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Thursday, 11 January 2007
For the last several days, I have been evaluating Top Producer's new email link, the Outlook Connector. The results, in my opinion, are a mixed bag. It does allow Top Producer users to send and receive email using Microsoft Outlook. It should be made clear, however, that any mass emails that the user wants to send will still be sent from Top Producer, not from Outlook. Overall, I would say that the integration and speed are fair, but any agent using the Outlook Connector will get better performance by leaving Outlook open all the time, and minimized when not in use.
What I Liked:
- The user will have the feel of Outlook, including custom columns, lots of folders, the ability to search and find emails and many other Outlook features.
- The option to copy existing Inbox or Sent items to a Top Producer contact's history if that contact exists.
- The option, when composing an email, to send the email through Outlook and copy it to a Top Producer contact's history if that contact(s) exists.
- Attachments in Outlook can be larger than Top Producer attachments.
- In Outlook, attachments can be opened by simply double clicking.
- The Top Producer contact list can be accessed from within Outlook, allowing emails to be sent to TP contacts along with non-contacts.
What I Did Not Care For:
- Outlook can be slow to open; leaving it running helps. It seems to take extra time when it loads the new Top Producer toolbar and connects to the TP database.
- One can only choose Top Producer contacts by First Name, Last Name or Company. In Top Producer, I can select contacts by most any criteria, such as Category Type.
- Once an email is copied to Top Producer, it does not appear to be marked as such. Therefore, it is easy to copy an email more than once, putting it into a contact's history more than once. This can be cleaned up in Top Producer, but it is still an annoyance.
- In Outlook, emails are copied to the appropriate contact by matching up the email address on the email with the primary email address in Top Producer. In Top Producer's email, you can link multiple email addresses (e.g., a contact's home and business email addresses) to the contact record; using Outlook Connector, you cannot do this.
- You must manually link (send) each email message to Top Producer from Outlook every time. In the Top Producer email, you link an email address once, and it automatically puts all future incoming and outgoing emails into the appropriate contact's history.
- Only one message at a time can be copied to Top Producer. Since the Top Producer email automatically links incoming emails to known contacts on arrival, I found this step in Outlook to be particularly cumbersome, especially because you can only copy one email at a time from Outlook to Top Producer.
- You cannot create a contact in Top Producer from within Outlook. If an email cannot be sent to Top Producer because the contact does not exist, you must go back to Top Producer to create the contact, then return to Outlook to copy it over. Again, in Top Producer email, this is all done at one time in one place.
- You cannot jump directly to a Top Producer contact record from an Outlook email. You can do this with the Top Producer email, and I use this feature all the time. If I receive an email in Top Producer that requires me to schedule a follow-up phone call, I can view that contact by viewing their record directly from the email, schedule the call and bounce back to my emails, all in about 20 seconds.
So which is the better way to go? As I said earlier, I find the Outlook Connector to be a mixed bag. If an agent really loves the feel of Outlook, likes to make a lot of email folders and receives a lot of really big attachments that they want to open quickly, then the Outlook Connector might make good sense.
On the other hand, if the automatic integration of email and contacts is important, along with the fact that Top Producer email is web-based and can be accessed from any computer, then staying with the Top Producer email would make more sense. And here are a few considerations in looking at the Outlook Connector advantages:
- Most of the folders that agents make in Outlook are not needed in Top Producer, as Top Producer can automatically link emails to contact histories. Those histories, to me, are better than an email folder.
- Top Producer still allows for rather large attachments. Even though Outlook itself will not limit the size of attachments, the email provider that an agent uses may very well limit attachment size, so an agent should check this out.
- If an agent wants to send out a lot of mass emails, the Outlook Connector does not handle this; you will still mass email through Top Producer.
Personally, I will continue to use the email in Top Producer, as it best matches the way that I work. Many agents may prefer the Outlook Connector for the reasons given. The good news is that you don't have to choose between the two. If an agent signs up for Outlook Connector, they can enable it or disable it as needed with one click of the mouse in Top Producer. And for $75 one time fee (Introductory rate), it won't break the bank to have Top Connector. Finally, like everything else about Top Producer, TP will continue to make changes, additions and improvements to the connector over time.
I hope this "concise review" is helpful for you. Please feel free to contact me if you want to discuss this further.
Regards,
Steve
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