Auto reply on Service Manager Inbox

[Andrew Parsons]

Is there a way of adding an auto response on the Service Manager inbox?

The problem we have is that our customers will either raise a ticket via the self service portal, or a service desk analyst will raise a ticket on their behalf. We do not offer an 'email in' function for logging tickets, only updating existing tickets.

Once a customer has a ref number, there may be communication between our Service Desk and them via the email function in Service Manager. There is a 'catch all' rule that updates the existing ticket as long as a valid reference number is included in the subject line.

However, as users are aware of this address, they have started emailing it when they have a new issue. As they don't have a reference number at that stage, the email hits the inbox, and does nothing. As we are not monitoring this mailbox, these are being missed.

Inbound routing rules are very limited in that it only allows you to file the email into a folder, or trigger an action within Service Manager (which will either result in it logging a new ticket, or updating an existing)

As we'd rather customers cannot raise a new ticket via email, neither of these options work for us. Ideally we'd like something like an autoresponse at the bottom of the inbound rules (so if all other rules before it fail, it messages them advising that this mailbox is not monitored, and they'll have to raise a request)

This doesn't seem possible in inbound rules (I'd rather it didn't generate a ticket, which runs a BPM just to send an email back telling them to log a ticket!).

Are there any other ways of achieving this?

 

[Steve Giller]

There is no Auto-reply.

The best way to create one would be to have a simple "Raise Request" action that creates a Request, emails the Customer with your required message, and closes itself, all without any Users interacting with it, or even being aware it exists.

This can then be reported on, and you have an exact count (if required) of the number of customers who do this, who they are, whether there are repeat offenders (individual or by department) or if there are patterns (e.g. they happen out of hours or at busy times, etc.) and you can take any actions that are deemed suitable.