SUNNYVALE, CA, February 26, 2008 - Sproutit, a Silicon Valley web based start up providing web based support software, has added PayPal support with Mailroom, its simple web-based help desk software for website email. Mailroom is the first web-based help desk to integrate PayPal support, enabling users to quickly reference purchases made using PayPal while responding to customer emails.

“For a company to offer good customer support, you need to have as much information about your customer as possible” Charles Jolley said, CEO of Sproutit. “Integrating with PayPal just makes sense for a small business. If you can have your customer’s purchase history available when you are answering their email questions, then you are one step ahead of the game.”

Using PayPal’s open application programming interface (API), Sproutit will tie incoming sales and support email addresses of customers to their transactions with that vendor. The PayPal support feature will be made available to current and new Mailroom accounts that subscribe to the $19 per month plan, and above.

PayPal, the global leader in online payment solutions with more than 164 million accounts worldwide, is currently used on over 100,000 websites, in addition to the largest online auction site, eBay, to process payments.

Mailroom by Sproutit is a web-based email help desk application designed specifically to help companies manage website email. Integrating with both PayPal and Basecamp, Mailroom provides companies the most complete and affordable help desk solution for website email.

Founded in 2005, Sunnyvale based Sproutit creates web-based help desk software for website email. With thousands of clients, Sproutit caters to web app companies, e-commerce websites, non-profits and political campaigns.

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Chris Bauman
Sproutit
chris@sproutit.com

From time to time I get a chance to actually meet in person, some of our clients. When that happens I am very eager to hear what they have to say about Sproutit, Mailroom and how they tackle the inevitable job of support. So, I sat down for a bit of fish ‘n chips with Ryan MacCarthy, co-founder of Uloop, and picked his brain.

What is Uloop?

Uloop is an online classifieds platform for colleges.

Classifieds? But, what makes you different than every city’s newspaper online classifieds?

We have created a college specific classified site that thousands of students are using to sell textbooks, find roommates, events, housing, full-time and part-time jobs, internships and even rides home. Take textbooks, for example. Not too many people using the local Herald, or Times will be needing the same biology text book.

So, what are the audiences and customers that you deal with

99% of our support comes from students. It is a mixture of feedback, suggestions, comments, and problems. We also work with employers to provide college specific job postings and housing management to provide housing listings for students.

Do the responses that you provide take on a certain tone and feel?

Absolutely. We make it a point to respond to every single email that we get. We try to be very straight up with students and respond with a casual, and youthful tone. Many of the ideas we build in, come straight from the student feedback. But, if we don’t think an idea is beneficial to more than one person, we’ll let them know what we think.

What do you think is the best feature of Mailroom? Why?

By far it is the multiple user support. This way, we don’t have to have a specific support person, but we can share the load. And, this also closes the gap between the students making requests and the team that creates new features. Less is lost in the middle and keeps our whole team more connected with our users.

Got a favorite company for support?

I like Apple. It fits they way I live.

Well, ready or not, here it comes. Introducing Mailroom 2.0, the fastest, easiest way to handle your sales and support email. Mailroom 2.0 is an all new application in many ways. We rewrote our entire interface as an advanced JavaScript application, which means it feels almost like you have a desktop application running in your web browser.

We’ve also made an incredible number of other number improvements. I’m going to post more about this later today, but for now I just want to say that this is the best version of Mailroom we’ve ever produced and I’m incredibly excited to finally get to share it with you. I think you are really going to love the changes we’ve made to this product.

Now, this new version of Mailroom has required some massive changes to the database that holds your email. We want to ensure the safety of your data, so we are bringing things back online in stages. Because of that, there are a couple of things I want you to know about the next few days:

First, we are bringing accounts back online one at a time as we get each of them upgraded. We are bringing paid accounts back online first and free accounts thereafter based on when you last logged in (so if you haven’t used your account in a while, it might be the afternoon before you have access again.) If you go to your account and it says you are still being upgraded, come back again in a few hours and try again. It will probably be available. We are doing this as fast as we can, I promise. We have over a million messages to go through through. It’s a big job.

Also, when you do get access to your account, we are upgrading some stats used for More About and the People page separately. So the conversation counts on these pages might be wrong for part of today. They should be back to normal by the end of the day, however. We could have waited until this was ready to activate your account, but we thought you would prefer to have your email.

Finally, we are expecting to receive a higher than normal level of traffic over the next few days. While we are going to do our best to keep your service as fast as possible, we really appreciate your patience as you have to share your server with some extra visitors. We will be adding resources and making improvements actively over the next few days to keep up with the demand as it hits us.

Mailroom 2.0 has been a long time in the making. In many ways, it is really the first realization of the vision we had for a polished, well designed business tool for small businesses when we started Sproutit two years ago. We think you’re going to love it and we would love to hear from you when you try it. Send us your raves and feedback at contact@sproutit.com and we’ll get right back to you. (Using Mailroom of course.)

Cheers, -Charles

I just wanted to take a moment to thank on of our vendors, Unfuddle. Unfuddle provides a hosted bug tracking service. They even host your source code if you want them to.

I promised erwin a more in-depth look at what’s coming with MR2 within a week or two. That was a few days ago, so now here it is: The first public demonstration of Mailroom 2, coming in January from Sproutit:

It’s not very flashy. I did something quick so I could actually get it out to you and get back to the project. I’d love to hear your thoughts on it though (especially if you are excited about the updates. ;-)

Cheers!

Speed has always been one of the most important areas for Mailroom. Our goal is to help you get through your email as fast as possible so you can get onto other things. We’ve been making steady improvements in this area since our launch and this next release will be no exception.

This blog has been a ghost-town lately, and I apologize for that. The reason is that we have been pretty heads down for the last several months working on some major upgrades to Mailroom and (gasp) another app. We’re not alone actually. Some of our friends from Omnidrive and Riya took some time from their blogs this summer to get some work done.

But that is about to change. Over the next few weeks I’ll post a bit more about the features coming with our new release. Mailroom is getting a major overhaul, so big we’ve sometimes internally been calling this “Mailroom 2.0”.

More soon…

When we explain to people what we are building at Sproutit (especially when we talk about our next product), they often nod their heads and say “right, its like CRM”.

Sproutit is not CRM. CRM is about helping you keep all the information you have about prospects and customers organized. It’s about tracking sales pipelines, or verifying sales track records.

CRM is about management, Sproutit is about caring for your customers. It’s about helping you make sure that every experience your customers have with you is personal, timely, and helpful. Sproutit is about making you look good to your customer.

That’s the reason Mailroom is designed the way it is. For example, Mailroom does not issue “ticket numbers” or anything like that for emails your receive from customers. Instead, Mailroom tracks conversations just like tickets in other systems, but every email you send through Mailroom will appear personal and individual to your customers.

Ticket numbers are the waiting lines of the internet; they make the customer feel like you don’t care enough to give them individual attention. Mailroom emails, on the other hand, are like private consultations. They send the message to your customers that you really care about them.

The same thing goes for our More About feature. Sure, other systems make it possible for you to dig up all the emails you or anyone else have exchanged with a person, but only Mailroom puts a summary of that info right next to the email when you view it along with a picture of the person if we have it.

Context and personality means better service. It puts you in the right frame of mind to treat your customer like a person even if you never meet them face to face.

Sproutit is not CRM.

Well, its been a long time coming, but we finally rolled out attachments support for Mailroom last Friday! We’ve been testing it this weekend, and so far things seem to be working great. If you’ve been waiting on attachments to give Mailroom a try, now is a great time to give it another go.

In addition to attachments, we’ve also made some other major upgrades to Mailroom in the last few weeks. Our latest deployment adds forwarding to the Cc and Bcc support we added a month ago. We also moved Mailroom to new servers, sped up the UI, reduced the time it takes to receive new email to under a minute (for emails sent directly to Mailroom), and made some massive improvements to our spam filter.

We’re really glad to have these features finally out, and especially excited to get started on our next round of improvements. We have some new things planned with our UI, suggested replies, and assignment features that I think you are going to love.

Special thanks to Shanti, Peter, and Rob (at OCS Solutions) for all the hard work you put into making these changes the last few months. This has been a big project.

As always, thanks everyone for your tremendous support. We are anxious to hear your thoughts on our recent improvements. Please give it a try and drop us a line anytime.

One of the best ways to make a product viral is to put your branding on your product or service so that when other people see your customers using it, they will learn about you also. Apple does this with their trademark white logo on the back of their laptops. Hotmail does this with the free ad at the bottom of their emails. DropSend does this with their website. (when you use it to share files, those you share with see the logo and learn of the service)

This biggest problem with this strategy for businesses though, is that most businesses don’t want your branding visible to their customers. Your heaviest users in particular – the ones who would most likely spread the word about your – are also the ones who are most willing to pay a little extra to have your branding removed from their site.

Carson Systems, the people behind DropSend, for example, recently introduced a new business plan that costs quite a bit more but offers the option to custom brand your site. Ryan says they’ve seen some great uptake for this new plan, but at what expense?

How do you get small businesses who use your service to tell others about your service without compromising on delivering your customers what they want?

You may have noticed that our blog has been a little empty for the last month or so. For that, I am very sorry but we do have a good excuse (actually several). All of us have been very heads down the last two months working on some big changes for Sproutit and Mailroom both. We’ll be talking a lot more about these changes in the coming weeks, but here are a few of the things we’ve been doing:

Peter, Chris and Charles are sponsoring a meetup in San Diego prior to the Simple Business Workshop.

The meetup will take place on Sunday, July 23rd at 8:00 p.m. at the Aero Club Bar, located at 3365 India Street.

We’ve arranged for Happy Hour prices all night and the first 25 drinks will be on us.

I’ve been busy talking with bloggers and journalists in the San Diego area about the upcoming Simple Business Workshop in San Diego.

If you’re a blogger or journalist who’d like to write about the Workshop, drop me a line and I’ll give you any information you need and even set up interviews with the perpetrators if you’d like.

San Diego is a bit of a homecoming for Charles, Chris and Peter who met in that city’s Point Loma Nazarene University MBA program. Their connection to the city, their experiences living and creating a business abroad and their involvement both with independent business and with online software development are all elements that make an interesting story.

Indigo Moon Systems mentions us along with some other easy business tools. I like his description of Sproutit Mailroom:

I just came across this one-it’s not free, but it’s interesting and I have at least one current client I’m going to recommend it to. It’s an online automated e-mail management system, using basic artificial intelligence to receive and sort mail coming in to common addresses (like “sales” or “support”) and automatically produce recommended replies, reducing the time to manage each individual piece of mail. This has long been a function available in helpdesk software, but that’s either very expensive or very complicated to implement-this is entirely web-based, easy to get started with, easy to quit if it doesn’t work well.

Being back in Houston has a few great advantages. I get to see my family, an Astros’ game, old high school friends at my reunion and Tex-Mex food. But something that I am very excited about is getting to attend another BarCamp. BarCamp Houston is happening on June 10 at the Buddah Lounge. If it anything like the BarCamp Austin experience, it should be great fun. So go to the BarCamp Houston site and sign up! I’ll see you there.