Make the Inbox feature similar to other messaging apps and inboxes

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I agree! I currently copy and paste information I'd like to stay with the booking, but when I have to search all over for information (my email, OR email and my texts) it's super time consuming. And I only have 1 property! It would be great if all emails originating from an inquiry, quote or booking were contained within OR. Thanks!

taketothelake.com

[Another topic was closed as a duplicate of this topic (Unified Inbox)]

Tim's points are spot on.

I searched for this topic after visiting Twilio and see their solutions for Real Estate.

https://www.twilio.com/en-us/solutions/real-estate

I know that OR is already using Twilio for SMS. Why not leverage that relationship and offer the rest of the Twilio solutions.

I need

One phone number ringing through to the first available agent

One text message screen that all agents can see and act on

One Email thread that all agents can see and act on

And, as Tim suggests, one place to view all phone, text and email conversations with eventual integration of all of the other messaging apps that are available.

Having to search several places is a big time waster.

I would appreciate this, too, please!

Yes, this would be great! Especially if my cohost can sign in and when she responds it would look like she is the one responding and not the main host. Notifications would be the best thing because right now my VA has to hover over Owner Rez inbox to see if we got any messages. It's better if she were to be able to get a notification just like Airbnb and Vrbo do for us. It's critical for timely responses.

I love OwnerRez in general, I really do. To put it bluntly, if you want OwnerRez to be the go-to place for messaging, you need to design it better. Otherwise all that effort is wasted because no-one is going to use it. There is often a disconnect between what a web developer thinks will be handy and what the end-user actually needs.  I hope you will take this seriously coming from an active user.

• Inbox on the main menu, not tucked under CRM with two other rarely-used items Reviews and Contacts. Access needs to be quick, navigating menus is more tedious than you realize. 
• Use a split-screen like all modern email systems do, so I can quickly click through messages looking for anything important. 95% of messages are clutter and do NOT need to be acted on. Your current interface requires me to click each message to mark it Read, or check boxes next to messages then click "Mark As" then click "Read". Tedious and clunky.
• Add Property name so we know which property the message is in relation to.  Also add stay dates.
• Convert AirBNB, VRBO, and SMS to icons.
• Add a "Quick reply" box so we can easily reply without leaving this view.
• Waste less screen space. Make everything tighter.

Here are some marked up screenshots with some suggestions:

These are all great suggestions... one small tweak. I like the Icon idea but we need one column to Identify the platform (ie AirBnB, VRBO, etc) and one to ID the medium (ie email, SMS, Channel Msg, and ideally be able to log Calls and/SMS outside the system be able to add own communication mediums (ie WhatApp) and be able to log communications. Maybe we could start with this latter idea which would at least allow for a manually generated record of all communication and then can add automations one by one to well developed structure.

Also integrate the Conversation and Inbox into a standard view (which includes triggered communication) - one more column could distinguish between manual and automated messages and field would be one more filter so one can filter out triggered messages.

Just this one integrated view with the ability to log messages manually would be a GAME CHANGER - should we create a seperate Feature request for "Manual logged Unified Inbox" as a starter

This is very well laid out and thought out!  Thanks for putting this together.  I second the comments you made.

Where's the "Upvote" button when you need it?

Excellent post!  

As far as status goes, what does "Planned" mean? A Unified Inbox is clearly the most basic, fundamental, mandatory feature of a PMS. How has this not been obvious to OR long before my six years in this business? Someone might ask me, "Knowing that, how can you have justified switching to OR from Hostaway?". Well, because overall I loved the other features and in my onboarding, I was told the unified inbox was imminent, and I believed it because, as I said above - it is the most basic, fundamental, mandatory feature of a PMS.

I was reminded this week of the necessity of getting this done when I didn't have access to my email accounts for a few days. I had access to OR, but a couple of email messages from guests slipped through the cracks resulting in the dreaded "We've been trying to get ahold of you for days!!!" reaction that no host investing in a managed solution wants to - or should ever - hear.

If you are newer to OR like me, here are a couple of suggestions for workarounds from someone who desperately had to find them:

• Minimize your use of email templates, to minimize emailed responses. Channel messages and SMS come to the OR inbox. I had to go through and redo all my templates to make them channel templates. Being able to use HTML in a message is just not worth the risk of missing an email.
• Make sure your System Alerts and Guest emails do not go to the same email account. My fix was to set up a private email domain, once I did so I was able to separate my guest emails (domain email) from my OR system alerts (account profile email?) Important guest communications can be buried by the mass of system alerts if you use one account.

None of these workarounds replaces a unified inbox. I use a PMS because I am busy and I need to make sure nothing slips through the cracks. This is a crack.

And in pleading with OR to move this from "Planned" to "In today's release...". I would offer the words of the sage, Larry the Cable Guy: "Git 'er done!"

Hi Michael - Planned means it's on the near-term official roadmap and our team is preparing to task and schedule it to be done. We're currently refactoring a few things under the hood in preparation for it first. So it's on the roadmap, yes, and highly important, but not yet at the point where we can call it truly "in development."

Any update on the very rough timing for this to get "in development"?

To add as a bonus feature in the future AFTER all of the above is completed - allow exports of all messaging and to run stats on host response times, # of messages received by day / week / hour. :)

Any update on the very rough timing for this to get "in development"?

To add as a bonus feature in the future AFTER all of the above is completed - allow exports of all messaging and to run stats on host response times, # of messages received by day / week / hour. :)

 

 

Yes please!!!

The ability to receive push notifications from OR would be infinitely helpful to me! I don’t want to depend on push notifications from Airbnb/Vrbo, just to miss/not see a message from one of my direct guests until several hours/days later because I didn’t log into OR. I hope the inbox mods include push notifications!

Actually, it's looking like the push notifications will be released first, considerably before the true unified inbox functionality.  With luck you'll have push notification very soon.

Hey everyone! We recently moved this feature to In Development, which is exciting! If you joined the Under the Hood webinar back in April, you also got to see a sneak peek of an earlier version of the inbox's design. However, I wanted to share with you the latest Inbox design (not necessarily final, but very close).

Upon release, the v1 Inbox will handle Channel and SMS messaging (if you have it enabled). Email in the Inbox (incoming and outgoing) will come as a follow-up version, but this gives you an idea of the look and feel of what the Inbox will eventually bring together. The info pane on the right-hand side will be especially useful to give users context of who they are messaging with and what property it is regarding.

We are working hard to release the new inbox as soon as it's ready! Thanks for your input and patience on this exciting development.

Love it, thank you for the sneak peak!

BLESS YOU!  This is SO SO SO needed!  Now of course I have to ask....is the window now days, weeks or months?

I can't share a narrow timeline (as that will backfire on us :-)), but I can safely say this year. We're working on it every week and will share a more definitive release timeframe as soon as possible.

Those are great, succinct suggestions!!  I agree with all the posted pain points. For me the most important and helpful are making the inbox front and center, and adding additional meta to the message preview (platform, stay dates, etc)

Yes, totally agree Seth!  We have just two properties but once I'm in the message typing to the guest I'd like to see the property, dates of the stay, platform message came from, etc.  That's exactly what I came here to suggest!  

Will there be any capability to have team members be given access to the messaging part of the site only? I want to ditch my other unified inbox provider, but I can't do so until I can give my team members the ability to answer and communicate with guests.