One of the major things we’re working on as a company is convergence – and, specifically, how we can make our services work better together. Recently, we introduced the SmartZone® Communications Center, which was born from our focus on convergence and enhancing our customers’ communications experience.
In a nutshell, SmartZone is the one place where you can access your email, Comcast Digital Voice voice mail, call logs, calling features, and a "universal address book" with all your contacts’ information in one convenient location.
Since the time we rolled out SmartZone to all our customers earlier this year, we’ve received a ton of feedback (yes, we’re listening, keep it coming!) on what you like, don’t like, what works well, and what doesn’t work so well. We’ve taken your feedback and have already begun fixing and enhancing SmartZone based on your comments. To date, we have fixed and enhanced many areas of SmartZone reported directly by you. For example, earlier this year we released fixes for the problems with forwarding email with embedded images (our bad!) and the ability to sort by ‘from’ in the inbox (our bad again!). Additionally, we’ve enhanced the system by allowing you to stay logged into SmartZone for up to 2 weeks (yes, remember me, finally!) without having to sign in every time you access SmartZone via Comcast.net. These are just a couple examples of the many more changes we’ve made based on your feedback and what you can expect to come as we address the areas important to you.
So what is coming? Well, we have plans to release some exciting and very useful changes to the system that have been requested directly from all of you. For instance, in early July, we’re releasing a feature that allows you to expand your email screen for the entire browser session by collapsing the ad space on the right hand side of the screen. No more of the screen jumping back and forth when you click on an email (yeah!). Shortly after, we will be releasing usability enhancements like improving the readability of email by increasing font size and spacing and implementing email and voice mail preview on Comcast.net so you can get to email and voice mail quicker.
This is just the tip of the iceberg as we work on rolling out many more convenient features such as: allowing secondary email users to access voice mail, call logs, and calling features, a Calendar tab directly in SmartZone, a security feature that certifies email so you can trust the authenticity of the sender, and much more.
Last, we see a lot of questions and requests from customers for features which exist today in SmartZone. Did you know you can address an email by simply typing in the name or email address of recipient in the To: field and SmartZone will suggest matches directly from your address book? Did you know you can drag and drop email to the trash folder? Did you know you can right click on an email to mark it as read or unread? Did you know there is a SmartZone Lite version? Did you know you can access email from other 3rd party email accounts like Yahoo, Gmail, and AOL in SmartZone? Yes, no, maybe? To learn more, take a look at the SmartZone tutorial and link to SZ Lite tutorial that goes into great detail of all the great SmartZone capabilities available today. Take a look, it just may help answer some questions you may have.
Well, that’s it for now but I’ll be back soon enough but keep the feedback coming as we’re constantly working to provide the best experience possible! Let us know what you would like to see in SmartZone - access your email on your TV? Email notifications on your PC? – you tell us, we’re listening.