INTRODUCING ORTOO: THE SALESFORCE AUTOMATION SPECIALIST
Gap Analysis
Ortoo began life in 2010, when Leon and his business partner Shams began to take a close look at, and experiment with, the Salesforce AppExchange. They spent a good deal of time looking at all the apps on the AppExchange, learning about all the common Salesforce challenges and studying which apps were proving to be successful and why. Then, of course, they started looking for, and analyzing, the gaps. What challenges were Salesforce users talking about on Chatter, and in the various forums, that weren’t being addressed by apps in the AppExchange?
Email Drafts
The first significant gap that they identified, and decided to address, was email drafts. The native email functionality in Salesforce was, and is, pretty basic. It’s true that the number of formatting options was pretty limited, but one shortcoming which seemed to particularly resonate with users was the inability to create, save and retrieve email drafts. This is pretty standard functionality in most email clients, but the lack of email drafts capability in Salesforce seemed to be a big miss, not least because, due to the nature of the CRM, if users are able to create and save email drafts against specific objects, then other users could and should be able to retrieve those same email drafts and amend or update them accordingly. This would open up a whole host of collaborative opportunities within the Salesforce ecosystem. A marketing resource could draft a door-opening email and load it into SFDC, ready for a sales rep to pick it up, personalise it and send it to one or more prospects. A customer service agent could draft a letter in response to a query or complaint and then have it adjusted or approved by their manager – all within Salesforce.
So Email Drafts, by Ortoo, was born. The app was written, loaded to the AppExchange and proved to be a success. Email Drafts was and is a good product, but the functionality was pretty straight-forward and it was hard to justify making it a chargeable product. At this stage Leon was more interested in getting familiar with the wants and needs of everyday Salesforce Administrators, and the mechanics of the AppExchange, than in making a quick buck, so he decided to make it available as a free of charge product.
This FOC strategy had the desired effect. In supporting the early adopters of Email Drafts, Leon was able to interact with the people at the Salesforce coalface, the Salesforce Administrators. They talked to him about other business challenges that they were struggling to find solutions for, and email functionality was cropping up time and time again. Beyond Email Drafts, their was a growing desire to route inbound emails directly to Salesforce and, in-so-doing, to create new records or objects automatically – or to update existing ones with new information. Salesforce was able to do this in a basic way with its “Email to Case” functionality, but what about the other SFDC objects? And what about custom objects? Was there a way to divert inbound emails to Salesforce and to automate the creation of Leads, Opportunities, Tasks and more?
Email-to-anything
There sure was. Leon and the team built Email-to-anything (E2A), a native Salesforce app which facilitates the automatic creation of Salesforce Leads, Cases or helpdesk tickets from inbound emails or web forms. Not only that, but it also captures email history against any Salesforce record or object and keeps existing records up-to-date by auto-populating missing fields and/or updating existing fields with new information. E2A was launched in late 2010, and early adopters were not shy to come forward. It quickly became apparent that E2A was a game-changer in terms of workforce productivity. Not only were organisations saving time and money by eliminating the need to create Salesforce records manually, the increased throughput also lead to increased sales and customer satisfaction ratings, because leads and cases were able to be processed more quickly.
Email-to-anything was an instant success, but there was no time for Leon and the team to rest on their laurels. The ability to automatically create object records automatically from emails had provided a welcome and timely boost to the productivity of every new client, but the question remained, what happens to those records next? How do they get processed? The fact remained that organisations were receiving ever-increasing quantities of leads (good news), alongside greater quantities of customer queries or cases (not so good news, but an inevitable consequence of “success”). These Leads and Cases (we use the generic term “tickets”) were typical routed to queues using native Salesforce functionality, and the sales reps or agents processed them just a quickly as they could, to the best of their ability. Leon recognised that automation was again the key, and he and the team began to scope out and build a second flagship product, Q-assign.
Q-assign
Q-assign eliminates the need to manually allocate Leads, Cases or Helpdesk tickets to agents. Instead, Q-assign ensures that all tickets are assigned to the agent who is best placed to process and resolve the given query. With a straight-forward use case, Q-assign can allocate tickets via Round Robin, ensuring the next ticket is always assigned to the next available agent. But if a more sophisticated solution is required, Q-assign can take into account the experience, skills, capabilities, location, language and the current workload of each agent, prior to deciding how to allocate the ticket in question. By routing enquiries to the best available agent, throughput is maximised, conversion rates are optimised and increased levels of revenue and customer satisfaction duly ensue.
Together, Email-to-anything and Q-assign are a powerful combination, ensuring that Leads, Cases and helpdesk tickets can be automatically created and assigned to agents using a combination of intelligent email automation and intelligent assignment rules. Intelligence is the key. By scanning each incoming ticket for pertinent data, the nature of the query can be quickly established, a record can be created, fields automatically populated, and the ticket duly assigned to the most appropriate agent, based on the contents of the ticket and the skills and capability of the agent in question. By matching tickets to agents in this way, productivity is optimised, and throughput and conversions maximised.
The Future
So what next? Well this is just the beginning. Email-to-anything and Q-assign continue to evolve through a process of continuous improvement. But we also have a number of additional and exciting products on the roadmap, all revolving around process automation on Salesforce. More details to follow.
In the meantime, if you are interested in trying out Email-to-anything or Q-assign on a 30-day free trial, with no obligation, then please head over to the AppExchange and give them a go. Our support team is on standby, and will be happy to hear about your use case and to help you with your specific configuration.
We’d love to hear about your use case! Please use the form below to ask any questions at all, or to arrange a chat or demo.