Last week we showed agileChilli‘s new Supplier Approval application to a number of customers and partners. It’s written using the agileBase platform to help food manufacturers audit new and existing suppliers, automating, documenting and speeding up the process.

We had some great feedback, validating the core ideas and suggesting some lovely features to add. For example:

Good seeing you today and the new update to software.

Been thinking about the software. Building on the feedback to suppliers. I know of some system that you can send emails from the UI that then track their return. […] As long as the recipient returns the email […] it pulls it in to the software. (thinking about something like that for our CRM module).

Not sure if it can be done, but would be a very handy tool for auto tracking supplier communication.

Not sure if this is any help, but thought it worth dropping you a note.

Whilst some customers have set up their systems like that, it previously only covered certain scenarios and required their in-house IT administrators to make changes to their email systems.

We’ve now simplified the process so this will work out of the box for anyone.

It’ll be a great feature not just for this particular use, but for any and all CRM applications built on the agileBase platform, so can benefit existing and new customers.

Improving email deliverability

With the above focus on sending and receiving emails automatically, ensuring they’re received properly becomes more important. We’ve done a lot of research on helping stop legitimate emails being mistakenly marked as spam and have taken a number of measures to help this, e.g. adding automated ‘unsubscribe’ functionality.

One important addition is the facility for customers to use their own email servers to send the emails. This allows them to use their own trusted systems, authenticated against their domain names, for example services like AuthSmtp, SendGrid or Amazon Simple Email Service.

As another partner told us,

Adding to option for our own smtp settings would be ideal. […]

If there was an option in Agile somewhere for our client to use their own SMTP settings that would be idea.

To set this up, please see the new ‘company’ link under Administration in the administrator interface.

Thanks to everyone for all the feedback and keep it coming!