Today, customer interactions take place across multiple channels – in person, over the phone, on websites, and social media, to name a few. Hence it is paramount to define a robust and flexible case management system.
However, for any case management system to be able to function to its fullest capability, it is important to define smart mechanisms to register customer issues and interactions with relevant and meaningful information.
As our Salesforce Consultant Animesh Bose explains, Salesforce, as part of Service Cloud, offers an efficient case management capability which allows recording, tracking and solving customer issues in the form of cases. It also provides the ability to record such cases either from an email, from a web form, or manually.
The Problem
Cases created via emails and web forms come with a challenge of addressing spam cases or cases which are not relevant. This results in flooding the case queues and consultants looking after irrelevant cases.
Remedies
Cases generated via spam emails or botnets filling up random web forms are very difficult to stop and, unfortunately, Salesforce does not offer any native feature to filter spam cases. However, there are multiple ways which can be used to restrict creation of such unwanted cases.
Validation rule
A validation rule can be created to check if the case origin is a specific value (for example, web for web-to-case scenario) and if the email field contains a specific set of email addresses. An error will be thrown and the case will not be created. This however, requires analysing the incoming email pattern and then identifying suspicious email addresses to be filtered out.
Another validation rule which can be handy is to check whether the newly created case contains keywords like – “Out Of Office”, “Mailbox is Full”, “Undeliverable” etc. This will cover the scenarios where an auto-response email is sent against a newly created case and if the receiver’s mailbox in turn sends an auto response with any of those keywords.
“Accept Email From” feature
This feature is available when On-demand Email to Case is enabled for the org. It lets the system admins define a comma-separated list of email addresses. Whenever an email comes from the supplied list of email addresses, a case will be created in Salesforce and thus, restrict case creation from any other email address.
Mailbox spam filtering
Forwarding rules can be set up on the mailbox on which forwarding to the email to case service address is configured. This step will have to be performed by the internal IT helpdesk of the customer’s organisation to ensure emails coming from suspicious email addresses will not be forwarded to Salesforce.
Spam queue
By creating a separate queue in Salesforce, and with the help of assignment rules, you can redirect spam cases to this queue. The queue can then be cleared by the system administrators later as a periodic activity.
Utilising Thread ID
A thread ID is a reference number that ensures emails are being correctly attached to their corresponding cases. Without them, responses from customers will continue to generate new cases. Thread ID can either be included in the email body or the email subject. To be on the safer side, include it in both places so that if a user deletes it from one place while replying, it stays in the other place.
Managing junk email cases in your org is a constant battle for consultants and those looking after case queues. As consultants we want to be able to help our customers as quickly as possible when issues arise, however if our list is clogged with junk it is easy to miss genuine cases that need attending too. By using the above options, you may be able to reduce the number of junk cases in your org, which will increase your productivity, improve your customer experience, and may just save your sanity.
