I keep on meeting cool people doing these One User Per Week interviews. James was no exception.

First, James lives in the UK. Xobni has a lot of international users, with the UK holding first place outside the USA. After I managed to add some more Skype credit to my Skype iPhone app, I was able to call over to England and have a nice chat with James.

James does sales for a large media company. He specifically sells into the British Government. He described his job as “pretty basic sales, lots of contacts, lots of emails, and lots of relationships to manage.”

The Ideal Xobni User

James sounds like an ideal Xobni user – and it ends up he is more than just that. James is the Xobni Champion within his company. He was the first to discover Xobni and now he has over 40 people in his 80 person office hooked on Xobni. The one bad thing is that all of his coworkers act as if he works for Xobni. He hears all of their feature requests and bug reports. As a company, we can’t thank people like James enough for what they’ve helped us do.

Compliments, Bugs, and Feature Requests

Just like most user calls, James had both compliments, a few bugs, and lots of feature requests. James had one compliment that I made sure to write down word for word, he said “Xobni opened up my archive of email, I can easily reach back and pluck and email from 2 years ago.” When asked, James admits to having over 40,000 emails in his inbox. He has accumulated those emails over 4 years, and if he doesn’t have to file or delete emails, he doesn’t. With Xobni he doesn’t have to. James described his historical emails as his greatest asset within his job, and Xobni makes that asset accessible.

James did have some requests: he wants to delete whole profiles from Xobni – some people he just simply doesn’t need to communicate with ever again, and he’d rather them just not show up in search results. James also found it hard to reset a Facebook profile for a contact after he had already selected wrong Facebook profile for a contact. Xobni allows this, but we need to make it more obvious.

A Great Efficiency Tip From James

James gave me a good tip that I could share with other Xobni emailers out there. He said that Xobni’s fast search and conversation view has changed his behavior. He now writes emails to himself, and uses the subject line of the email to “tag” the email with relevant keywords. This way he can always go back and find an old note by looking at his own Xobni profile and filtering the subject lines in the conversation view. Nice tip!

Sharing The Xobni Love

Finally, James told me of one other common instance when Xobni shines. James will be on a call with a customer, and they’ll be discussing some previous conversation or contract. James can hear the customer typing away on their keyboard – looking through folders in Outlook, attempting to use Outlook’s prehistoric search function, and scrolling through months of email. James is calm and collected on the other side of the phone line – armed with Xobni. He simply says “I have that conversation right here – would you like me to resend it to you?” And more often than he can count he also offers another helpful suggestion “If you haven’t heard of Xobni for Outlook, you should download it. Xobni is the word “inbox” spelled backwards, and it will make your job much easier.”