Notification when a new e-mail has been sent for an existing case

Hi Leonid Paust ,

You technically can set up SugarBPM to notify a case owner when a new inbound email is archived to the case, but our experience has found that to be limiting in multiple ways for efficient support operations:

• SugarBPM has no way to evaluate who the sender of the email is. Typically you don't want an email alert to be sent to a case owner if the inbound email was sent by anyone within your company. Additionally, this causes potential issues with case status automation. If I have a case that is set to 'Waiting on Customer Input', I want the case status and SLA to automatically change when the customer responds (not when one of my employees respond).
• SugarBPM Email Templates on the Emails module do not provide the ability to use field variables from a related case. Since emails can technically be related to multiple cases, this relationship is not available to display values from a single record. This means the email notification would be generic (no information on the customer, case status, etc.) and the user would have to navigate to the email and then the related case each time an email came in to decide how to prioritize the work. 
• SugarBPM does not offer a way to filter out email records created by the case owner. In scenarios where the case owner manually archives an inbound email to the case via tools like Sugar Connect or the Outlook Plug-In, we want to avoid notifying that same case owner. 

We also tried to approach this problem from the perspective of the Cases module using Sugar Logic & SugarBPM. Sugar Logic provides a way to count related records conditionally, but it is only based on a single condition. The thought was if we could successfully count the number of relevant inbound emails related to a case, then we trigger SugarBPM to notify the assigned user any time that count increments. In other words, I can count the related emails to a case that have an 'inbound' direction, I can count related emails that are not from a specific domain (e.g. not our employees), or I can count emails that are created by someone other than the case owner, but I can't do all 3 at once. There are other reasons why Sugar Logic isn't good for this use case but being unable to get a multi-conditional count of related records puts this potential solution to rest quickly from our perspective. 

To drive a clean user experience and ensure that users are receiving informational notifications they can act on, we strongly recommend a code-customized solution if you are intent on maintaining email as a support channel.

Since you are a Sugar Serve customer, I strongly recommend also exploring whether dropping email support would be more appropriate in lieu of using the Support Portal. If you have contacts engaging through the Support Portal, using SugarBPM is a much easier solution for sending appropriate notifications and automating other aspects of a case lifecycle. 

If you'd like to learn more about how we can help in any of these areas, I encourage you to reach out via our website. 

Chris

Hi Leonid Paust ,

you can take a look at this article : https://support.sugarcrm.com/knowledge_base/sugarbpm/process_definition_setup_case_follow-up_date_management/#null

This workflow is a stock BPM, provided by Sugar, so you could see it on your instance. 

Fred