Previewing an email before it is sent

[Guest gregmarcroftorc]

In Supportworks, we had the opportunity to preview a message before we sent it. We would tick a box that said "send email" and then it would bring up a box with your templates where you could select the specific one:

This would then bring up the email you wanted to send:

This was a good feature for us to have because not every single email we have wants to follow the standard template. Obviously the majority do but it is beneficial for us to be able to tweak certain things on occasions.

Would this be possible to implement within Hornbill?

Thanks

Greg

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Greg, 

Thanks for your post.  The email communications do work a little differently from Supportworks.  We have provided more options for automation of communications using the BPM Workflow.  These are the behind the scenes communications that can be done without any interaction from the support team. This may be the confirmation of a new requests that has been automatically raised using the Routing Rules or a request raised manually by a support person. The Email Templates work extremely well for these types of emails to make sure that they are consistent in their content and because they are automated, they are never forgotten about and becomes one less thing the support staff have to worry about.

However, automation is not for everyone or for every situation.  Within each request there is the Email Action for manually sending emails from within the request.  The important aspect of this type of Email is that you can send emails to anyone, not just the customer of the request, but possibly as an escalation to a manager, or communication to a third party, and we have the Connections feature where multiple connections of different types can be emailed..  This Email Action has its own template and the content of this template should be kept to generic information that is suitable for all possibly recipients.  I wouldn't recommend having things like Dear <customername> in the template as these emails do not always go to the customer.

This is where the Snippets come into play.  If you are predominately sending emails manually from within the requests you can use the Snippets.  Like Email Templates you can include variables where required.  These can be created and shared between teams.  When you apply a Snippet to an email, the variables are replaced with the correct values which you can see and edit your email before sending. 

Here is a video that describes the Snippets 

    

[Guest gregmarcroftorc]

@James Ainsworth

Thanks for your response James. We have been using these features and they have been beneficial mostly but I did raise this topic which was never answered:

The problem we have with the way the snippet currently works is that it is all in blue text which is why I logged that other topic.

Another issue we have found is that when we have owner name as a variable I am finding that on occasions, people within the team are forgetting to assign the ticket to themselves and then emails are being sent with the wrong person's name in the signature. It's making it a bit confusing when you see your name on the signature because you are the owner, but it wasn't you who sent the email. Is there any way of it recognising who you are logged in as rather than the owner of the ticket?

Cheers

Greg

 

 

[James Ainsworth]

We do plan on continuing to expand on the Snippets feature.  One of those areas would be the inclusion of a formatting bar so that you can include additional formatting such as coloured text.

Regarding the signature, I would recommend not having this in the email template but shared with your team as a Snippet.  In a collaborative environment the expectation is that more than just the owner will be communicating from within the request so hard setting in the template that the email is coming from the owner does have the opportunity to be incorrect.  Possibly something that we can look at is adding a signature option to this email component so that it always considers the user that is sending the email and applies their signature.

The fact that your text that has been added from a snippet is blue doesn't sound right. Is it just the Snippet or is it everything that is typed into the Message Box of the request email?

Regards,

James

[James Ainsworth]

Hi Greg, 

I was wondering if you could have a look at your template.  As the templates have colour formatting I can only think that there is some blue formatting that is including the variable.  Can you try highlighting the variable and remove any formatting if possible.

Regards,

James