Managing customer inquiries effectively can determine the success of your customer service operations. Salesforce’s native Email-to-Case is an essential tool that automates case creation from emails, but as customer expectations rise and case volumes increase, businesses need a more sophisticated approach.
Ortoo’s Email-to-Case: AI Edition, built on the Email-to-Anything (E2A) platform, provides enhanced functionality beyond Salesforce’s native tool. With powerful AI integration and advanced automation, Ortoo’s solution transforms how cases are managed, offering faster response times, intelligent triage, and deeper customization.
In this post, we’ll explore both the core features that make Ortoo’s Email-to-Case more flexible than Salesforce’s standard offering and the AI-driven enhancements that take your case management to the next level.
Ortoo’s Core Email-to-Case Functionality
Before diving into AI, let’s look at what makes Ortoo’s Email-to-Case solution stand out—even without AI. Built on the Email-to-Anything (E2A) platform, Ortoo extends case management far beyond standard functionality, offering flexibility, customization, and enhanced automation that make it a superior choice for businesses with complex workflows.
Work with Any Object, Not Just Cases
Unlike Salesforce’s native Email-to-Case, which is restricted to handling only standard cases, Ortoo’s platform allows you to manage emails related to any Salesforce object. This includes custom objects such as tickets, support requests, or other workflows unique to your business.
For example, a company might use a custom object to track service tickets across different product lines. Ortoo’s solution ensures that emails related to these tickets are automatically converted into Salesforce records, streamlining workflows across various departments.
- Use Case: A healthcare provider could use Ortoo’s Email-to-Anything to manage patient inquiries, linking emails directly to custom objects like appointment requests or medical records, reducing manual data entry and improving patient satisfaction.
Draft Emails with Shared Drafts and Autosave
In Salesforce’s native Email-to-Case, drafting and collaborating on email responses is cumbersome. Ortoo simplifies this with draft emails that can be shared across teams. Agents can save drafts, share them with colleagues, and collaborate before sending the final response. Autosave features ensure that no drafts are lost, even during complex, multi-step responses.
- Use Case: In a customer escalation, a technical support agent can draft a response and share it with a senior manager or product specialist for review, ensuring accuracy and professionalism in the final communication.
Duplicate Prevention for Reply-All
Ortoo’s solution prevents duplicate cases from being created when customers reply to an email thread, especially with Reply-All scenarios. This prevents clutter and confusion caused by duplicate cases, saving agents time and reducing manual case merging.
- Use Case: When a customer sends a follow-up using “Reply-All,” Ortoo detects the duplicate and avoids opening a new case, instead updating the original case with the new information.
Advanced Email Editor
With Ortoo’s Advanced Email Editor, users gain access to rich text formatting, templates, and inline attachments, allowing for more professional and branded communication. Salesforce’s basic editor lacks the customization options many businesses need, but Ortoo’s solution ensures that every customer-facing email aligns with your brand’s standards.
- Use Case: A financial services company can use branded email templates for high-value client interactions, ensuring consistency in communication while maintaining a professional appearance.
Distribution Lists
Ortoo’s Email-to-Case allows users to send emails to distribution lists stored in Salesforce. This ensures that updates or responses can be quickly shared with predefined groups, such as key stakeholders or internal teams, without manually adding each recipient.
- Use Case: A project manager working on a product release can send a single update email to a distribution list containing the entire product team, ensuring all relevant team members are kept in the loop without extra effort.
Advanced Contact Search
Ortoo enhances the standard search capabilities by allowing users to search across Case Account Contacts, All Contacts, All Leads, Distribution Lists, and Salesforce Users. This makes it easier to find the right contact, regardless of where the data resides within Salesforce.
- Use Case: If a sales agent needs to find a lead associated with a case or an unrelated contact in Salesforce, they can use Ortoo’s advanced search to quickly pull up relevant contacts or leads for follow-up.
Configurable Field Mappings
Ortoo allows businesses to map email data to any Salesforce field, not just standard Case fields. This means that any important information captured in an email, such as ticket numbers or product details, can be mapped to specific fields, ensuring structured data and more accurate record-keeping.
- Use Case: An insurance company can configure field mappings to automatically capture claim numbers and policy details from incoming emails, directly populating these fields in custom Salesforce objects.
Advanced Case Ownership Rules
Ortoo’s solution allows you to assign case ownership to users or queues based on complex email data. Ownership rules can be set up to route cases to the correct team or individual based on keywords, customer details, or even the content of the email itself.
- Use Case: If an email contains certain product keywords, Ortoo can automatically assign the case to the appropriate product support team, ensuring that the right experts handle each inquiry.
Business Units
Ortoo introduces the concept of Business Units, which allows businesses to define default settings and workflows for specific departments or divisions. This ensures that cases are handled in accordance with the processes defined by each business unit, without needing individual configurations.
- Use Case: A multinational corporation with separate product lines can define unique Business Units, each with its own rules for case handling, prioritization, and SLAs.
Relate Emails to Multiple Objects
Unlike native Salesforce Email-to-Case, which primarily links emails to a single case object, Ortoo’s solution allows emails to be linked to multiple Salesforce objects. This is especially useful for businesses that track different workflows across various objects.
- Use Case: A customer service email could be linked not only to a case but also to a sales opportunity and account, giving sales and support teams a unified view of the customer’s interactions.
Email-to-Case: AI Edition
Now that we’ve covered the foundational advantages of Ortoo’s solution, let’s explore how Email-to-Case: AI Edition takes Email-to-Case management to the next level. From intelligent triage to sentiment analysis and SLA management, Ortoo’s AI-driven features streamline processes and provide smarter automation.
AI-Powered Triage: Faster, Smarter Case Management
Ortoo’s AI-Powered Triage eliminates manual case triaging by analyzing incoming emails in real time. The AI system detects keywords, patterns, and customer history to understand the nature of the case and decide its priority. This ensures that cases are assigned quickly and efficiently, without the need for human intervention.
- Use Case: A global tech company might receive inquiries from both retail and enterprise customers. AI triage can detect if the email relates to a complex enterprise issue or a simple retail query, instantly categorizing and routing it to the appropriate support team.
AI-Driven Case Classification
Accurate case classification is key to delivering timely resolutions. Ortoo’s AI automatically classifies cases by analyzing the email’s content and learning from past cases. This improves accuracy and consistency, ensuring cases are correctly tagged, even as volumes increase.
- Use Case: In a B2B environment, AI can classify cases into product support, billing, or contract queries by scanning the email content, making it easier for agents to address customer needs faster.
Sentiment Analysis: Understanding Customer Emotions for Better Response
Customer sentiment matters, especially in support. Ortoo’s AI conducts Sentiment Analysis on incoming emails, detecting whether the customer is frustrated, satisfied, or neutral. Based on the detected sentiment, the system adjusts the priority of the case, ensuring more urgent cases are handled quickly.
- Use Case: If a customer sends an email expressing frustration about a delayed delivery, the system flags the case as high priority and can even escalate it to a senior agent for faster resolution.
Prioritization and SLA Management: Never Miss a Deadline
Managing Service Level Agreements (SLAs) is crucial for maintaining customer trust. Ortoo’s AI continuously monitors cases and adjusts their priority based on the urgency and SLA deadlines. It ensures that critical cases are handled before they breach SLA commitments.
- Use Case: A financial services firm can rely on Ortoo’s AI to track each case against its SLA deadline, sending real-time alerts if a case is at risk of breaching, ensuring that priority cases receive timely attention.
Automated Escalation: Ensuring Timely Resolution
Ortoo’s AI prevents unresolved cases from falling through the cracks. If a case isn’t resolved within the set timeframe or if the system detects a potential escalation (based on sentiment or urgency), the AI automatically escalates it to higher-level agents or managers, ensuring the issue gets the attention it needs.
- Use Case: If a critical support case hasn’t been resolved within the standard timeframe, the AI escalates it to the department head, reducing the risk of delays and improving response times.
Case Deflection: Reducing Case Volume with AI-Powered Self-Service
Not every customer inquiry requires human intervention. Ortoo’s AI-powered Case Deflection system can recognize common questions and offer pre-configured solutions or direct customers to relevant knowledge base articles before a case is even created.
- Use Case: A retail company could deflect common customer inquiries such as order tracking or refund policies by sending an automated response with a link to a self-service portal, reducing the volume of cases that agents need to handle.
Triggering a Swarm: AI-Driven Collaboration for Complex Cases
When a case requires input from multiple teams or departments, Ortoo’s AI can trigger a swarm, gathering the right people to collaborate on the issue. This reduces time-to-resolution for complex cases that span different areas of expertise.
- Use Case: In a healthcare setting, if a case involves both billing and technical support, the system triggers a swarm, notifying experts in both areas to work together in resolving the issue.
Smart Actions: Automating the Manual Tasks
Smart Actions are Ortoo’s AI-driven automation tools that handle routine tasks, such as sending acknowledgment emails, updating case fields, or triggering workflows. This reduces the manual workload for agents, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.
- Use Case: After receiving a customer’s inquiry, Smart Actions can automatically send a personalized acknowledgment email, update the case status, and set a reminder for follow-up, ensuring that no steps are missed.
The Complete Case Management Solution
While this post highlights the advanced features of Email-to-Case: AI Edition, it’s essential to mention Q-assign, Ortoo’s sister app, which seamlessly complements Email-to-Case. Together, these apps offer a comprehensive solution for managing customer cases—from intelligent triage and classification to optimized case assignment.
Q-assign automates case distribution to the most suitable agent, considering skillset, availability, and workload. Combined with Email-to-Case’s AI-driven triage, the result is a smarter, faster, and more efficient case management process.
Closing Thoughts
Revolutionize Your Email-to-Case Workflow with AI
By combining Ortoo’s core functionality with powerful AI-driven enhancements, your business can achieve a new level of efficiency in managing customer inquiries. From flexible email management across custom objects to intelligent case handling with AI, Ortoo’s Email-to-Case: AI Edition ensures that no customer issue goes unresolved.
Ready to take your case management to the next level? Discover how Ortoo’s Email-to-Case: AI Edition can help your business optimize its workflows, deliver faster resolutions, and exceed customer expectations.
