Email Response Feature Requests

[martinb]

As I've not seen any detail for this section of 4.0, I thought I'd pony up a few recommendations off the top of my head as a starter. Some are no-brainers, but let's get them on the table, eh?

1. Ability to poll a POP3 box (multiple: nice to have)
2. Rules engine - ability to run a set of independently operating rules over incoming email, and specify the order in which they run
3. Classification rules - ability to append multiple classifications to emails, and to have those classifications available immediately to subsequent rules
4. Routing rules - ability to route emails to individual users or queues
5. Response/templating rules - ability to auto respond to emails or simply suggest a template. Should offer the option to stop processing at that point
6. Branching rules - should be able to branch to another ruleset
7. Prioritisation rules - set level of importance of each email or queue
8. Multiple queues - emails generally don't get allocated to users, but to queues. Users are allocated/log into queues
9. Queue escalation - ability to define response time SLAs for each queue, with automatic escalation to another specified queue at expiry time
10. Emails and suggested responses visible in web client inbox, not normally in a standard mail client. Once appearing in a user's inbox, email is assigned to that user until either dealt with, or session ended, when released back into the queue.
11. Ability to sort inbound emails by priority, and limit the number of emails available in the inbox
12. Ability to pull email sender's details from either Sugar records, or (if not available), some detail (like name) from the email. All to be available as fields for response templating so you can merge in data on the contact, the account or the user. Templating should be able to contain conditional logic
13. Ability to add custom fields to each email, fillable by rules
14. User can respond to the email (using the ruleset template as a base to customise), or forward to another queue/user
15. Sent email to contain a tracking ID so subsequent emails can be linked as a conversation, even if it's with several customer email addresses (think: the conversation gets passed around several contacts in an account), visible to the user
16. Naturally, all inbound/outbound emails linked to the contact/account history
17. All actions logged & timestamped for reporting on queues and users - numbers of emails responded to, %age within SLA etc

It'd be good if the good people at Sugar can suggest which of these are in, and out of, scope for 4.0.

[manoj]

Hi,

Thanks for this great input. Inbound email processing is in Sugar roadmap and will be in the product in the next releases. We are envisioning inbound mail processing across all the functional areas namely Sales , marketing and Support. Please stay tuned for the announcements which will be made shortly.

Thanks

[tigerincanada]

I guess this is a policy question... will this kind of functionality still involve the use of Outlook / Thunderbird / etc?

End users tend to be fairly comfortable with their normal mail client application, and so I would suggest making it possible to add email accounts in a mail client that correspond to queues, have Sugar sort incoming mail into queues, and add a tracking ID to the subject line (unless it already has one, because it is a response to an existing case). This could be done without modifying the mail server - just taking mails from one POP3/IMAP account and pushing them into the others.

The trickier bit would be to route outgoing mail back through Sugar so that responses, response times, etc, are recorded using the tracking ID. Either a modified SMTP server would parse outgoing mail before passing it to the real SMTP server for sending, or one could set a forced Bcc on the SMTP server, copying outbound mails into a box for Sugar to monitor.

Or did I just go off at a tanget to cloud-cuckoo land?

[manoj]

Agent desktop should be uniform across all the CSR's . Forcing them to use Outlook ot thunderbird for creating email responses will not be the most ideal soultion. Moreover there needs to be integartion with knowlegde base and other support tools. The approach that looks favorable is to build the agent console within Sugar suite.

Thanks

[martinb]

Agent desktop should be uniform across all the CSR's . Forcing them to use Outlook ot thunderbird for creating email responses will not be the most ideal soultion. Moreover there needs to be integartion with knowlegde base and other support tools. The approach that looks favorable is to build the agent console within Sugar suite.

I think that's the better approach. Auto-forwarding on to a POP3/IMAP server offers an extra point of potential failure, and the opportunity for much randomness on the part of agents.

Example:
http://www.easyweb.co.uk/Members/mar...1-06.3034/view

Now what I *would* do is allow an agent to choose to forward an email on to a normal mailserver to enable (say) collaboration with a member of the salesforce who doesn't normally log into the agent console.

This is the "What did you say to this customer in your last meeting/are you planning to say in your next one?" scenario, and with Blackberry enabled staff, lets you get really fast responses back, rather than waiting for the next time they're in the office..

If you set the reply address to be something smart and/or add a tracking ID to the subject, it can all be tied together without the customer being aware.

[tigerincanada]

The Popsicle project appears to offer some of these functions, or at least a starting point...http://sourceforge.net/projects/popsicle/

Discussion of use with Suger Open Source 3.5.1 http://sourceforge.net/forum/forum.p...orum_id=449583

The Long Reach corp also has email integrated into their Info@hand system which is built on Sugar.