range, don’t you think?) the demise of email is predicted.

It’s a pain.

It’s a spam-laden nightmare.

It’s archaic and clunky.

It’s possible that you, too, see email through this lens. But I’m going to hazard a guess and say that, regardless, email is still an essential part of your business and of your life.

In fact, I’ll go a step further: Without email, your overall communication plan (business or personal) would be irrevocably stunted. This is nothing to be ashamed of (though it seems many are). Without the keyless entry on my car, I’d drop a lot more groceries. I don’t think this makes me a bad person.

The latest fad in the “email is dead” game is to claim that social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace will replace traditional email. Status updates, it is said, will suffice for passing along the critical information that travels through email. Check out this BBC article to prove it.

If this appears to be a sleek, trendy, agile solution to the headaches associated with email, well, it’s a bit premature. There is a long list of interesting and useful business applications possible with social networks. Conveying developed pieces of information necessary both internally and externally as part of the business process is not one of them.

That’s still the job of email.

• Email is a place where you get more than 140 characters to decode your message (unlike Twitter, for instance).
• Traditional email (as opposed to Facebook messages, for instance) is a credible, go-to business communication channel. It’s still a vehicle for CEOs to reach out to one another and for customer service reps to personally engage your customers.
• With 210 billion messages sent every day (a large percentage spam, I know), email is a part of our communication fabric, tied undeniably to much of what we do.

Want to make email even more useful? Check out some tips and tricks by clicking here.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager

Tags: communication, email, Email Center Pro, emailcenterpro
Posted on March 17th, 2009 | No Comments »

This is a time of year when family and good cheer should take precedence over work and things like email monitoring. Many of us will step away from our inboxes and turn our focus on real boxes — those containing gifts.

Of course that’s not to say that messages aren’t going to continue materializing in your inbox. In fact, you might even get a few good ones — potential leads, perhaps.

Given that fact, it’s impractical to consider stepping away from the mess entirely — as recommended in this Lifehacker.com blog post. This might work for the few of us who can afford to pass by viable opportunities or for those among us who don’t place a premium on customer service.

But for the rest of us, it would be nice to find a solution built to distribute the workload of customer and business email so that when one person steps away from her inbox, others can pick up the slack — and see that no opportunity is missed.

For instance, Email Center Pro was designed to manage exactly this scenario. By centralizing all of your email in a single, transparent location, there’s no longer a need for one person to manage all of it.

And that means that you can step away from your business email with a peace of mind — because you know that messages are no longer piling up in eager anticipation of your return. Instead what’s piling up is leads.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager
jason@paloalto.com

Tags: Email Center Pro, email overload, lost leads, managing email, vacation email
Posted on December 19th, 2008 | No Comments »

Taking a little time out here to make a couple announcements:

1)  We had a bit of an issue with our blog and some of you were not getting any of the blog posts in your RSS feeds for a while. We’ve fixed that and you should be able to see all of them now. We apologize for the rush of posts all at once, but hope you enjoy all the great “new” content you missed! Things should be smooth sailing from here on out.

2)  We’re going to be participating in the Global Entrepreneurship Week, November 17th-23rd. We’re getting all the specifics put together, but I’m going to give you a sneak peek!

Keep checking back for more details and some outstanding articles and posts all centered around getting back to the basics of your business. (If you’re interested in attending Tim Berry’s webinar on the 17th, make sure to register soon! It’s first come first serve and space is limited! Click the picture for more information.)

3) Palo Alto Software’s product Email Center Pro has released version 2.0!   Internally, several Palo Alto Software employee’s are participating in a “solidarity experiement” where we’ve all committed to … well, I’ll let Jason tell you all about it. Head over to our Dead-Simple Software blog to read all about the things we’ve decided to give up or do in the coming weeks.

That’s it! That wasn’t so bad now, was it?

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

Tags: business planning, Email Center Pro, email management, global entrepreneurship week, Palo Alto Software News, Plan as you go, roller skates
Posted on October 16th, 2008 | No Comments »

October 3, 2008

We’ll be showcasing our new Email Center Pro product at the forthcoming Future of Web Apps Expo, in London on October -10. The FOWA Expo will feature a number of well known speakers including Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Mike Butcher of Techcrunch UK & Ireland, as well as Julie Meyer of Ariadne Capital.

If you are in the vicinity of Excel London and want to attend, be sure to register and to visit us on Stand 12.

Alan Gleeson

Palo Alto Software U.K.

Tags: Email Center Pro
Posted on October 3rd, 2008 | No Comments »

The science behind email behavior is extensive, I’m sure, and not something that I purport to know much about, from a factual standpoint. Most of the email-based thoughts and assumptions I make throughout my day are driven by a fair bit of intuitiveness — with a dash and a half of instinct and a peppering of intelligence gathering.

I would hazard a guess that most people fall into my category — that is, if they think at all about email as anything more thhan simply a communication medium.

But not Kaitlin “Ducky” Sherwood. You can click on her name to read her full bio, but I’ll give you enough information to establish context. She’s written two books on overcoming email overload, was the first Webmaster at the University of Illinois (during the Mosaic creation days) and just recently earned an MS in Computer Science.

I got to spend an hour on the phone with her, aggressively asking for her opinion on email and cautiously tip-toeing into her thoughts on Email Center Pro.

Sherwood speaks with confident conviction about all manner of topics, but, for my purposes, focused most of her energy on email. Much of what was said centered around the idea that, as yet, the perfect email system doesn’t exist. And the reason for that is that no provider is meeting all of Sherwood’s standards — many of which have to do with efficiently and effectiveely moving through email in a reasonably organized way.

She chuckles at the notion of “Inbox Zero,” the popular concept that basically mystifies people into thinking they’ve properly dealt with all of their messages just by clearning their inbox. But, have they? Have they adequately addressed that communication channel, or have they simply shifted it from one place to another so as to better manage the guilt associated with 100 unread messages?

Sherwood argues for the latter, asserting that the psychology of seeing “0″ as an Inbox tally is ggiven disproportionate weight in relationship to proper management of email as a communication vehicle — creating a false sense of security, if you will.

Much of that, Sherwood continues, is driven by the passionate pursuit of perfect filtering. Users constantly seeking to compartmentalize the various buckets of information flowing into their Inboxes chew up time that can’t possibly be recovered through the convenience associated with “more easily” scanning through those folders.

In essence, filters/folders/etc. are not effective means of organizing data — given the existence of an uber-powerful search function. Wiith the reality of virtually limitless data storage, it no longer makes efficient sense to try to organize things the way we needed to when filing cabinets held all of our pertinent paper work. Without proper paper management, I might lose a week looking for a single document. Now, I type “2006 tax returns” into the search bar and PRESTO!

In light of that, it’s comforting to know that an advanced search functionality provides the infrastructure for version 2 of Email Center Pro, which is scheduled for release in the next couple of weeks.

So, do the psychological aspects of email resonate with you? Do you struggle against the rising tide of email overload? What is your method for managing your inbox?

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager
jason@paloalto.com

Tags: , e-mail, email, Email Center Pro, organization
Posted on September 25th, 2008 | No Comments »

I was in San Francisco two weeks ago for Office 2.0 conference. The effort was the third installment of Ismael Gahlimi’s pledge to bring together leading minds in the Web 2.0 space for a 3-day discussion about moving the duties associated with work off of the hard drive and onto the Internet — exclusively.

That means all of it, from data storage to accounting, and everything in between. It’s a radical shift in concept. Moving all of a business’ operations into “the clouds” gives pause to some (data security junkies) and brings smiles to others (whomever might be concerned about the bottom line).

Whatever your feeling about moving organizational functionality into a hosted state, the fact that it’s gaining momentum is impossible to deny.

Thankfully for those of you who need to use email (please don’t overlook the sarcasm there), Email Center Pro is a product with its eye on “the clouds”. And that’s probably one reason I felt so at ease while scrolling through the demo booths last week in San Francisco. Yes, there were plenty of cool applications on display. But were any of them attempting to do to email what we are? No, not that I could tell.

With a rich feature set that’s only sweetening as we approach the public release of version 2, it was nice to see that Email Center Pro might be standing in the gap between the obligation of email and the genuine usability of a collaborative tool.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager

Tags: business email, cloud computing, collaboration, email, Email Center Pro, hosted software, SaaS
Posted on September 15th, 2008 | No Comments »