Communication with experts that are unable to directly interact with 1stAnswer still have to be integrated into incident management process.

Single point of documentation for 1stAnswer users has to be… 1stAnswer. Single point of documentation for collaborators that don’t have sophisticated Ticket System at their hand often is their e-mail application (Interfacing 1stAnswer with other Ticketing Systems is already solved by implementing Web-Service that enables back office case information exchange across different Ticket Systems).

Bringing 1stAnswer users and external collaborators that have no access to an sophisticated Ticket System together is the challenge being described and solved in this Business Case.

Phone, fax or e-mail is the most common way of reporting a support case to a support organization. Although phone and fax communication is next to impossible to properly document (because of their unstructured and free-form nature), e-mail communication can be easily registered and structured because it is possible to add Meta information to it. E-mail communication can be used in different stages of case tracking process.

Ability to seamlessly integrate e-mail communication into case tracking process no matter at what stage or context it is being initiated we have named “The Intelligent e-mail”. ”The Intelligent email” provides ways to automatically create support case within 1stAnswer and fill its properties with the data out of the e-mail, to send information out of created support case back to initiator out of 1stAnswer over e-mail and re-import her response back into created case seamlessly for both the user of 1stAnswer and initiator of support case.

1. Customer sends an e-mail to the announced support e-mail address (e.g. support@1stAnswer.de or support@1stAnswer.com)
2. At a periodic intervals scheduler checks e-mail inbox for every configured support e-mail address (defined in support team)
3. Found e-mails are processed and business rules such as “determination of customer based on e-mail address” or “filling support case fields with information from e-mail” applied and new support case created
4. Created case is assigned to a category based on business rules (e.g. standard support category defined in support team)

For automatic processing of e-mails the Intelligent Email-Service must be configured and set up.

1. Over the “send e-mail” function, user opens e-mail form
2. “To”-field is filled with e-mail address of customer by default
3. Optionally, user opens “address book” for the case and selects one or more addressee (addresses displayed in address book could be addresses of users assigned to the support team of category of support case; further specification is possible by showing only users that possess right “external”)
4. User chooses a adequate email-template, fills in e-mail fields and sends e-mail

<note tip>To be able to receive answers to mails sent from 1stAnswer via “intelligent mail” the subject in the mail must contain [caseId:38947]. Please use the placeholder [caseId:[DATA:Id]] in the subject of Emailtemplates.

Instead of 'caseId' we suggest to use a placeholder which is unique to your company (e.g. SAGID) to avoid problems when mails are exchanged with other 1stAnswer systems. </note>

1. External partner or customer replies to the “intelligent e-mail“
2. At a periodic intervals scheduler checks e-mail inbox for every configured support e-mail address (defined in support team)
3. If business information (e.g. Case Id in Title of e-mail) is found in e-mail reply, it is parsed, associated with corresponding support case and case data updated with information from e-mail reply (e.g. in form of new comment and file attachments)

Your Intelligent e-mail service automatically makes the following change in status of existing incidents:

1. If IntelligentEmail receives an e-mail about a closed or invoiced incident, the incident will be reopened if the flag reopenClosedCase is true. A new incident will be created and linked ( “related”) to the recent incident if the flag reopenClosedCase is false. The settings (category, priority, etc.) will be the same like the original incident.
2. When you receive an e-mail about a solved or messaged incident, it depends on configuration whether the incident will be reopenend (if the flag noStatusChangeForMessagedCase /-SolvedCase = false). In this case the current priority will stay the same. The status of the incident won't change at all if the flag noStatusChangeForMessaged / -SolvedCase is set to true.
3. If an e-mail to an incident in wait “status is received, the incident - just as if a completion date entered would be achieved - set in the status “open”.
4. If an e-mail to an incident in the status “open” is received, nothing will change.
5. The current system sends e-mails, if so configured. Incidents that should be currently in progress (unlikely, since no processing status in the respective longer exists) will be taken over by the Intelligent e-mail service with no message “for editing” that is, removed from the current editor, and 1stAnswer the status change before the increase. Subsequently, the agent receives the message that the incident was taken.

Incoming mail will be received with the type of email in the solution during the incident. Including all data for the sender and receiver:

<note warning> IntelligentEmail will only work if there are no customers or users with duplicate E-Mail addresses.

When Intelligent Email receives an email it will search for a customer/user with the sender-address of the mail.
Intelligent Email will refuse to process the email if there are multiple users/customers with the sender-address of the mail.
The mail will be moved to the “unprocessed”-folder in that case. </note>