Spring '14 brings additional customer service capabilities to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Online and On-Premise. These features are bundled together as "Enterprise Case Management" and available through CRM Professional license. One of the features of this advanced case management is "Automatic Email to Case Conversion". This is the ability to create cases automatically from emails received in the CRM queue.
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Business benefits of email to case automation:
- Increased Agent productivity
- Increase ROI by reducing number of clicks per response
- Customers receive better service
- Improved and consistent support process
So given the benefits of productivity and better customer experience here I am going to list some of the considerations for implementing an email to case automation:
- Automatic linking of new case to an existing Account or Contact - B2B CRM would like to have all cases linked to Accounts whereas B2C would like to link cases to Contacts in CRM
- Handling emails received from unknown senders - Would you like ignore emails received from unknown senders or would still like to create cases but link them to some Dummy Account / Contact in CRM.
- Email spam protection - ability to filter out emails from specific email ids or even complete domains.
- Email loop protection- if sender also has a built-in email to case mechanism then this may result an infinite loop of emails and cases.
- Email subject exclusion - ability to filter out emails with subjects like undeliverable, out of office, etc.
- Support HTML Email - good to have the email body copied to Case description without the HTML tags.
- Ability to copy attachments to Case - good to have attachments directly copied to case and optionally removed from the email
- Identify incoming email is regarding an already existing case - an email received regarding an already existing case needs to automatically link to case. Will the system be intelligent enough to recognize the email is part of on-going discussion regarding an existing case? Good practice could be to use case number in subject for matching to an existing open case.
- Ability to re-open a closed case if needed - if someone replies to an existing resolved case then good to re-open the existing case rather than creating a new one.
- Setting of default case field values on new case creation - auto-populating default values on case creation
- Automatic Email Response to the sender of the email - ability to send email notification with the case number of newly created case
The spring '14 release of email to case functionality has some of these features, however there are still some significant gaps compared to the IOTAP Email2case automation solution for users to fully realize the benefits.
Implementing Email to Case automation for CRM 2011 customers:
The spring '14 release is applicable only to Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2013 Online and On-Premise users. This functionality is not available to CRM 2011 customers. For some 2011 customers the IOTAP Email2Case automation can be the difference between upgrading now or later. The Email2Case automation solution works well for both CRM 2011 and CRM 2013. For more details, click here!
CRM Dynamics is great platform to build CRM solutions for small business to enterprise organization. However to enhance the platform, add-ons from different partners provide a great way to improve the user experience and improve productivity. Check out the various add-ons that you can purchase from our online store:
- Record Clone or Record Copy
- Advanced Auto Number
- Report Scheduler for CRM Online and On-Premise
- Email to Case Automation
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