Email integration for CRM use

Ideas & Features Integrations
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@oshyan and I were chatting about the benefit of Fibery for CRM use:

I very much am counting on Fibery to have continued development of CRM functionality, so I thought it would be useful to suggest an Email integration that would serve CRM - it’s one my team is already trying to hack together via API and some workarounds because we really need it!

I’d also like to say that it’s my understanding the former Vizydrop team is focused on integrations, so I’ve wondered if this might be behind the focus on so many lately. So my hope is to get this on the priority list, and perhaps see if there is support here in the community as well!

I am “in the game” with Fibery for the hope of being able to manage all my work needs in one place. As you say on the “Anxiety” page, “maybe Fibery will be good in 2 years” and if you guys can get the “all-in-one” goal done by then, I will come along for that ride! So as pertains to CRM, I have never really seen any good integration with CRM & work management that solves this problem of tracking work, and leads, seamlessly in one tool. It’s a real need in the market. There are numerous integrations across apps like Salesforce/Hubspot/Pipedrive and into Jira/Asana/Wrike, etc. But these integrations don’t really combined enough detail from the respective tools. Teamwork.com even has a CRM and Project Management, but it too is poorly integrated! For example, you can’t easily create a task against a client in the CRM that can be picked up in the Project Management Suite.

A bit part of CRM is the Email correspondence conducted with those leads and clients. One solution to deal with this would be a Gsuite add in that would allow you to push email to Fibery. The email could be tracked as a type, you could even call it “Email,” and each email exchange an Entity therein. This Type would in turn relate to contacts type with each contact an entity. If you have a client with multiple people you deal with roll this up to that client & see all email within the client company. There are a host of other ways this can be set up to provide as good a functionality as any CRM out there, but then when pulled together with other work in Fibery and the Vizydrop reporting, you get some major CRM power within the Work Management app.

I think if Fibery could:

  1. be visible inside Gmail so you could push Emails into Fibery, and
  2. Convert Email neatly into an Entity in a dedicated Type, kind of like what is going on now with the Intercom and Discourse integrations,
  3. With buttons, have the ability to compose a response Email and send it, thereby keeping the whole Email conversation visible in Fibery,

Then you’d be very close to getting this functionality.

This is somewhat related to this request around Email integration as well:

https://community.fibery.io/t/email-integration-email-to-item-filter-comments/761

Thanks!

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Yes to basically all of this!

ClickUp has some useful Gmail integration, and I could see it being way better and more powerful in Fibery. I’d personally like to be able to link any email to any type, though I can see the benefit of having a dedicated email type in Fibery, and this also aligns with how other integrations have been handled so far. So as long as I could then create a task that links to the email entity, and in the email entity is the conversation, or a link to it, it would be OK. But ideally I’d then be able to have some indication in Gmail that a given email has a task associated with it, and if task types are a separate type from email types, this seems to be more complicated (though do-able, e.g. with a reference of sorts).

For my needs Gmail would be great. But of course general CRM would probably want to integrate with other email solutions, bulk sending, etc… It may be a lot to ask. But perhaps once a public and documented API is available other companies could tackle it if interest was sufficient…

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Great! As usual, great synthesis of one of my not-so-succinct requests!

I agree with:

as what I think would happen in my suggestion is the user just creates on his/her own a dedicated type to house the Email, but you could related it to anything you wanted really, as not all use of Email is with CRM.

And for sure would be great to see back in Gmail what is related within Fibery. Some of the more “pure” GSuite integrations - like Asana, Wrike, Atlassian - actually give you a right-pane integration alongside the Native GSuite stuff - so below your Calendar, Keep, Tasks, you get a “Wrike” logo. ClickUp is not there yet although on their forum it is a big request.

And this may be a stretch, but some tools like Hive actually let you run your Email from inside the tool. Not sure how much work that is, but it’s very useful:

That is not a terrible well-rounded app, so if those guys could pull off the integration, I’m sure Fibery could, too, if they saw the benefit.

All in all a lot of work is done by teams in Email to this day, and it’s a big lofty “problem” some apps try to solve, but don’t really. We are already trying to eliminate internal mail by using Fibery Entities, and then comment strings as responses, to handle most of our Internal Email needs. It’s working OK, and is why I just requested this:

because comments are basically how you “respond” to an Entity that you are trying to use to replace an Email. Because otherwise you’d write a response to the Email, right?

So with this going OK, we are now eager to try to handle external Email within Fibery, given most of our work is moving into Fibery slowly but surely!

Thanks again!

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Hi guys!
Telling the truth, that is smth we do really want to have as well. We understand, that this is a crucial feature for all the companies, that focus on sales/hiring for example.
That is smth we are lack as well, telling the truth :face_with_monocle:

So we have that feature in the backlog, but don’t plan to implement it in the nearest future, as for now, we don’t focus on the areas, where this feature is a must.

No promises, no ETA, but yep, we have that in plans :wink:

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This is already possible, in theory, but not in practice.

  1. You can create a label “To Fibery” in Gmail and use Zapier integration to copy them over, by using the “New Labeled Email in Gmail” as the trigger.
  2. Right click email, add label, then max 15 mins later (depending on your Zapier plan) a new entity in Fibery is created.
  3. Use Action button to send last comment as an Email to target.
  4. Use “Find or Create entity” to possibly add replies as comments, although I don’t know if Gmail will auto-label the replies you receive.

As mentioned that is only in theory because Google themselves have a whitelist of approved apps that they allow integration with, and Fibery is not on it. I am also not sure how feasible it is to use Gmail API inside buttons, or if it even is a good idea as all mails will be sent from the account connected to the API key.

Even if it would be possible this way, more work than it’s worth in my opinion :man_shrugging:

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I agree. Can’t use Fibery as a CRM until gmail/email -> Fibery entity issue is implemented

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Yes good points! I thought about doing just that with Zapier to create an Entity in Fibery from the Email via a label, but the rest of the set up, as you suggest, starts to get problematic.

Here’s to hoping this need gets up the priority list, as it would really make Fibery a CRM standout, given the rest of the capabilities of Fibery.

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Hi,

  1. Is there a way to send emails from Fibery and have all the exchanges appear in the Comments section, for instance?

Alternatively, does each item have an “email address” so that I can forward emails to items and have them attached somewhere?

This is an absolute must-have feature if I’m going to be using Fibery as a sales CRM

  1. To expand on that : it would be great to be able to filter the comments section based on activity type (comment, mentions, emails, or even phone calls if you’re going to integrate with tools like Aircall or Ringover in the future). Something similar to what Pipedrive does. This is maybe less critical than 1) but would be a big help.
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Big +1 for your first feature request!
Adding comments to an entity via email is an important feature for CRM AND for ticket related communication with external folks

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Yes specifically want to add a big vote for this. Comments going to Email is some basic functionality it would really be great to get in Fibery soon. It is a really basic need.

I have just posted a separate request specifically around this that is a bit different, but around the same theme.

but it is also absolutely a basic functionality to be able to respond to comments directly from Email. I can’t think of any marquee productivity app that doesn’t have this as a basic feature.

Thanks!

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@mdubakov Will there be any ability to somehow access the created email thread?

It doesn’t have to be anything complicated, I’m guessing when the email is sent you get a response with some kind of ID? Looking at the Gmail API docs this could be the threadId.

Somehow giving us access to that ID in Fibery might allow for:

  • Custom scripts that track the progress of email threads (is it replied to, who replied to last, etc.)
  • No code option of creating a URL field that links to an email thread
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i just want to check back in if email integration is actually doing more than just importing emails as tickets:

  • is there a way to send emails to a contact from within fibery (as it is in clickup for example - one of the features why we chose to go with clickup … but as of really crappy performance now looking into other directions)
  • is it possible to receive emails in a thread linked to an entity in fibery (i have contacts in a very simple crm setup and id like to see emails sent to and from this contact in relation to this)

is this something that is build in or something that can be build with automations?

thanks

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You can send emails as an action in an automation (rule or button)

You can set up auto-relations so that messages in the email integration are linked to contacts based on a matching email address.

https://the.fibery.io/@public/User_Guide/Guide/Set-relations-automatically-aka-auto-linking-50

Matching on sender is easy, matching on recipient less so, since there can theoretically be multiple recipients. If you only expect a single recipient, you can make a formula to convert the collection to a single value, and then match on just that.

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would that make it possible to reply to an email as well?

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You can set up an automation in the Messages db that will create/send an email based on the subject/content of the original message (which is basically what a reply is :blush:)

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i will dig into this, thanks a lot

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I recently created a video on how ClickUp can be used as a help desk which brought to mind how much I would love to build this template in Fibery. The current email as a button/script action solution is missing a few features that would make the experience seamless.
I’d like to recommend these improvements

  1. Integration with the email message type that records links the sent email and the record it was sent from OR email threads as part of the comments
  2. The ability to receive messages from the same thread and have them link back to the original entity/comment thread
  3. If building on top of the existing Email Sync Integration
    a. Email Templates with support for variables/merge fields
    b. A modified list view that shows rich text previews on a new line.
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I think most of those things (maybe other than 3b) can be done with the right rules/automations. It won’t be the prettiest system, but it would be more than functional. I already have something built that’s similar.

My biggest issues with the current email integration is the 60 min sync. Needs to be much more frequent if not instantaneous.

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In today’s release sync interval reduced to 5 mins, but you should change it on your side to apply this new setting

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And threads were added recently too :grin:

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