First and foremost, you need a team of people that are tired of the frustration of email, and ready to think about how it can work differently for your team. Sound like your group?
Beyond that, to get the most out of Charlie you'll need to connect it to your email provider (so that your emails can get into Charlie) and to a source of information about the people you speak with by email. In most businesses, this is a Client Relationship Management (CRM) system, Practice Management (PM) system, or some other systematic client and/or contact list.ย
Tip: To keep things simple, in Charlie we collectively refer to these various types of client and/or non-client contact lists as your CRM.
Email Provider
Charlie can automatically set up email ingestion for businesses who host their team's email in Google's G Suite environment. When you connect your Gmail account, Charlie starts to automatically import your emails in as they arrive in and send from your Gmail account.
For businesses not using G Suite, a server configuration is required to automatically send a copy of all emails to Charlie. If you require this setup, get in touch and we're happy to help!
We'll be adding automatic connection for other email providers in the near future, so stay tuned for announcements that your favourite email provider is now available, or get in touch to talk about a custom integration.
CRM Provider
Charlie needs a source of client and contact data in order to determine how your emails should be stored and segmented. Without this connection, Charlie can't determine the privacy level of a message and therefore emails in Charlie are only shown to their original participants (which isn't all that helpful for collaboration!). That's why setting up a connection to your CRM is one of the first steps of creating your team.
At present, Charlie integrates with the following CRM systems:
Xero
In addition, connections for the following CRMs are coming soon:
Xero Practice Manager
Zendesk Sell
Salesforce
We're always on the lookout for new CRMs to integrate with, so if your CRM isn't listed get in touch to talk about adding support for it.