My First Month With E2A

At Ortoo we believe in a collaborative approach, not just in the way we develop our products but also in the way we continually improve them after launch. That’s why we listen to as many perspectives as possible and regularly get our talented workforce to test new iterations of the application in action. My assignment for the last month as someone who has only used Salesforce fleetingly was to spend 3 weeks getting acquainted to the standard functionality that comes with Salesforce, paying particular attention to the usability of the platform and also the Email to Case functionality. I’m then going to document my findings and give an unbiased comparison of how that parallels with the latest version of our Email-to-Anything application.  Here’s my journey.

Having worked with Salesforce for 6 months in a previous position, I do have a basic level of expertise when it comes to navigating the platform. Having said that I’m constantly blown away by the sheer level of possibility and how much effort has gone into making the platform great. There are so many options when it comes to maintaining the data housed within the CRM and I’ve found some of the standard functionality very useful. The ‘email syncing’ feature is incredibly useful (it works with Office & Gmail), saving countless hours of copy and pasting by automatically syncing data within the platform to your outgoing emails. I’ve particularly enjoyed the ‘Branded Email Templates’ editor which again saves lots of hours for people involved in outbound roles and the general UX of the platform is improving all the time. I’ve found the menu layout and usability very straightforward, in some instances you do need to know where certain functions are saved but more often than not you can find what you are looking for by exploring or using the available content online. I did find the ‘dashboards’ functionality extremely useful for changing the viewpoint when looking at data. With dashboards you can easily find all data points you are looking for (leads, sales figures etc) but then view that data in a range of options such as horizontal bar diagrams and funnel charts.  Overall, I’ve found my first detailed foray into Salesforce CRM to be one which has been positive and one which I’ve easily been able to upgrade my own level of expertise by reading lots of the content already existing within the Salesforce community.

The one area within Salesforce that I’ve become most versed with is ‘email to case’. If you’re wondering what is email to case is? It’s a standard piece of functionality within Salesforce which automatically creates Salesforce cases based on the content coming into you company emails. The case fields are automatically generated, with various rules being able to be applied. Without question it’s a much-needed tool in the platform and again will save numerous administrative hours over the course of a year. From my perspective the most useful side of the tool is that it helps you prepare your next action and the automation ensures items from email are not missed. For my role, email is often the communication channel which does contain most of my client requests and future actions, so having the email to case functionality automatically pinpoint those requests and begin populating the case details is absolutely desirable.

I found there to be some useful configurable options within email to case setup, some were useful and others I did find myself wanting more. The tool unfortunately doesn’t come with a unique guidebook on how to tailor it to your specific role, so actually being able to define how you want it to operate is difficult. Through trial and error, I’ve configured unique rules for ‘email to case looping’, which helps stop already existing cases coming back as fresh issues or quotes. Auto response messages are easy to setup too, which send your clients a confirmation when their raised issue has been seen by the relevant contact. I also made use of the escalation mechanisms where rules can be set, as cases and issues move from one level to another. All of these options are great to have and there is even more you can do with ‘email to case’, the problem is you do need a solid understanding of how it works and there are some simpler functionalities that you would expect from the tool which don’t yet exist.

After spending weeks learning the ropes of Salesforce CRM and ‘email to case’, I shifted my attention to trailing the latest version of our e2a product for the first time. And I have to say I wasn’t disappointed. With all applications of this nature the setup did require a little bit of brainpower, but once setup I found the e2a app a breeze. The new layout and menu structure is easy to navigate, and the way information is automatically stored within the app is easy to digest and use.  There are various filter options which enable you to sort stored information by items such status, priority and territory. The main benefit though is while the standard ‘email to case’ functionality is useful, the automation only works to pre-populate cases. With e2a the application uses the data contained within your company emails to populate everything (as the name suggests), this means that cases, leads, objects can all be automatically generated based on the content of your emails.

Straight away I found the application to save much more time and felt that I could leave the tool to work on autopilot, knowing that the email rules and field assignment settings were more robust. What’s more, from taking a deeper plunge into the mechanics of the app I could see there were features present which were missing from the standard email to case functionality. For example, there is a much more advance email editor and options to populate Salesforce objects and records using draft emails in addition to incoming mail. The contact search element is much stronger, enabling users to sift through Contact Lists, Distribution Lists and Leads to be able to find the correct stakeholder each time.  Additionally, rules can be setup which route cases to specific ques or specific owners based on the data within incoming mail and you can also populate multiple objects as well as cases – from a singular email. Overall, I found the application to be incredibly powerful in giving me more control over how I run a typical day and being someone who values time the level of automation was far superior.

The above highlights just a handful of the features available through e2a, but it does signify how far our e2a application has come from the standard out of the box email to case setup. From taking the time to work with the back end of the tool and looking at what customisable rules are actually available in both ‘email to anything’ and ‘email to case’ it was clear to me that there was an obvious winner. Email to case is a useful starting solution, but for those serious about maintaining their records and saving time I’d advise you to check out a free trial of our email to anything app. If I can figure it out anyone can!