handling email coordination
Christopher Wensink
As our company has grown we have more staff in the customer service
role. Everyone uses Thunderbird for an e-mail client, and e-mail
accounts are IMAP hosted by an offsite third party.
we have specific email accounts for each person as
<firstinitial><lastname>@domain.com
we also have aliases for generic addresses like custome...@domain.com
With a majority of customers emailing the alias address we're working on
coordinating the history of emails (and folders) between multiple staff.
Fort the purposes of this discussion we'll call these people staff1,
staff2, and staff3
All three staff have their own individual accounts, and staff1's
individual account has a huge list of folders storing the history of
conversations for each customer. Staff1's email address was set up on
staff2's thunderbird profile as well so she can get the folder history,
and so that if either of them makes a change it updates on each other's
folder lists.
Now the staff are complaining because staff2 is getting emails from
staff1's named email, and they don't want that, but they do want to keep
the full folder list and the history of all saved emails, and keep
updates synced between email profiles.
The best solution I can come up with us to set up a new email account
(not an alias) called custome...@domain.com and move the full
folder list from staff1's account to that new account, then on both
staff1 and staff2's email profiles they would have
custome...@domain.com set up in addition to their own named accounts.
The other solution is to harness a CRM to capture all incoming e-mail,
so it doesn't go into thunderbird at all it goes directly to that
application, then is managed per username there.
My question is, what are other larger companies doing that are managing
large volumes of emails coming in primary to one address, where the
volume of the email exceeds the capacity of any one person, and there is
a department that is managing communication? Hundreds of legitimate
non-spam emails coming in is difficult for anyone to answer and manage
in a timely manner.
Thunderbird is a good solution for a single person solution, but is not
scaling well. What does everyone else use?
Chris
--
Christopher Wensink
IS Administrator
Five Star Plastics, Inc
1339 Continental Drive
Eau Claire, WI 54701
Office: 715-831-1682
Mobile: 715-563-3112
Fax: 715-831-6075
cwen...@five-star-plastics.com
www.five-star-plastics.com
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J.B. Nicholson
> The best solution I can come up with us to set up a new email account (not an alias)
> called custome...@domain.com and move the full folder list from staff1's account
> to that new account, then on both staff1 and staff2's email profiles they would have
> custome...@domain.com set up in addition to their own named accounts.
member would access their own account plus any shared accounts (such as
customerservice) appropriate to their role. But shared passwords are usually not a
good idea. Shared passwords may be something you have to live with if your
authentication system doesn't let users (staff) authenticate as themselves to gain
access to accounts.
If Thunderbird tags are stored server-side[1], the staff can mark emails with tags to
mark which email they will handle -- one tag is for staff1 to handle, another for
staff2, etc. They might do this to avoid stepping on an inbound request allocated to
another staff member without using out-of-band coordination (yelling across a shared
room, phoning each other, instant messaging, etc.). Since your staff is small and all
using the same email client (Thunderbird) it shouldn't be hard to configure 3
Thunderbird profiles to have the same color and tag text so the UI looks and feels
the same across all staff.
But, as you rightly pointed out, this approach won't scale up very well. So if your
staff grows you'll need an enterprise approach to handling inbound emails.
You'll also need to consider how outbound emails should appear to recipients -- when
staff2 replies to an email, should the recipient see the email from customerservice
or staff2?
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7549879/thunderbird-tags-in-imap-php says
that Thunderbird tags are stored on the IMAP server.
> My question is, what are other larger companies doing that are managing large volumes
> of emails coming in primary to one address, where the volume of the email exceeds the
> capacity of any one person, and there is a department that is managing communication?
> Hundreds of legitimate non-spam emails coming in is difficult for anyone to answer
> and manage in a timely manner.
ticketing system (the ticketing system is given the credentials for the
customerservice account and monitor that account's inbox) and all replies are sent by
staff through the ticketing system. Something in each email would help the ticketing
system keep track of the inbound emails so the responses coming in are added to the
proper ticket. Staff are notified on new tickets (which nobody yet owns) or tickets
owned by that staff member.
Andrea Venturoli
> Now the staff are complaining because staff2 is getting emails from
> staff1's named email, and they don't want that, but they do want to keep
> the full folder list and the history of all saved emails, and keep
> updates synced between email profiles.
>
> The best solution I can come up with us to set up a new email account
> (not an alias) called custome...@domain.com and move the full
> folder list from staff1's account to that new account, then on both
> staff1 and staff2's email profiles they would have
> custome...@domain.com set up in addition to their own named accounts.
will have two accounts and need to choose which one to use everytime.
What I sometimes do is, as you said, create a shared account; however, I
don't set up that account on every ThunderBird: instead I give access to
it server-side to each staff user.
This way everyone has his own account, but sees the shared folder tree
under "Other Users".
People will write/answer with their own name/email address (and won't be
able to write from the shared one). This might or might not be what you
want.
Also, this might be feasible or not, depending on your server (I usually
have my own).
bye
av.
Travis Mooney
On 4 Feb 2021, at 07:37, Andrea Venturoli <m...@netfence.it> wrote:
Magnus Melin
> On 2/3/21 10:51 PM, Christopher Wensink wrote:
>
>> Now the staff are complaining because staff2 is getting emails from
>> staff1's named email, and they don't want that, but they do want to
>> keep the full folder list and the history of all saved emails, and
>> keep updates synced between email profiles.
>>
>> The best solution I can come up with us to set up a new email account
>> (not an alias) called custome...@domain.com and move the full
>> folder list from staff1's account to that new account, then on both
>> staff1 and staff2's email profiles they would have
>> custome...@domain.com set up in addition to their own named
>> accounts.
>
> This will work (CRM/ticketing system considerations aside), but people
> will have two accounts and need to choose which one to use everytime.
>
> What I sometimes do is, as you said, create a shared account; however,
> I don't set up that account on every ThunderBird: instead I give
> access to it server-side to each staff user.
> This way everyone has his own account, but sees the shared folder tree
> under "Other Users".
> People will write/answer with their own name/email address (and won't
> be able to write from the shared one). This might or might not be what
> you want.
I agree it sounds like using a shared IMAP box should work fairly well.
If you want the mails addressed to custome...@domain.com to get
replied to from that same address even if it's staff1 who is replying,
try out the "Reply from this identity when delivery headers match"
option in the account settings. With that set, From would get set to
custome...@domain.com when it's addressed to that email, and
private mails would work as normal. Staff1 or 2 would perhaps just put
their name in the email if you want who replied to show to customers and
yourselves.
-Magnus
Andrea Venturoli
> Dear Andrea —
> ...
> Happy to help out off-list if you like.
Thansk Travis, but perhaps you should address the OP (Christopher), as
I'm not having any such a problem to solve ATM. :)
bye & Thanks