The Email Management feature in RightNow CX gives complete control over the handling of inbound and outbound email messages, whether they are related to Service (incidents or staff notifications), Outreach (surveys) or Marketing (mailings) matters.

When it comes to Service, RightNow CX handles email communication between customers and the customer service team in a very flexible way. RightNow CX evaluates each incoming email to ensure it meets the criteria for service, and then manages all back and forth email replies between the agent and contact until the incident is resolved. Along the way, RightNow CX can automate key service email messages that will help the customer service team to deliver timely, world-class service.

When a customer emails a question to the customer service email account, RightNow Service handles it using the following process:

1. A contact record is associated: The Techmail (*) utility first searches all contact records for the email address in the Reply To field of the message’s mail header. If no match is found, Techmail looks for the address in the mail header’s From field. If a match is found, the contact record is associated with the incoming request. If the customer’s email address is not found in an existing contact record, a new contact record is created for the customer.

2. Contact validity is verified: Once the email management system identifies a matching contact record, customer information is evaluated to determine whether it meets your organization’s requirements for service. If SLA’s are required, the system checks to ensure the customer has a valid SLA before creating an incident. If the customer does not have a valid SLA, an auto-response denying assistance is generated and sent to the customer.

3. An incident is created: Once a contact record is matched and any SLA requirements are met, Techmail creates an incident using the contents of the email message. If the message is multipart (containing both HTML and text versions), the text version of the message is added to the incident thread and the HTML version is discarded. If the message contains HTML only, it is converted to text and added to the thread.

4. The incident is processed by business rules: Upon incident creation, RightNow CX sends the contact an auto-generated receipt for the question. However, business rules are often configured to perform additional functions such as assigning an SLA, sending an auto-response, and assigning the incident to an agent for a response. Rules can also be configured to escalate the incident if the assigned agent does not answer the customer’s question within a specified time period.

5. The agent responds: When an agent responds to the contact’s question, an email is sent to the contact containing the agent response. Occasionally, a contact may reply with additional questions or information for the agent. Techmail identifies the reply message by looking for specific markers (such as the contact email address, the reference number in the subject line, and the message tracking string in the mail header) and applies the update to the incident, extending the conversation until resolved.

* Techmail: A scheduled utility that retrieves mail from specified POP3 mailboxes. RightNow Service processes some of the mail into new incidents and routes the incidents using business rules (depending on settings). RightNow Marketing and RightNow Feedback process bounced messages to assist in tracking incorrect email addresses.

With RightNow CX customers have the ability to update incidents by replying to email messages. The management of this process is sometimes tricky as customers include the original message in their reply, quoting the email they received from RightNow CX.

When the Techmail (*) detects an email reply, it attempts to identify the part of the message containing the customer’s reply, and strips out any text that may have been quoted back from the original message thread. In this way, new replies are added to the incident as a new entry in the incident thread, while text from previous thread entries is ignored.

Techmail uses several methods to determine which blocks of text in a message consist of previous thread entries:

• Most email clients mark or “block quote” the original message when replying. In text messages, the original text is often block quoted by inserting a greater than symbol (>) or a vertical bar (|) at the beginning of each line of the original text. In HTML messages, the original message is usually enclosed in block quote HTML tags (<blockquote>). Parameters in the block quote HTML tag indicate how the message should be displayed (for example, each line begins with a vertical bar or an indent). The Techmail utility’s block-quoted reply detection method finds block-quoted text and removes it from the email, leaving only the reply from the customer.

• If a customer replies to multiple points within the original email, inter mixing the reply with the original text, the message may contain multiple blocks of quoted text. In this case, the replies may refer to the original text above them, which may be important, so Techmail includes the entire email message in the incident.

• If a customer replies within the original text, and the reply text begins with a block quote, such that the reply is indistinguishable from the original text, Techmail can determine that additional text has been added within the original text by comparing checksums in the reply to checksums in the original message. If the checksums differ, the entire email is added to the incident to ensure that no reply text is lost.

• Techmail can also detect and remove “boilerplate” messaging while leaving the customer’s content intact. Boilerplate messaging is text that has been added to an email message by a mail client, such as a line of advertising text embedded by Hotmail. This helps to ensure that the thread is not diluted with advertising and contains only information pertinent to the discussion.

* Techmail: A scheduled utility that retrieves mail from specified POP3 mailboxes. RightNow Service processes some of the mail into new incidents and routes the incidents using business rules (depending on settings). RightNow Marketing and RightNow Feedback process bounced messages to assist in tracking incorrect email addresses.