The Detail Department

You are here: Home / Productivity / Difficulties using Email in Salesforce

Difficulties using Email in Salesforce

by

The subject of this post may seem a bit harsh, but hopefully by the end of this longish post, you will see where I’m coming from. My call right now, is that there is NO email solution that works with Salesforce that is without difficulties. I hope that I’m wrong. I really do. If you think I’m wrong please add to the discussion below.

When I’m talking about emails and Salesforce I am talking about the following scenarios. For the tl;dr version I’ve included my ratings for each of the scenarios:

  1. Receiving email from an existing client – PASS.
  2. Receiving email from a new client – FAIL.
  3. Receiving email from a new client about a specific case – Qualified PASS.
  4. Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case, replying to the email sent to them – PASS.
  5. Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case – FAIL.
  6. Emailing to a client – FAIL.
  7. Emailing to a client about a specific case – FAIL as above, with a MAJOR FAIL for dealing with attachments.
  8. Emailing to a third party about a specific case – FAIL.
I am focusing on Cases with this post, but there are a lot of things similar with Opportunities – the same issues you have about ensuring emails are recorded against the right Case happens with Opportunities and Leads also. How you set up these objects in Salesforce is dependant on your business processes.
The “ideal” email scenario with Salesforce is:
  • All contacts who ever email you are already contacts in Salesforce.
  • All email to those contacts are generated out of Salesforce.
  • Anyone who emails you about an existing case, will ALWAYS only ever reply to an email that has come from Salesforce.
  • Clients will reply to emails about specific cases with only content relevant to that case.
Of course that doesn’t happen in the real world – EVER.
And it definitely doesn’t happen if you are dealing with staff who work only out of their Outlook Inbox.

In this post, I am not talking about paid email syncing options that are available in the App Exchange (or this post will be very long). You can see that there are many many options, for huge dollar amounts. My thinking is that you pay enough for Salesforce, you should not have to pay more for basic functionality such as tracking emails for your client. There is one paid app that I will comment on, specifically in relation to Email to Cases. 

Receiving Email

Receiving email from an existing client

Emailing in to Salesforce to record that email against an existing contacts is pretty well handled. You can use Email to Salesforce, or the Salesforce for Outlook toolbar (which essentially does exactly the same thing). This matches the email address of the sender with an existing contact in Salesforce and then puts the content of the email in an Activity linked to the Contact record. I give this scenario a PASS.

Receiving email from a new client

I have no idea how you are meant to manage emails that you want to track for new contacts, apart from the obvious:

  • Forward the email to Salesforce (or click Add to Salesforce in Outlook)
  • Manually create a new Contact
  • Manually attach the email to the contact through the Unresolved Email Task or the Unresolved Emails screen.

This takes a number of steps and will probably not be done by most staff after about the first week. This scenario is a definite FAIL – so you probably need to ensure there is another way to create contacts first, rather than when receiving emails for the first time.

Interestingly I noted that forwarding an email and using the Salesforce for Outlook results in different behaviour for Unresolved Emails – forwarded emails are shown in a special Unresolved Emails page, whereas Emails added from Outlook only show up as Tasks. 

Receiving Email related to Cases

Setting up Email to Case

There is a great post over at Button Click Admin that goes over all the steps to Set Up Email-to-Case, and there is a good video from Salesforce showing an overview of using Email-to-Case.

Also, when setting up Email to Case, one must have app is Email2Case Attachment Reassign which takes the attachments from the email and puts them in the Attachments related list on the case.

Receiving email from a new client about a specific case

After Email to Case is set up, the logging of emails into Salesforce to create new Cases works quite well – If the client emails directly to your support email address (or you can forward the email to your support email address). For a client that does not yet exist as a Contact in Salesforce, the case will be created similar to the one shown in the Email to Case Setup Video. and you will have to do the following:

  • Manually create a new Contact
  • Manually edit the created Case to attach the Contact to the Case.
I’m going to give this scenario a Qualified PASS because if all else fails, and the Contact is not created in Salesforce, the Case can still be managed and the contact details from the client are still recorded in the description field on the Case. But it is best to create the Contact in Salesforce as they may be an ongoing client.
I have created a No Code No Cost solution to create new Contacts from Cases like this using Object Converter. 

Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case, replying to the email sent to them.

This is one of the perfect scenarios noted above. When emailing out of Salesforce to an existing client who has a Contact record created in Salesforce, the email gets a Thread ID added to it. When your client replies to that email, Email to Case sees the Thread ID and attaches the email to the Case and notifies the Case Owner that there is a new email. This scenario works effortlessly and is the way things should work in Salesforce – this gets a big PASS.

Receiving email from an existing client about an existing case

But as we know, people aren’t perfect and often your clients will email you about an issue that is related to an existing case. This scenario is more annoying and here are the steps:
  • Forward the email to Salesforce (or click Add to Salesforce in Outlook)
  • Open Salesforce and go to the record of the Contact that sent the email
  • Find the email in the Activities Related List
  • Open the Email Tasks record
  • Click Edit
  • In the Related To field enter the Case Number of the Case that this email is related to (Don’t know the Case Number? – no problem, simply open a new tab, search for the Case, copy the Case Number, come back to this tab, paste the Case Number in – easy!)
  • Save the Task
My response to this – AS IF! This scenario is a definite FAIL and there is no way that anyone except the most detailed person will do this. The end result is that Emails will either be only associated with the Contact, or not recorded in Salesforce at all. This then bypasses the whole reason for using Salesforce, which is to have “one thing in one place, once”.

Emailing Out of Salesforce

Emailing to a client

If the client is already a Contact record in Salesforce you could just BCC your email to Salesforce address as you send the email out from your email client. But that’s annoying to have to remember that each time. You can achieve a similar thing by clicking the “Send and Add” button in Salesforce for Outlook – a little easier.

The idea, however is to get people out of working from their Inboxes and work from within Salesforce as their primary tool, so you want them to generate the emails from the Contact record in Salesforce. There are a few advantages and disadvantages  with this way.

Advantages:

  • Multiple email addresses can be stored against each client record – just choose the right one to send to.
  • It looks just like regular email and has all the fields like Additional To and BCC.
  • You can do rich text formatting in the body of the email.
  • You can choose predefined Email Templates that have Merge fields in them to quickly create emails.
  • There is a spell checker built in.
  • You can attach files.
Looks and feels and smells exactly like email – right? Well just start using it for a week or so and you start to find the disadvantages are numerous:
  • Which is the right email address to send to?
  • No auto complete in the other email address fields.
  • No shortcuts or auto formatting that you are used (eg ctrl+shift+8 – Gmail or * space – Outlook to create a bulleted list; ctrl+k to insert a hyperlink).
  • No inline images in your email body (even Gmail can do this now).
  • Only one Email signature – you can’t swap email signatures as you can in Outlook.
I could go on. For hard-core email users who feel that they can’t get their job done effectively by using Salesforce this is an issue – they will just stop using Salesforce, and the emails won’t be tracked. And then there are Attachments, which is a whole other story – see below… So sending emails is a FAIL from me.

Emailing Out of Cases

For emailing out of Cases, or Opportunities or any other client related object, I’ve concentrated on Attachments. Specifically for Cases, there is an app called Email to Case Premium – this is a paid app so I will deal with the features and issues of this app in a future post.

Attachments

Attachments are where the real hell begins. So, you’ve spent all this money getting Salesforce up and running for your organisation, and you want to ensure you get the most out of it, therefore you insist that all documents related to Cases (or Opportunities, or Accounts or any other object) are attached to the Salesforce record that they relate to. (Why you would try to manually maintain matching folders on your share drive or in Box.net or similar is beyond me). Now, you want to email one of those documents to the Client or someone else – these are the steps to attach one document to an email from within Salesforce:
  • Before you email, go to the Case record, decide on the attachments you want to download.
  • Right click on the file name and download it to your local computer, or network drive (and use up your bandwidth for a second time, because you have already uploaded it once).
  • Now create the email and fill in all the details.
  • Click on Attach a file.
  • Click Choose File.
  • Browse to the File, remembering where you just saved it.
  • Click Attach to the email and wait for it to upload (using your bandwidth for the third time).
  • Click Done.
  • Now you can Send the email – Finally!
What an absolute joke! And querying this with Salesforce officially (this was a deal-breaker for a client of mine recently), they say that this is the way it is designed and the only way they can suggest you attach documents to emails, that are already attached to the record.
Yes, you could pay lots of $$ for Email to Case Premium, Loop or Conga – a few apps that will help attaching documents to emails, but that is not the point. How does Salesforce even consider this to be acceptable business practice? You know what’s going to happen, people will start saving documents onto the dreaded file share either instead of, or even worse, as well as the Salesforce record, then you have a nightmare of consistency – which one is the correct and latest version of the document. Wow! You will end up needing SharePoint just to manage the versions of the documents – and that is way overkill.
Dealing with Attachments is a MAJOR FAIL!

Emailing to Third Parties

This scenario really depends on your business, but a number of businesses would need to take documents from Clients, especially relating to a specific Opportunity or Case, and then forward them to another third party for processing or information.
Apart from dealing with the whole attachment issue there are a number of other issues:
  • You will need a place to record the Third Parties on the Case or Opportunity – your best bet is a custom child Object, because the standard functionality of Contact Roles is a bit limiting.
  • When you want to email to one third party you will need to copy the email address, create the email, then paste the email address in to the Additional To field.
  • What if you want to email two or more third parties – good luck with working out how to do that – possibly open a separate copy of the Case in a new tab, then do the email and switch back and forth between the two tabs and copy and paste the email.
  • If you want to use Text or HTML Email Templates there is a limitation that emails must be sent to a Contact or a User – so you may have to have your name in the To field, as well as the third party – this may look strange to them.

So – that is a lot of stuffing around just to send an email – so, for me, emails to third parties are a FAIL.

Summary

This is a long post and I have tried to be thorough in looking at ALL the options. There are some basic functions of emailing that get a PASS, but as soon as you take it even a little bit past the basics (I don’t think adding an attachment is anything but basic), we descend into the realm of FAIL.

I have yet to see any reasonable, even paid, solution for simply dealing with the attachment issue (without the other features of Loop or Conga). I’m sure it could be coded as a visualforce page, but I really don’t understand why someone hasn’t done it as a simple free app – so maybe I’m missing something that will mean it is difficult to build.

So, if you have any suggestions, other options or favourite apps to deal with emails, please add some detail in the comments below. In a future post, I will talk about the features and issues with one particular email App, Email to Case Premium.

Otherwise, right now, I don’t have a solution.

Comments

  1. Jodie Miners says

    Thanks for the comment Jason.
    Wow! $10 / user / month for a basic thing like attaching emails.
    You would be way better off getting an offshore developer to code a solution up for a few hundred dollars then be in front after the first year (and this is me saying this when I will always try to look for apps first rather than coding as coding may come back to haunt you later on).

    This does show were so many COTS products are broken and how so many people just live with annoying stuff like this, or worse, make their staff live with annoying stuff like this.

  2. Jason Howe says

    Hi Jodie,

    I agree whole heartedly, email in Salesforce can definitely be handled better overall. Personally, I would love to see SF add the ability to have emails sent and received from any object, without having to go with extra plugins (SF for Outlook for example). It would be fantastic if all of my users could simply have conversations with their contacts directly from their Contact record if they choose. I guess this would be similar to how email 2 case works, but without the administration pains of setting up routing addresses for each new email address that needs to be added.

    As for the attachments fail – wow, do I ever agree. They totally dropped the ball on this one, and for reasons beyond my understanding, still haven’t fixed it. It is absolutely painful to have to go through the steps of attaching a file to an object record, then try to send an email and attach that same document only to be told you have to save it to your computer first. You can’t even attach docs stored in the Libraries, which again, is nuts. I have come across one app that did a pretty good job of getting around this though, called Email Attachments from CRMGuidance. The only issue I had with these guys is that they don’t seem to have much in the way of customer service. For example, I tried the product out, it worked great, so I wanted to buy it. I asked them for purchase options, and they sent me an invoice, but didn’t provide me with a way to actually buy the product. I asked if they took credit cards, no reply….I asked where I should send a PO to…no reply. Sigh.

    Thanks

  3. Jodie Miners says

    Thanks for the comment bernino. I would not use that solution as it does not deal with attachments also. It is not really a solution if it does not deal with ALL emails in ALL circumstances.

    Integrating to other solutions like Marketo is really only an option for larger businesses with a large budget. Most of my clients are small businesses or Not for Profit, so don’t use products like Marketo.

    Unfortunately, I don’t yet have a solution, but I will be sure to add it to my blog if and when I do. 🙂

    Thanks

  4. Bernino Lind says

    This addresses lots of pain points we have with SalesForce as well – having thousands of leads each month and then SalesForce not having out of the box Reply To things etc. is a real pain.

    Could you update your post with suggestions on solutions?

    I’m looking into http://sassyforce.com/2011/09/12/adding-reply-and-forward-buttons-to-the-email-activity-page-layout/ which looks promising and pragmatic as a solution for our inside sales staff and also of course adding Marketo automation as well – but that doesn’t eliminate the need to make it easy to reach out to customers…

    Thanks for any solution you could find.

  5. Jodie Miners says

    Ah thanks for that Kristin, I think that is going to be a great help.
    My users already use the Case ThreadID – they email to themselves from Salesforce, and then ensure the ThreadID is in every email they send to the client.
    So I think doing something with a Workflow that emails them the Case ThreadID when they take over the case may be a good idea.
    I will definitely show the ThreadID on the Case anyway.

  6. kristin says

    I feel your pain. We use Email to Case for internal support and it’s been a challenge that users have to reply from Salesforce.com (or suffer the consequences with duplicate cases).

    I just came across an old blog post on crmsuccess that is giving me hope and you might be interested in. See http://crmsuccess.blogs.com/support/formula-for-the-emailtoca.html. It provides the formula logic for a custom case field that creates the case’s Thread ID.

    I created this field and added it to my “new case assignment email”. Now when I receive a new case assignment email in my Outlook, I can reply from within Outlook and my reply is automatically attached the original case in Salesforce.com. There’s a few catches:
    1. Case assignment emails come from noreply@salesforce.com. When I reply, I have to replace that with my contact’s email address and add my support email address
    2. If/when my contact replies, they have to ‘reply all’ to be sure that the support email address stays on the email.

    So it’s not perfect, but maybe you have ideas on how to best address the above points? Maybe replacing the case assignment email with a workflow alert could tackle #1? And if the case owner has permission to send email from the support email address in their Outlook, that might help address #2…