Outreach allows you to proactively reach out to employees and external partners directly from Back, avoiding the need to jump between Back and your email client, and helping you keep all the relevant conversations in one place.
Messages can be sent via email to one or more recipients, with replies automatically being turned into individual requests.
Reaching out through Back
Send a new message from the Outreach section in the sidebar.
For each message you can specify:
Which team should this message be sent from
Who are the Recipients – you can include both employees as well as any external partners
Who should be included in Cc
What is the Subject and Body of the message
For the body you can use one of your Saved replies
Upload any file attachments to be sent with the message
💁🏻♀️ As replies will be automatically delivered to your team in Back, you don't have to include the team email in Cc.
Message delivery
The message will be delivered as a single email to all the recipients and Cc. When you specify more than one recipient they will be included in the emails Bcc field to ensure the privacy of each recipient. When you only specify one recipient, they will be included in To. This means that Each recipient will only see themselves and whoever is in Cc.
From messages to requests
When a recipient replies to a message sent from outreach, Back will automatically create a request in the same team to be able to continue the conversation. A separate request will be created for each recipient that replies to the message.
You can see which messages have been replied to in the list, and find links to all the requests in the message detail.
💁🏻♀️ While messages from outreach are always delivered via email, once a request is created for the recipient further notifications will be sent according to their preferred notification channel.
When to use Outreach?
When should one use Outreach compared to simply creating a request on someone's behalf? For example, some of the use cases that we had in mind were:
When you need to reach out to an external vendor
When you want to send a welcome message to a new employee
When you want to send an announcement to current employees
In these cases, there is no question or request upfront and it's more natural to start the conversation with a simple message instead of creating a request.
Creating a request on someone's behalf is useful when you already know there is a specific question, service request, or task that needs to be done, and that the employee already communicated to you, e.g. during an in-person conversation.