Why we built an email helpdesk in Trello
People still send emails.
Although millions of teams use tools like Trello, Basecamp, or Asana to collaborate and get work done, work often starts and ends with a plain old email.
And dealing with email can be challenging, especially for teams with shared email addresses like support@, sales@ and accounts@. Using Gmail or Outlook to collaborate and respond can get messy (Ugh!).
Larger teams might use email helpdesk software like Zendesk or Freshdesk, but these tools are all about email. Unless you’re a full time email support agent, you end up using one tool for email and another tool for coordinating your tasks and collaborating with teammates.
So whether you’re using a personal email client or a fancy helpdesk, email is often disconnected from where work actually happens.
There are solutions that try to bridge the gap.
For instance, Jira is a project management suite that includes a helpdesk. Zendesk and Freshdesk both have integrations to Trello and Basecamp. There are Gmail plugins that let you link emails to tasks in Asana. But the solutions we’ve tried in the past still felt disconnected. And other options we’ve looked at are too expensive or too prescriptive of how work should be done.
Trello is a visual collaboration tool for managing projects.
The teams I work with use Trello for almost everything.
I guess because it’s so quick, easy-to-use and flexible. Trello might seem too basic for some teams, but we’ve found that (like many things) it depends on how you use it. And although a handful of external stakeholders join our Trello boards, most of them engage with us via email.
“Our team loves Trello but our customers use email — why don’t we integrate the two?”
My co-founder (@rohland)had this idea about a year ago. I still remember the phone call like it was yesterday — “Why don’t we integrate Trello and email?”. He’d already started looking at how it might be achieved.
Trello have a Power-Up ecosystem that was exactly what we needed. We could build our own Trello Power-Up to provide the bridge between email and Trello. We soon started prototyping solutions and designing how it might come together as a product. We settled on the name ‘SendBoard’ — a Power-Up that would let you send email to and from a Trello board.
The idea was pretty simple.
SendBoard would connect an email address to a Trello board. Teams could get up and running using a SendBoard email address like help@example.sendboard.com. But with some simple email forwarding rules, they could link up their own custom email address like help@example.com.
With setup complete, they could start dealing with emails directly in Trello.
Receive Emails — New emails would appear as cards on your Trello board, with smart logic to group conversations.
Collaborate — you could use the processes and Power-Ups you were already familiar with to get work done in Trello.
Reply — See the full thread of email messages and internal notes, then reply without leaving Trello.
We had a working prototype within a few months.
We started using it to power our own IT helpdesk, and learned a lot through the process. SendBoard was evolving every week. We ironed out bugs, improved usability and started preparing to release SendBoard publicly.
We also rolled out SendBoard to more teams in our own business.
Customer Support emails (help@…)
Accounts and billing emails (accounts@… )
General emails to the team (info@…)
Sales and order requests (sales@…)
Job applications (jobs@…)
Feedback from our teams was hugely positive.
They were more organised, less distracted, and we could tell that replies were going out quicker. Trello is so fast and easy to use that we actually found ourselves enjoying the process of dealing with email.
We launched SendBoard in September 2019.
It’s now live in the Trello Power-Up directory, and over 1000 accounts have signed up. It’s being used by all kinds of organisations, and we’re feeling really encouraged by the feedback we’ve received from users so far.
Here’s an example of Sendboard in action:
Replying to an email in Trello with SendBoard
What’s next?
We’re super excited about the future.
We thought we were creating a very specific solution to let people reply to emails from within Trello. But in using SendBoard ourselves, and getting feedback from other users, we’ve realised this is just the start. Sendboard is unlocking a huge range of opportunities through leveraging Butler and many other Trello features and Power-Ups. It’s much more than just an email help desk in Trello. With emails now in Trello, we’re doing more collaboration, more automation, more integration and getting better reporting on our email effectiveness. It’s changing the way we work.
There’s so much to talk about that we launched a publication on Medium.
We’re not just going to write about SendBoard and our journey building the business. We’ve got tons to share about what we’re learning through using Trello and SendBoard on a daily basis.
If you want to see how SendBoard works, you can find it in the Trello Power-Up directory. Happy emailing!
