Two Mailroom Tricks

Since they launched, I’ve used Mailroom to handle customer support email for my company. Mailroom is awesome because it learns your replies and automatically suggests them to future inquiries. After a couple of major upgrades and some mismanagement on our part, the service had broken down for us and we went back to the manual method of replying to each email.

I missed that automation so yesterday I decided to start fresh with their 2.0 product and learned a couple of tricks with help from Charles:

1. Personalized Responses – in the FAQ, SproutIt explains you can insert tags to address your recipient by name with %RECIPIENT_FIRST% and %RECIPIENT_LAST%. But you can also sign your email with %SENDER_FIRST% and %SENDER_LAST% which picks up on your user information. This is useful if you have more than one person answering emails.
2. Tag Grouping – We were creating long and somewhat unwieldy tag names like QuestionForOrganizer or RefundsAndCancellations. If you create your tags with a colon like organizer:Question or attendee:Cancellation, the pop-up tag selector will create groups so that everything prefixed with “organizer” is in one section and everything prefixed with “attendee” is in another. This makes finding and selecting the appropriate tag faster. I wish tags would retain their mixed case for readability and have requested an enhancement.

Do you have any Mailroom tips? If you haven’t used Mailroom and find yourself replying to similar inquiries repeatedly, you definitely should try it out. They have free and $10/mo accounts making it very startup and entrepreneur friendly. It would also be good for people who run small open source or free software projects.