Having a single e-mail address as a contact point is a great start, but you need more to solve the problem of fragmented communication, since customers inevitably end up having conversations directly with individuals in the company (and often prefer to, since they then know they're dealing with a real person).
> A better solution might be to automatically save incoming email to the company CRM and also append outgoing messages to the appropriate contact. That way, no-one has to remember to add records. The next step would be to expose that information directly in the email client so employees don't have to go hunting for info (if they can even be bothered).
We've been working on http://noosbox.com/ to solve exactly this problem. It integrates directly into GMail (on Google Apps) or outlook to allow you to save conversations against a specific contact.
> A better solution might be to automatically save incoming email to the company CRM and also append outgoing messages to the appropriate contact. That way, no-one has to remember to add records. The next step would be to expose that information directly in the email client so employees don't have to go hunting for info (if they can even be bothered).
We've been working on http://noosbox.com/ to solve exactly this problem. It integrates directly into GMail (on Google Apps) or outlook to allow you to save conversations against a specific contact.