There’s a bunch of options for running corporate grade customer email management, and obviously a bunch of solutions to manage personal email. What I’ve not seen a lot of however is a nice tidy solution that small businesses can use to run their email – to avoid duplication, ensure transparency and generally keep everyone in the loop.

I came across Email Center Pro late last year and have finally gotten around to checking it out (not in any way the fault of ECP – totally due to my own bandwidth constraints). ECP is a solution that helps businesses handle incoming emails from customers. It allows an entire customer services team to work side by side with total visibility and transparency. It’s all about increasing efficiency and productivity and from the brief play I’ve had with it – I’ve found it a cool offering.
ECP has three price levels – their freemium product allows for two users and 1Gb of storage and there are another two pricing breaks with increasing user/storage levels – these tiers are USD19 and USD49 per month.
So how does it work? Once users are set up, they’re part of the organisation and can add notes and have emails assigned to them.

All email is visible by all members but can be assigned to particular team members. Once assigned email can be reassigned, users can add internal notes to the email and (of course) the sender can be replied to
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This then creates a log of all entries against a particular mail – the original email, and replies, internal notes, reassignments etc.
Rather than using mailboxes, ECP leverages tags to allow individual emails to be categorised in various subject areas – for example orders, sales enquiries and support. Users than can view all conversations within particular tags.
Lastly ECP has some nice analytics that allow managers to see email volume, average response times both across the organisation and for individual representatives and peak times for email activity.
Overall Email Center Pro is a nice offering – for businesses handling a reasonably large volume of customer emails it’s a good option. It’s be nice to see it integrated with a system that handles voice enquiries so that an overall customer enquiry system could be created but for businesses handling email predominantly – it’s worth a look.
We use Email Center Pro to support large conference and public events.
We found no other centralized email application that met our needs.
It is a great cloud based application, I highly recommend checking it out.