Most Cirrus Insight customers say that the app helps to speed up your daily workflow and help you be more productive. Typically, you’ll see a 2-3x increase in email output! And, being able to see this increased activity in Salesforce is sure to keep managers happy.
But some users do notice a difference in performance of the inbox after downloading Cirrus Insight. If so, there are a couple of important things to understand, and some easy ways to help speed it up!
Note: These tricks can help speed up your inbox even if you’re not currently a Cirrus Insight user.
First, Remember It’s Worth It!
If you are used to vanilla Gmail or Outlook (without any Salesforce-connecting apps like Cirrus Insight), then adding Cirrus Insight might seem slower, initially. By default, it will not be 100% as fast as vanilla Gmail/Outlook. This is because Cirrus Insight is working hard to pull in data from your CRM in real-time. This data must travel hundreds or thousands of miles to reach your inbox.
So while our app might not seem as fast as vanilla Gmail/Outlook, it’s worth putting in the time to make you more productive overall.
Having this data right in your inbox saves you the time drain of having to copy and paste customer email addresses to look up records in Salesforce. It will save you having to sift through data to find the info you are looking for (ie conversation history), and you won’t have to switch back to Outlook or Gmail from Salesforce to continue the conversation.
With features like email templates and follow up reminders, you will find yourself working through a list of follow ups, and a full inbox, much faster. We also give you features like email tracking which will enable you to work smarter (not harder) and have insight into what makes your process successful.
All that said, your inbox is working harder. Below are some reasons that you might notice a slightly slower inbox experience, and ways you can easily improve it.
Slow Internet Speed
First and foremost, you’ll want to make sure your internet connection is providing 20 Mbps or higher download speed. You can easily test your connection speed here.
Most people have access to 50 Mbps or higher now in 2017. However, if you work on a wireless network and are sharing bandwidth with multiple devices, wireless routers can struggle to prioritize requests appropriately.
For example, if one person starts to download a software update for their Mac or start streaming an HD video, other people on the network might suffer slow internet speeds.
If you are not getting reliable internet speeds, speak with your network admin.
Too Little RAM
It’s important to also have enough RAM on your computer to handle today’s applications’ demands on your computer.
RAM is available memory for your computer to manage multiple tasks at once. 8GB of RAM is currently the benchmark for having great performance in your browser and in your inbox.
You can follow steps here to see how much RAM your computer has.
Multiple Programs or External Monitors
If you have multiple applications open on your computer, you are making it harder for your browser or inbox to work. Each application with take up a certain amount of RAM. Even using an external monitor can take up RAM and slow you down.
So, consider closing out those other programs you don’t need to be using for your current project.
Google Chrome Issues
Google Chrome is notorious for using available RAM! That’s OK if you have enough RAM to handle it. But if you have 8GB of RAM or less, you’ll want to limit the amount of tabs you keep open in Chrome.
There are other steps you can take to reduce Chrome’s weight on your computer such as clearing disk space or disabling non-essential browser extensions.
Gmail Conversation View
Many people that use Gmail also enable Conversation View which, unlike a traditional inbox, will group message threads together, which can provide even more context.
However, Gmail does not having a setting to control if these threads are collapsed or not when working and opening them. This means that if you open a large thread, your browser is forced to load all the messages in the thread. This can slow down your inbox considerably, even in vanilla Gmail.
Try disabling Conversation View, and you’ll see that Gmail runs much faster.
Note: We are also working to improve our compatibility with Conversation View.
Outlook vs. Webmail
If you use Outlook, it is much more important for you to stay on top of your updates, whether that’s Cirrus Insight updates, drivers, or operating system updates.
You can make sure you are on the latest Cirrus Insight version by going into Cirrus Insight’s settings.
You’ll also want to make sure you don’t have conflicting plug-ins. Remove anything that is non-essential!
If you are still experiencing slowness in Outlook, there are other steps you can take to speed up your machine.
We Want to Help Make You Faster!
Our engineers have designed Cirrus to move data as fast and efficiently as possible, and we are constantly working to improve the service.
If you have questions about best practices, or even notice something that you think could be improved, we are here and listening to you.