Etacts Brings CRM-Like Features To Gmail

I’m not really sure how this bad boy managed to slip under my radar but, Etacts is yet another Gmail add-on that will provide some degree of social network information and CRM-like features to your contact records. It is available as an add-on for FireFox, an extension for Chrome, or you can drag a button to your browser toolbar if you are using something else. Etacts would compete with other add-ons for Gmail like Gist and Rapportive. That being said, it does have some rather unique features.

Like Gist and unlike Rapportive, Etacts does require a separate account to be set up. This main site then becomes your dashboard where you can view emails you have sent that are awaiting reply, create messages to multiple contacts, or look more closely at contact records. All of this does require that you allow Etacts to connect to, and sync with, your Gmail records. The real power, ideally, comes from the direct interface with your Gmail inbox ….

Here’s a little closer look at each of the elements…….

Etacts has correctly identified my contact’s Twitter, FaceBook and LinkedIn profiles and those badges are live links. Recent email conversations are shown on the right (like Gist and Xobni for Outlook) but those are not links. Recent Tweets are also displayed and you do have the ability to correct the Twitter user name if it is not for the right person or to add one in manually (nice). Tweets are not live links. Like Rapportive (and unlike Gist), FaceBook updates are not displayed. For that matter, and this is the case with most add-ons I have used, Etacts may have trouble finding and identifying networks. For example, it has not found my FaceBook profile which is something that Rapportive also had difficulty with.  From what I can tell, there is no provision to manually add networks. There is a place to add notes to a record (also found on Rapportive) which is pretty sweet and Etacts also gives me a running total of messages exchanged as well as phone calls. Problem is, I can’t figure out where it would get the phone call info as I can’t find a place to even manually log that information. I am suspecting maybe … Google Voice although there is an option to connect to AT&T.

Etacts does provide for a few features that I do find very interesting. There is a “Stay In Touch” button where you can set a frequency of of call backs with this contact say weekly or monthly etc.. It also ranks your contacts based on importance.

There are a couple of other nice features though that are not found in either Gist or Rapportive. When I compose an email, I can double left click on any of the email addresses in my “To”: field and I get this which is the same info displayed in emails in my inbox ….

That’s pretty sweet! I can see what a contact is talking about, NOW, before I email them. This is/will be a necessary and highly desirable function of a good Social CRM. You can also tell Etacts to remind you to check on this email in a day or two to confirm that you have received a reply. Nice.

There is an option to display “All Contacts” but, I’ll be damned it I can get it to work? After several tries, I am convinced that this is a contact import issue and further investigation shows this to be a known issue that was last addressed four months ago on Get Satisfaction with a promise to “fix this right away”. Since then, people keep posting that it has not been fixed. This has totally crippled the value of the “Stay In Touch” button. However, on the brighter side, it’s not even stable. LOL. I have to constantly refresh my pages as it seems to disappear and then reappear for no particular reason. I might even be wrong about a lot of things but, their website contains little if any information and I have emailed support three times since Thursday without a single reply. By contrast, Rapportive and Gist offer the best customer service that I have seen with any application.

The bottom line for me has to be that this is a product with huge potential. They have all the makings of something really nice and have a very nice interface to go with it. But, not yet ready for prime time. I’ll be watching them though.

Thanks for visiting!

Craig

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