handling incoming support email for cases

[Gabe]

Note to salesforce.com: Integrate an Email Gateway into case management (a feature available in products like http://www.kayako.com/ and http://www.deskpro.com/) so that incoming emails to support or replies to existing cases are automatically logged.

In the meantime, I'm curious about how other folks handle incoming email. My support org uses SF Web-to-case. All our outgoing emails are from within SF and all use the same support address. Therefore, all replies go to one address. Additionally, emails manually sent to our support address must be manually logged in SF (or SF-Outlook create a case feature). But this is a very manual process. My support org is small, so right now, I can manually filter all incoming emails to the support address and forward to appropriate support engineer on my team, who then logs the email to SF and replies from within SF. However, this is obviously not very scalable.

How do you handle this? Do you have one person who manages incoming email and forwards to appropriate person? Or do you not use one general support address?

Thanks in advance for any input!

[mpark]

There is a third party extension that handles incoming e-mails for support cases. It is called email to case at www.extendsf.com

[Gabe]

Perfect! Thanks very much, mpark. Do you use the app? Have you been happy with it? Anyone else use extendsf email-to-case? I just contacted them for a quote.

Thanks,
Gabe

[captain obvious]

As a strategic shift, you can move more towards leveraging the self-service functionality and migrate away from email integration all together. The customer self-service portal enables you to create a user name and password protected area of your site that customers can login to, submit support issues (cases) through forms, view the status of cases they have submitted (open and closed), update their cases with comments and attachments, and view comments that have been added to their case. Further, you can have the system auto-generate email notifications to customers and case owners to let them both know when the case has been updated (by one or the other).

The advantage to you is that you dont have to migrate the information from email to a support case, you can have the cases automatically assigned internally, the system can auto-generate the initial email response to the customer, and you have an interactive environment to communicate with your customer with. This will also help deflect the "what's the status of my issue" calls, as the customer will be able to check this themselves.

There is a great new guide on the best practice site that discussed self-service implementation:

http://www.crmsuccess.com/dreamforce/dreamSession.jsp?id=00630000001nK0VAAU

As initially mentioned, this approach represents a shift in how you manage your support organization, but I would suggest that it is a shift in the right direction in building a scalable support infrastructure.

[Gabe]

Thanks for the suggestion, captain obvious. We actually did try this approach for a while and basically turned off our support email address (customers could still email us there, but they'd get an auto-response directing them to the login). The customer feedback was not at all good. Even with the automated messages, customers hated not being able to email us. And what of replies? All of us naturally want to be able to respond to an email via email. It was messy.

The other challenge was the manual creation process involved with self-service setup. Basically, a customer would have to request a self-service login, wait for us to set it up, then submit a case.

With thousands of customers, it's not realistic to manually go through in advance and create self-service login accounts.

-Gabe

[captain obvious]

Gabe -

If you are still looking for a solution ... there is one with the product now:

http://www.crmsuccess.com/browse/feature_detail.jsp?id=00630000001wjYxAAI&flid=02n30000000036ZAAQ&slid=02n30000000035wAAA&tlid=02o3000000008SeAAI

[Gabe]

Thanks, captain obvious. We've been successfully using the email to case offering since about July 2005. The initial release we were using (1.03) was not as reliable and could not handle Outlook emails attached to emails we've received. Early last month we upgraded to 1.04 and it's been running smoothly ever since!

I'm very happy with the offering, and it's really streamlined our support department in the past year and has allowed us to scale.

-Gabe