The standard Email to Case functionality is one of the most used ‘out of the box’ tools within the Salesforce CRM platform. But customers are consistently telling us that the limited functionality of this native solution is holding them back. This post talks through the primary benefits of Email to Case and shows how organizations can upgrade their case management systems through the deployment of Email-to-anything, the powerful email automation app.
What is Email to Case?
Email to case is an out-of-the-box feature of Salesforce’s Service Cloud offering. It will require some additional setup from your Salesforce Administrator, however it can be used without any additional purchases, so long as you are using any of the Professional or Enterprise editions of Salesforce.
Its purpose is straight-forward. It saves you time by removing the need for users to manually create or update cases within Salesforce. It essentially removes some of the manual administration required across your team by creating cases automatically, using the relevant information contained within the emails sent by customers. When customer send you a query or question via email they are, effectively, “raising a case”. Email to Case ensures that the email is captured, an actual case created in Salesforce, and the pertinent data contained within the email mapped to the relevant fields on the new Salesforce record.
Features
Once setup, you can populate case information from a variety of datapoints contained within your incoming mail – for example:
- An email subject line could become the title of a brand-new case
- The company website address could be pulled from the email domain of the sender
- The body text can be mapped to a “Case Notes” field
Also, if a known contact sends an email from their known email address, then it can automatically store that email against a specific case or against the contact. Automating Cases in this way can literally save organizations thousands of administrative hours and the larger the company the more potential there is to recover valuable time. Let’s take a look at the benefits.
Benefits
- Better Contact Management – When using it for inbound emails any new contact that isn’t already included in the system is automatically added with any complimentary information that is available. Not only does this save the time of manually having to create new contacts, it also removes forgetfulness – as adding contacts can be a task which is often left until later
- Quicker Response Times – A huge benefit of case automation is that customer service agents are in a position to respond more swiftly. With this level of automation, cases are updated almost instantaneously rather than having to wait for any manual input. It can also be setup so that relevant team members are sent notifications each time a case of interest changes or is updated – meaning service agents immediately have the latest information & correct statuses of any cases they are working on.
- Fewer Clicks Per Response – When configured correctly, you can dramatically reduce the number of clicks needed per response. The need for someone to manually copy and paste email details into case fields is removed but, additionally, replying to case situations is also easier, as agents typically have more information about each case at their fingertips and they can take advantage of additional functionality – like adding attachments.
How to Upgrade Your Email to Case Solution?
Naturally, Ortoo are big believers in the power of automation. If you can see the potential in using the standard out of the box implementation, we would always recommend giving it a try. However, if you do have a more complex use case or want something more sophisticated, then there are better solutions . Our very own Email-to-anything app uses the same principles as the out-of-the-box version, but you do get so much more customization and additional features:
- It’s not just cases. You can send emails to any Salesforce object, including custom objects
- Store entire email conversations against specific record in any object, the whole email history will always be visible
- Send new emails from directly within Salesforce and from within any Salesforce record or object
- Send mass emails whilst overcoming Salesforce email limits
Ortoo’s 5-star-rated app, Email-to-anything, is an intelligent email automation app which is 100% native to Salesforce. You can learn more here or take a look at it on the AppExchange, where it’s available to download on a 30-day trial.
