Email Template Flaw / Shortcoming
There are many use cases to send an email from inside a specific record (person or deal) to another party (vendor, referral partner, outside partner). These would include status updates, outside vendor orders needed to process a deal won, or a simple thank you's to others attached to the deal.
These emailed orders and updates are more productive when we can use templates to insert key data about the person or deal we are working on.
Pipedrive is the first CRM in 20 years that can't do this. Even Goldmine installed on my desktop in the 90s could perform this basic idea. Here's the design flaw:
Currently, if I'm inside a record (person or deal) and open an email, it defaults to that person's email address (which is fine). Next, when I launch the initial template, the data I need for the order or update populates fine. Still no problems... yet. The problem occurs when I try to send that update or order to someone else. When I delete the defaulted email address and replace it with the email of my vendor or referral partner the template breaks. In that minute, the data from the record that I'm still in disappears. The data from the record of the vendor or referral partner being updated is replaced in the template.. even though I've never left the record I'm trying to perform work for. Your engineers seem to think this is good functionality and told me the workaround is to not have records for my vendors and referral partners in Pipedrive, so there is no competing record to break the template. Since I work with the same vendors and referral partners over and over... it's kind of important I have them in my CRM so that's not a good 'workaround'.
If the template pulled the data from the record we were inside and didn't update if a new email address replaced the defaulted email address, we'd be in business.
Keeping email connected to the record it was sent from, even when being sent to an outside party would be a bonus.
I'm confident your users would find a myriad of use cases for updating these two pieces of functionality since communication about a deal is not limited to the sole person.
Your support team has videos demonstrating what I'm talking about and your engineers verified it.
Comments
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Thanks for bringing this up. Wanted to suggest this feature for a long time.
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Hi @Bobby Welch , thank you for your feedback, we appreciate it and how clearly you stated your use case, it really helps us understand.
I’ll discuss your comments with our team and share your concerns. My apologies that you're not having an ideal experience, I understand your frustration. Although I can't promise anything, I'll make sure to forward your suggestions internally so our team can consider it for future developments.
PS - We'd like to ask you to please not use the "What's New?" or "What's Planned?" topics in your posts: they are read-only topics used by Pipedrive to communicate updates to our community members. I have removed them from your post and replaced them with more pertinent topics. Thank you!
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Just had this very same conversation with support a few minutes ago. I first became aware of the issue two years ago and am surprised it is still an issue now in 2023. -- The work around seems to be creating custom fields, duplicating data and then managing that duplicate data. IMO, that defeats much of the purpose of using a CRM like this. From a user's perspective, being able to quickly / easily pull and share contact information for something as simple as a template email seems like very basic functionality that would not be unreasonable to expect from CRM platform.
I cannot imagine that there aren't MANY users that need this functionality. So, I am very curious as to why this is and why it still has not been addressed. Is it because it would interfere with some other future feature on the roadmap? Was it just an early design oversight that is too difficult to correct in the current architecture? Am I wrong and there aren't that many users that expect this functionality?
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