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Responding to tickets: via Outlook or inside Sugar?

Elisabeth Hunt

Hi all - 

We're moving to "new" Sugar from an old, unsupported community version.  Right now, my team all respond to cases inside the case by adding a note, which triggers an email that is sent from our main support email account. I know about the Out look connector, where folks respond to tickets from inside their Outlook, but we've never used it and I have a few questions.

1. When someone is on vacation, and a customer responds to an email about a case, how do other customer reps pick up that case?

2. If a customer has a rep's direct email, and sends a new case directly to that rep, how do the others see if it the rep is out that day?

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  • Hi ,

    I generally do not recommend using Outlook for the primary means of support communication for the use cases you cite. Sugar Connect is good for creating a case from a personal email received or softly pointing the customer to a more appropriate support channel to ensure things do not fall through the cracks. 

    For email-based support, I find the following setup to be best:

    1. Sugar is set up to monitor a group address (e.g. support@companyxyz.com)
      1. Depending on how much spam/non-support inquiries you get through this email, you will want to decide to enable automatic case creation or to have one or more people triage the inbox to create new cases
    2. You ensure all your support agents have permissions to send as the group account
    3. Set up an outbound email account under each user to send from that group account and set the outbound account as a favorite so that emails composed in Sugar default to that address (rather than their personal email address)
    4.  Agents then use Sugar as their primary means for support communications. The benefits include:
      1. Emails composed in relation to a case will automatically contain the case macro so that future interactions in that conversation will automatically archive to the case
      2. Customer replies will automatically come back into the monitored inbox and allow you to trigger additional logic (e.g. SLAs, alerts, etc.) without requiring an agent to manually archive emails to a case from Outlook

    With regards to how to handle agents being unavailable (whether due to PTO or scheduling), the Preferred Agent Routing feature of our plug-in, Upsert BPM Essentials, addresses that specific use case. This feature requires use of the business center and shift features in Sugar to handle the preferred routing. We consider these features critical for companies focused on delivering positive customer experiences as it helps ensure cases are handled in an efficient and transparent manner.

    Chris

    Co-Founder | SugarCRM's 2024 Global Outfitters Partner of the Year

Reply

  • Hi ,

    I generally do not recommend using Outlook for the primary means of support communication for the use cases you cite. Sugar Connect is good for creating a case from a personal email received or softly pointing the customer to a more appropriate support channel to ensure things do not fall through the cracks. 

    For email-based support, I find the following setup to be best:

    1. Sugar is set up to monitor a group address (e.g. support@companyxyz.com)
      1. Depending on how much spam/non-support inquiries you get through this email, you will want to decide to enable automatic case creation or to have one or more people triage the inbox to create new cases
    2. You ensure all your support agents have permissions to send as the group account
    3. Set up an outbound email account under each user to send from that group account and set the outbound account as a favorite so that emails composed in Sugar default to that address (rather than their personal email address)
    4.  Agents then use Sugar as their primary means for support communications. The benefits include:
      1. Emails composed in relation to a case will automatically contain the case macro so that future interactions in that conversation will automatically archive to the case
      2. Customer replies will automatically come back into the monitored inbox and allow you to trigger additional logic (e.g. SLAs, alerts, etc.) without requiring an agent to manually archive emails to a case from Outlook

    With regards to how to handle agents being unavailable (whether due to PTO or scheduling), the Preferred Agent Routing feature of our plug-in, Upsert BPM Essentials, addresses that specific use case. This feature requires use of the business center and shift features in Sugar to handle the preferred routing. We consider these features critical for companies focused on delivering positive customer experiences as it helps ensure cases are handled in an efficient and transparent manner.

    Chris

    Co-Founder | SugarCRM's 2024 Global Outfitters Partner of the Year

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