Email Management for Customer Service Teams

Customer Service teams typically receive inbound emails from a variety of sources. There are customers who have questions, feedback, complaints or issues they need resolved. There are vendors and partners who are reaching out with notifications about their services or questions about yours. There are also other departments you are coming to your teams with questions or issues of their own.

The IDI platform lets you take control of these emails by providing a unified interface to manage, track and respond to them. When the Unsolicited Email feature is enabled in the IDI platform, the system will create a Ticket for each new inbound email that is received. Using the capabilities in the Tickets module to manage these communications will let your teams respond faster, better and improve your overall customer experience.

How Unsolicited Email Tracking Works

Unsolicited Email tracking uses the IDI Communications module. More information on enabling, configuring and utilizing Communications functionality can be found here.

Configuring Unsolicited Email

In the Tickets module, you can enable or disable Unsolicited Email tracking. When it is enabled you must provide two critical pieces of information:
Email Address – The mailbox address that IDI will monitor for incoming emails. To enable Communications your company will already have been required to create and register an email domain with the IDI platform. The mailbox address will need to be in this subdomain and will look something like contact@support.iditel.com.
New Ticket Properties – When a new incoming email is detected the system will create a new Ticket. The Ticket type, priority, assignee and other default properties are specified.

Routing Emails to CostGuard

Once the IDI platform is ready to track emails you will need to update the ways that customers are contacting you. This may include update contact forms on web sites, changing MailTo links, updating address books or any other source were the old email addresses you used were published.

New Ticket Created

When people start sending their emails to the new address CostGuard will open an Email Ticket for each one received. Customer Service Teams.

Managing Emails in Tickets

The Tickets module helps teams efficiently resolve their work items and helps managers gain insight into the types of communications that they are receiving. Here is an overview of what capabilities are available to assist with this:

Properties on Tickets

1. Action Date – Sets the expectation you have for when a rep will start working on the response.

2. Commit Date- Sets the expectation for resolving the conversation.

3. Categories- Allows you to classify the nature of the communication. Classifications helps guide users on the proper response and allows managers to put metrics to the types of communications.

4. Assigned – Responsibility to replying to a sender can be assigned to persons, groups or escalated to other teams.

5. Status – Use statuses to track the response through its lifecycle. A typical response lifecycle would be something like Open -> In Process -> Resolved -> Closed.

Tickets Features

Communications – View and respond to customer emails from the Ticket. All threads in the conversation are automatically added to the Ticket. Users can Reply, Reply All, Forward and browse through all threads across all of the Ticket conversations.

Email Templates – Predefine responses and automate inserting account specific information into your response.

Journals – Add notes to the Ticket to document the work that you did formulating your response or record information for others.

Workflow- Responses that require business processes, work from other teams or follow a complex resolution path can utilize Workflows to automate that work.

Active Tickets Dashboard – Quickly see what Tickets are open and still awaiting resolution. Quick actions allow users to manage tickets right from the Dashboard.

Setting up the Dashboard for your Teams

The Tickets module lets multiple teams work at the same time but filter the workspace to only displays items they each are responsible for.

Creating Dashboard Filters for Email Management

Configuring the Dashboard to display email tickets an individual team is responsible for is done by creating a Dashboard filter.

The fields to filter on are:

Ticket Class = Email – This will filter out other Ticket classes such as customer or equipment tickets

Facilitator = <Your Team> – This will display all Tickets your team is ultimately responsible for. Facilitator can be more useful than Assigned To because it will still display Tickets your team has escalated to other groups. If your company is not using the Facilitator field then Assigned To may work instead.

If your team is using other classification fields such as Ticket Type or Categories to distinguish responsibility between groups then those can be added to the filter as well.

The Active Ticket Graphs can be filtered as well by Ticket Class.

Matching Email Senders to Customer Accounts

When an unsolicited email is received the IDI platform will attempt to match the email address of the sender to a Primary or Billing Contact on a customer account. If a unique match is found, the customer account is assigned to the Email Ticket. If no unique match is found the customer field is left blank however a user can assign an account if they determine once they work the Ticket that the sender is an existing customer.

Advanced Configuration

The Configuration screen by default only allows for specifying a single inbound mailbox and set of new Ticket properties. Creating Email Tracking for additional mailboxes or creating different types of Tickets based on the email subject can be accomplished by creating additional Workflow Triggers and Actions.

When Unsolicited Email tracking is enabled, the IDI platform will automatically create a Trigger based on the configuration settings you provided.

This properties in this default trigger can be used as a guide for creating your additional ones.

Monitoring Multiple Inbound Mailboxes

To monitor additional mailboxes create a Trigger like the default one except for specifying a different Email in the ReceivingAddress field. Adjust the properties on the new Tickets as well if needed.

For example, to create a new mailbox to monitor incoming requests to your Sales department copy the properties of the existing trigger but change:

Trigger

ReceivingAddress = Sales@mydomain.mycompany.com

Create Ticket Action

Assigned To = Sales Department

Subcategory 1= Sales Opportunity

Creating Different Ticket Types from a Single Mailbox

By editing the default and adding additional triggers you can have emails to a single mailbox create different types of Tickets depending on the properties of the incoming email.

For example, to create a specific Ticket when the Email subject = Billing Inquiry you would copy the properties of the existing Trigger but change:

Trigger

Add New Condition – Subject = Billing Inquiry

Create Ticket Action

Assigned To = Billing Department

Type = Billing

To make sure the default trigger isn’t opening a Ticket as well it needs to be modified to exclude in the filter emails that you have created separate triggers for.

Trigger

Add New Condition – Subject <> Billing Inquiry