Supervisor Approval for E-mail

[Pillai]

I have just installed SugarCRM Community Edition Version 5.0.0g (Build 3391). This is running on LAMP.

I am the training/supervision manager for my company and one of my roles is to make sure that our trainee sales and support staff provide the right information to our clients. We use a web based lead capture form to capture infomration into SugarCRM. Once I assign the lead to one of my trainee sales reps, he or she will have to formulate an e-mail reply to the lead. I dont want the e-mail to be sent to the client until I have had a chance to read it and approve it.

What we have done is told our sales reps that they should not send the e-mails, but they should save it in My Drafts so that I can check and then send them along later, but this requires that I log in as each sales rep.

When I log in as the admin, I can list all e-mails and read the e-mails in the Draft Items folder of all my trainee sales reps, but this does not allow me to send the e-mails. To do this, I have to login as the trainee sales rep and press the send button. As you can guess this is not a good solution when I have about 20 sales reps working under me.

Any ideas on how to accomplish this will be very welcome.

[eNick]

Hi, I've got a suggestion.


Why don't you instruct your reps to not initially create an email at all, but instead to create a note. In there, they would type their intended email content. They can then assign this to you. You can review or edit it, change it's status to something suitable, and assign it back.

Once it's assigned back, the trainee can then copy the text into an email and send it, BCC'ing you on the distribution list so you can double check they sent what they said.

Once your trainee gets a little trust, they can skip the note creation and simply create the email and send it, BCC'ing you in. And finally you may even trust them enough to do their job and not require they BCC you.

[Pillai]

Dear eNick,

That is a great suggestion and I will certainly try it out. However, I have just one problem in this approach and I should have mentioned it right at the beginning. To make things easier for my sales reps, I have created e-mail templates that can be used for certain standard replies. Once the template content is in the e-mail body, it may need to be tweaked slightly to match what the lead has requested.

The ptoblem is that the Note feature does not make use of the e-mail template wihout having to go to the template first and doing a copy and paste.

Is there a custom module/workflow or something available in the paid editions of Surgar CRM that can support what I am looking to do?

[Pillai]

I was playing around a bit with SugarCRM and I found that there was an option to create group folders. I am not quite sure how this works or if it can give me a solution to my problem. There was one thing I noticed: when I tried out several options in the settings tab of the email client, the My drafts and my sent items folders disappeared and I could not get them back. There seems to be no resolution to this problem. I had to reinstall SugarCRM.

Can anyone out there explain a little about how group folders work?

[Pillai]

I have tried to find this information, but can someone tell me if the Workflow Manager is part of the Community Edition? I went to Admin and Developer Tools but there is no workflow option there.

[dav_singh]

Workflow only exists in Ent/Pro version.

Thanks,
Devendra