Email Channel

ON THIS PAGE

The Email Channel Section shows all the interactions managed by the Agents and coming from external Email Systems.

The Email Channel allows you to define the Email Accounts that the Agents, belonging to specific Email Queues, will share and use to send and receive Email messages in the standard XCALLY Motion Omni Desktop Interface.

The XCALLY Motion Email Channel provides some ready-to-use interfaces towards mailing systems (like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail and so on) but the System Administrator can very easily configure new ones.

Email Benefits

The Customer and the Agent can exchange email messages (including files, emoticons, pictures and so on), reaping the following benefits:

the Customer can use market standard email systems
the Agent interaction happens inside the XCALLY Motion common environment
the Agent can manage several types of interactions at the same time
the interaction content is shared, easily retrieved and managed
all the Customers information is stored in the Contacts Manager

XCALLY Motion Email Channel service needs to be connected to the IMAP service of the mailing system: as soon as a new email message arrives, the IMAP server notifies XCALLY Motion which manages it providing a standard interface for all types of mailing systems.

Whenever customers interact with the Contact Center using an email system, the Agents belonging to the specific email channel queue will receive a request on the Omni Desktop interface.

They can reject it and the request is passed to another Agent in the same queue (in this case Sales).

The interaction starts when one agent accepts it: all the others will be notified that the interaction has already been taken by somebody else.

If your Agent Desktop is running on MAC with OS High Sierra and using the Browser Safari, remember to enable the audio notifications in Safari in order to receive an audio alert for all incoming interactions

Email session

Let's see how a typical email session looks like: let's see how it works when the Agents receive an e-mail from a customer and need to manage it (e.g. replying with a message or forwarding it to somebody else, simply closing it, or other)

Customer’s Side

Agent's Side:

the customer sends an email message using an external system (in this example Gmail):

after accepting the notify of the incoming email request, a new email tab opens:

1.DRAFT: Replying or forwarding a mail message can be suspended and the message can be saved by the Agent as a draft copy and opened and finished later by the same Agent who saved it. In this case:

if the pencil icon is grey, it means that there is no draft message saved for this interaction
if the pencil icon is red, it means that there is a draft message saved previously (using the SAVE AS DRAFT button) and linked to this interaction. If you click on this button the draft will be reopened

2.REPLY: When replying, the field TO would be automatically filled with the email that has been used by the sender or, if different, with the email set as "reply to" by the sender.

3.REPLY TO ALL

4.FORWARD

5.NOTE

6.DOWNLOAD the message (with or without its attachments)

7.DOWNLOAD ATTACHMENTS ONLY

The Agent can also set the email as unread (if this function has been enabled by the administrator), clicking on 3 dots and than on Mark as unread:

If the Agent replies or forwards it, the new-message form shows like the following:

The Agent can attach one or more files (each one must not exceed 15 MB size) clicking on the attach button.

The Show original message switch (default=off) at the bottom of the panel allows the Agent to see the full list of messages exchanged in the same interaction

If the Transfer option is set by the administrator as possible, the Agent can also see this command in the menu in order to redirect the email message:

to another queue or to another agent (among the online and not in pause status agents):

and the system will let you choose among those available (in the picture the list of all the queues):

The Agent can type the answer or use the canned answers to reply to the message, choose the mail format, attach files and Send it clicking on the button SEND

It is also possible to click on the down arrow of the Send button and choose one of the following options:

Send as and choose a Substatus (e.g. Pending or one of those made available by the Supervisor)

About Open Substatus: Pending (or any other customized sub-status of an open message) is set by the Agent in order to highlight a message: this status is automatically removed anytime the email has been replied by the customer

Send and Close

The Agent can also decide to suspend composing a message (a new one or one as Reply/Forward to a received message) and to continue later, clicking on the button SAVE AS DRAFT: doing this, the message is temporarily saved as its draft is linked to this interaction.

About the message draft

Please note that:

each interaction allows only one draft message at a time to be saved. You can write as many messages you like but as soon as you try to save a draft, if there is already one for the same interaction, you will be notified that if you continue the old draft will be replaced by the new one;
when you compose a message you can save it as a draft as soon as the interaction is open: if the interaction has been closed since when you saved the draft (for example, by another agent) your draft will be deleted;
only the Agent that has saved a message as draft can see it, but some limitations apply:
- the agent must access to the e-mail environment from the same browser used before
- on the Agent workstation no local storage cancellation must be performed (otherwise all drafts will be deleted)

All the messages that have been saved by the Agent will be shown minimized in boxes at the bottom of the Mail Interactions List:

They can be deleted by the Agent clicking on the X near the name of the draft.

In order to reopen a draft message and to continue composing and eventually sending it, just click on the box of the minimized draft you see at the bottom of the email interactions list

or open the interaction itself and click on the red pencil. When you open a draft message, the whole interaction will be opened as well.

The name of the draft message is shown as: "ACCOUNT KEY - TO" or "ACCOUNT KEY -SUBJECT", in case the To field is empty. In case the fields To and Subject are both empty, the message is shown as "ACCOUNT KEY - Untitled". In the examples above, the Account Key is SERV for both drafts, followed by the destination address (for the first one) and the subject (for the second one).

How to insert an internal note

The Agents can insert an Internal Note in the interaction thread:

Click on the sign

Write the note (eventually adding an attachment) in the pop-up and save it:

From now on the note is shown in the interaction, but it's only internal to the organization and the customer will never see it:

Also the Supervisor can spy an Email interaction from the Interactions List and insert notes for the the agent only (the customer will not see this note).

Closing the session

If the Agent closes the session clicking on the X sign in the session tab:

and confirm:

The interaction can be simply Closed or Closed & Disposed, choosing one of the listed single level dispositions:

or ready-to-use multi level dispositions:

The same Close&Dispose action can be applied clicking on the 3 dots of the interaction and then on Close and dispose

Dispositions

Dispositions available in the list must be created by the Administrator in advance and can be single or multi-level (up to three).

If on closing an interaction is disposed by an Agent, you can see in the Status column of the Interactions List:

the name of the disposition applied:

Now, hovering over it with the mouse all the information on the disposition itself will be displayed:

so you can discover that in the above example a single level disposition has been applied.

If, on closing, the Agent chooses a multi-level disposition instead, the name of the disposition that is positioned at the lowest level of the set (second or third level) available will be shown, as in the following example:

Now, hovering over it with the mouse all the information on the disposition set will be displayed:

NOTE: The Administrator/User can set the disposition as Mandatory: in this case the Agent is requested to dispose the interaction when closing and until this operation is finished the agent will remain paused.

Contextual information

On the right side of the screen there is contextual information the agent can use (during the session or after it) to manage the interaction/customer:

CONTACT

INTERACTION

JOURNEY

To add more details in the Contacts Manager file, click on More

It refers to the current interaction

Here you can see the entire history of interactions with this user

All these interactions are coming from Email Channel. You can filter the interactions by channel and by date using the filters above.

Each interaction can be opened clicking on this button (and this feature is available only for those Agents with proper permissions on the specific item) or inspected clicking on Show Details

List of Email Interactions

The list of the interactions managed by the Agents will be available on the Email Channel Interactions List:

If the email Subject is underlined when you hover over the text you'll see the first lines of the last message content, like in this example:

This function can be disabled by the Administrator.

The down/up arrows near the Last message field indicate if the last message was incoming or outgoing.

Messages sent as Auto-Reply or Secret Notes will not be considered as a Last Message

You can filter the interaction list by: Start Date, Read/Unread, Status (Open/Closed), Account (Me, Not Assigned, All), Agent (the first one who managed it), Tags (multiple choice):

The interactions can be searched by:

interaction ID
message text
subject
contact first name
contact last name
contact email address

So click the search button, insert the search string and confirm:

and the list of the contacts matching the search string will be shown. When you want to go back to the full list of contact view again, click on X.

If the Search on Enter Key in the Settings-General-OmniDesktop Interface is activated by the Administrator, the request starts only after pressing Enter.
If not, the request starts only after having entered at least 5 characters or after pressing Enter.

The interaction Status can be:

Open
Open - Sub-status (where Pending is a default sub-status but many more can be added by the administrator)
Closed (by an Agent)
Closed Unmanaged (the interaction request has not been managed)

There are two ways to set an interaction Sub-status (only if it is Open):

Sending the Message

click on the down arrow of the Send button choose Send as and a Sub-status from the list:

Without sending the Message

click on 3 dots menu on the Message View, choose Set as and a Sub-status from the list

The Administrator can set new sub statuses.

If you see a small number near the contact name, like in the following picture:

it means that new interactions have been received (but not managed) in the same conversation.

Clicking on the Interaction row, the agent is able to see all the messages exchanged in the single session, as well as the right side bar information (contact, interaction, journey).
Clicking on the three dots menu, the agent can apply the following commands to the selected interaction:
- Show the interaction contents
- Download a pdf transcript of the interaction, with or without attachments (depending on Agent's permissions)
- Close and (eventually) dispose the interaction.

You can use the Advanced Search button and select a field to be matched with a value among a list of all those available.
When you click this button (you find it on the right side of the toolbar), the system will show you the following form:

Select the Field (scroll the list of all the available search fields)
Select the Operator among those available (eg.: equals, contains, starts with, and so on)
Select or insert the Value
Add the Condition (click on +)

To add more conditions repeat the operation, like in the following example:

and choose whether the conditions:

must all be met:

or at least one of them:

If you want to delete the advanced search condition inserted click on the single search condition button X to delete it or click on the CLEAR button in order to delete them all at once.

When you finish, click on the APPLY button in order to start the search: the query is executed and all the items that match the conditions inserted are shown.

It is possible to:

modify a condition set: click on a set condition and press Edit

now change the condition as you like(field, operator, value)

2. temporarily disable the search condition: click on the set condition and press Disable:

and enable it again:

When a selection is active as long as the search conditions are operational, the Advanced Search button will notify it by reversing its color (red on a white background) and blinking

Moreover the Advanced Search conditions will search all the List of the available entries, regardless of any filter applied to the list view using the filters Select a list or Select Tag

Send a new Email Message

To send a New Email Message, just click on the button + you find in the right side of the Email Interactions List header, choose from the the proposed list one of the email Account you are configured to use and compose the message:

The operation is the same as described above (in the example of how to reply to a customer's e-mail).

Remember that anytime you open a message, the full list of messages exchanged in the same interaction (thread) will be shown.

If the Agent is a CC or a BCC recipient, the message will display a notification like the following in the message header: