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How We Built It: Email Ingestion & Response in Care

Khoros Alumni (Retired)

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Care now can ingest, delegate, and respond to email addresses that have been configured as a Source Integration.

Note: This is still Early Access.

This new channel provides many advantages over a standard email response or distribution list, such as monitoring via a work queue. Once in a work queue, agent responses via Care look just like a typical email reply. 

This update opens up new and exciting advantages previously unseen in Care.

  • Agents can now all respond as the same email address to any incoming inquiry. 
  • Now, Agents can evenly distribute the incoming load, all of which can be captured via Khoros Analytics. 
  • Managers can now attain significant insight into email handle time, what emails are particularly effective, and even conduct marketing or feedback campaigns—all the while capturing all response metrics in real-time with the ability to audit and review. 

The uses for this new channel can be limitless! 

With a little creative thinking, help and support type email can even be ingested. This allows helpdesk or support feedback to be curated via Care. This can even mean that a workflow such as Salesforces’ email-to-case solutions can be done away with and converted to a Care-centric workflow. This can help eliminate the need for multiple products and services while still providing top-notch customer support.

Keeping Community Support in Khoros: A Use Case

Let’s take a look at how Atlas’ Community Help email support is now being provided through Care. 

The configuration described below is currently being utilized by multiple teams and has allowed us to move away from using a third party email/case management system. Aimed at facilitating the moderation, administration, and reporting of email cases across Khoros products, specifically Care. We wanted to showcase what can be done only using our own products while giving our customers a top-end experience. 

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Email integrations can be set up just like any other source integration, though currently limited to Gmail and Exchange email addresses. 

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The email being ingested will have to be set up as a user on the backend in order to pass its credentials into the integration.

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Once this is done, the integration can be handled just like any other. Agents can now interact with the email account via work queues, agent view, and configure analytics to provide real-time feedback on utilization. Below is the Community Help email example of the configuration.

Once configured to a source integration, a Work Queue needs to be set up that is listening to the newly configured email integration.

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Users will need to be added individually, or whole teams can be added to the work queue as well. 

Users in agent view can now moderate this email like they do any other integration. The best part is the ability to now report in real-time on active email campaigns, email support cases, and many other targets via creative use of Care’s tagging system.

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More to come

The ability to integrate and ingest email in Care is a huge step forward in the overall capability for the product. We look forward to more updates, feature-adds to this service, and seeing what creative uses all our world-class partners come up with.