Meet Alex and Evan, two of the dedicated ECP programmers who used to get woken up at 2:00 in the morning with alerts that the servers were struggling to handle all of your mail. These days, they’re a lot more rested.

The most recent improvements to Email Center Pro are largely behind-the-scenes upgrades that help you serve your customers faster and more reliably.

More helpful Search results

One change you can actually see is in the Search function. We noticed that a lot of our users were using search for “names@domain”, rather than opening the Contacts tab to look specifically for people.

You’ll see that the Search box on the top right of your Email Center Pro screen now contains an arrow. Click the arrow next time you’re using the search, and use the drop-down menu to focus your search results on emails, contacts, templates, or tagged conversations.

1. Open Firefox 3.x.
2. Log into your Email Center Pro account.
3. Paste the following code snippet into the address bar (NOTE: you should replace “paloalto.emailcenterpro.com” with your actual Email Center Pro account domain name. Also, if you have SSL enabled, the protocol should be https instead of simply http): javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto","http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#%s","Email Center Pro") and hit Enter.
4. Click the “Add Application” button on the info bar that shows up just above the browser viewport to allow Email Center Pro to handle the mailto links.
5. The next time you click on a mailto link in the browser, it will prompt you to make a choice.  Select Email Center Pro and choose “Remember my choice for mailto links” if you would like to skip this step next time.  These settings can be updated at any time by viewing Tools > Options > Applications and searching for the Content Type of “mailto”.

That’s it!  If you’ve made it this far, you’ll now be able to spawn a new ECP message by clicking on the mailto link in your browser.  Another thing to note is that the ECP message will open in the same window, so it may be useful to right-click on the mailto link and choose “Open link in new tab”.  Go ahead and send us a message and let us know how it worked!

Alex Boone
ECP Developer

Email Marketing Campaigns
Our partners at VerticalResponse help you grow your business with targeted email marketing campaigns. With a single click, you can now automatically create lists for your email marketing campaigns from any group of Email Center Pro Contacts. Then, track your lists and campaigns in a dedicated VerticalResponse Dashboard widget.

Live Chatting
With the growth of online interaction, more and more customers expect live online chat capabilities as part of the customer experience. In addition to real-time tracking of email conversations, users with a Velaro chat account can now see live online chat details in the new Velaro Dashboard widget. Log in and view chat transcripts, send customers a record of the chat from your Email Center Pro address for future reference, or even look up other email conversations with that customer, all with a single click!

Dazzle them with your speed!
Paid accounts can now add a Response Time Badge to their websites, announcing to the world how fast your customer response time is for any mailbox in your account. Whether you want to intimidate the competition or just applaud your customer service team, the Response Time Badge shows that you understand the value of your customers’ time.

Our solution was an online form which prompts customers for each bit of information we need in order to solve their problem or meet their needs on THEIR timeframe – ASAP. Of course, as a software company, we have a full-time staff of Web-savvy programmers, but now this sort of innovation is available even for very small businesses.

This week, Email Center Pro has released an update which includes a new Dashboard widget for tracking results of your online forms from FormSpring. FormSpring allows businesses and organizations an easy way to build any type of online form, integrate it with their website and begin collecting data in digital format.

To see the new widget:

1. Open your Email Center Pro Dashboard
2. Click Add More Widgets at the top left of the screen
3. Scroll through the list and find the FormSpring widget
4. Click Add This Widget

If you already have a FormSpring account, just enter your API key to log in and see your responses. If you don’t have an account yet, you can sign up right in the widget. Isn’t it nice to get your customer interactions in their best form ever?

Palo Alto Software is pleased to announce that we are now one step closer to closing that email loop, with the integration of a new widget which lets Email Center Pro users access key data from their VerticalResponse email campaigns, right in the Email Center Pro Dashboard.

To see the new widget:

1. Open your Email Center Pro Dashboard
2. Click Add More Widgets at the top left of the screen
3. Scroll through the list and find the VerticalResponse widget
4. Click Add This Widget 

Once added, you will need to log in with your VerticalResponse email address to see summaries of your mailing lists and campaigns.

If you don’t yet have a VerticalResponse account, you can sign up directly from the widget, and get 250 free email credits and 50 free survey credits.

You can learn more about VerticalResponse and how they can help you manage your email campaigns at the VerticalResponse website.

1. Open any mailbox or Saved Search
2. Click the Subject or Date column
3. You can click again to reverse the sort order
4. Scroll through the list to find a specific message
5. Click the message to open that conversation

• More users
• A tad more recognition
• The chance to impact more businesses

The challenges in the face of all that positivity are things like performance optimization and growth management. And the sign of a product or service that’s coming of age is the opportunity to tackle these challenges and emerge from them stronger for it.

Email Center Pro began its first genuine stint of product maturation a few weeks ago when our capacity to serve butted up against the demands of our users.

Quite frankly, it was terrific. The situation allowed us to learn a couple of things:

• We operate very effectively under a bit of duress
• It’s nice to be a SaaS — Internet-hosted — product, as it allows for big buckets of agility
• Focusing on optimization does wonders for Email Center Pro

Email Center Pro undergoes regular performance tuning, but never before had we drilled down on optimization with such laser-like precision. And it’s the users who win as now the service is faster and more responsive then ever before.

Oh, and the last thing we learned is that Email Center Pro has a rocking, passionate team driving it. And that’s a reason to use it, if nothing else convinces you.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager

Jake Weatherly, Vice President of Customer Experience

Jake Weatherly, our Vice President of Customer Experience, has asked his team to share some of their experiences using Email Center Pro to improve customer service at Palo Alto Software. Here’s what they had to say:

Casi Deatherage: It’s about customer service

On a daily basis, Email Center Pro plays a huge role in boosting my level of customer service expertise. Our first duty is to answer each customer professionally and ensure they have a pleasant experience with our company. Read more…

Shawnie Gartman: Accountability and transparency built in

Email Center Pro certainly makes my job a lot easier. I arrive an hour before any of my coworkers. Because I am first in the office, I am the first to jump into ECP. My job is to equally distribute the incoming mail to my fellow team members. ECP makes this a seamless task. Read more…

Desiree Norton: Teamwork with a click of the mouse

The collaboration tools in Email Center Pro are what I appreciate and use the most. My team and I are in Email Center Pro every day answering inbound messages. We are able to easily collaborate with the features of Email Center Pro. Read more…

Steve Weersing: If only we’d had this before!

While Email Center Pro cannot solve all of the institutional challenges in such a textbook case of a company mired in its own indecision and lack of direction, it can help greatly to reduce many of the incremental delays that can accumulate at each step in the cycle of communication. This in itself can make a critical difference in nailing down pending deals that are “on the fence.” Read more…

Jay Snider: So easy to get started

The best thing about learning to use Email Center Pro was how easy it was. Not only was the training time really just a matter of minutes, but once up to speed in ECP, it made training for my job much easier. Our extensive collection of templates allowed me to start responding to customers much more quickly than I might have otherwise. With common questions coming in all the time, quick keyword searches of the templates allowed me to respond with confidence. And when I was ready to start answering the phones as well, I could handle those same questions because I was familiar with the answers from having used the templates. Read more…

I’m enjoying my Email Center Pro solution, which gives me some email addresses I can use to load my lists and brainstorm ideas from whatever email address is most convenient. That includes my iPhone’s email, so I can get to it from almost wherever I am.

You can see that best from this screen shot:

So, for example,

• when it occurred to me — I was waiting for an appointment — that this would be a good blog post, I emailed it to my blog@sample.emailcenterpro.com address (and that’s a fake address, doh).
• And when I remembered, at lunch, that I need to get an appointment for getting the car fixed, I emailed a list to my email at todo@sample.emailcenterpro.com.
• And when I’m working at the computer, take a call, and need to remind myself to call somebody else, I send that one to the calls@ emailcenterpro address.

Each of these special emails is very easy to set up. I don’t have to ask our IT person for a new mailbox on the company server. I just do it in about one minute from the mailboxes tab of the account manager.

So when I want to refer back to these lists, they’re right there in the dashboard of my Email Center Pro email account.

Simple and easy.

– Tim

I’ll warn you ahead of time, this post was written for programmers. If you’re an Email Center Pro end user, you probably don’t need to look at this. If you’ve never written a line of code in your life, you’re probably better off just skipping this article or handing it off to someone else.

If you’re the brave sort, keep reading.

Here is a screenshot from inside of our Email Center Pro backend. From time to time we may need to contact the person who holds the account for whatever reason- billing issues, to follow up with a phone call, or sometimes just to say “hi”. In its current form, it takes a few clicks to get there. Every time we want to contact an account owner we have to go through the long and arduous task of click, drag, copy, change tab, compose, click “To” field, paste.  Let’s get this down to one click.

All you need to do to is output a link that looks like this:

<a href="http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#mailto:emailcenterpro@paloalto.com" target="_blank">emailcenterpro@paloalto.com</a>

(I’ve bolded the parts you’ll need to change.) By adding the #mailto:emailcenterpro@paloalto.com to the link, we tell Email Center Pro that we want to create a new email addressed to emailcenterpro@paloalto.com. We can add a link to this address, dynamically populating the URL part, so that we get something like this:

Clicking that link leads us here:

Wow! One click, and we’re ready to compose an email. We’re already saving time! Not a lot, but every second counts.

Without much more work, you can do some very powerful things. Sometimes we get calls from people who signed up for Email Center Pro but they’ve lost the email they got when they signed up, and they can’t remember the URL or user name that they signed up for/with. We send this sort of email fairly often, so we have a template for it in Email Center Pro. The template explains what URL to go to, tells them the user name they signed up for, and gives them information on how to change their password.

We can look the account up using the user’s email address or company name, but then to actually get the information to the account owner, we have to: copy the email address, change tab, compose, paste the email address, type a subject, load a template, change a few words in the template (username and URL), and finally send. That’s a lot of mouse clicks and keystrokes. How could we speed this up?

First, let’s pick a subject to use. “Your account information” sounds pretty good. To add this to our link, we’ll just add it as a parameter to our URL:

http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#mailto:emailcenterpro@paloalto.com?subject=Your account information

I’ve bolded the new part. To be totally correct, we should escape those spaces, but most modern browsers will do this automatically. Plus, it reads better without %20 everywhere.

Now, we’re going to find the ID of the template we use. To do this, open the template for editing, and look in your address bar.

You’ll see something like this:

http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#templateId=afd17f09-e615-3e92-48eb-534bc28ca27c

The bolded part is what we’re interested in. It’s the templateId, a globally unique identifier (GUID) that identifies this template. We’ll add this to our URL also:

http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#mailto:emailcenterpro@paloalto.com?subject=Your account information&templateId=afd17f09-e615-3e92-48eb-534bc28ca27c

Great! We’re almost there. We don’t have to type the subject or select the template anymore, but we still have to copy and paste the user’s information into the email. This is where our newest feature, Input Fields, come in handy.

Remember what our template looked like?

The rows of underscores are the cue to replace part of the template. We updated the template to use Input Fields, now it looks like this:

See the Input Fields? They look like normal words, but they’re surrounded by {curly braces}. We don’t need to configure these anywhere, just add them in as needed. You can fill these out in the interface, or you can pass in values from the URL like this:

http://paloalto.emailcenterpro.com/Client#mailto:emailcenterpro@paloalto.com?subject=Your account information&templateId=afd17f09-e615-3e92-48eb-534bc28ca27c&name=Evan&subdomain=paloalto&username=admin

Clicking this link will automatically fill in the Input Fields.

Now we can just click “Send” and we’ve managed to shrink a long, multi-step process into just a few clicks. We can easily add this link into our admin panel, automatically pulling the details from our database.