Using Email-to-Touchpoint to Simplify Your Workday

CS teams and executives benefit from recording customer emails as a touchpoint directly from their email client without the need to switch between screens. The touchpoint is viewable on the account timeline within Totango. 

Key Features

• Record a meeting summary or touchpoint by simply sending an email to touchpoints@totango.com
• Recording email interaction via cc/bcc touchpoints@totango.com 
• Recording customer email via forwarding to touchpoints@totango.com
• Touchpoint Synchronization with Salesforce: With our integration, you can sync the touchpoint activity into Salesforce

Benefits

• Save time by reducing the need to move from screen to screen
• Record customer activity once and sync across your systems - no need to enter data twice!

Getting Started

There are 3 ways to utilize the Email-to-Touchpoint.

1. When you need to log a customer interaction, you can type your notes in an email and include the customer's email address in the subject line. Send to touchpoints@totango.com, and your notes will be recorded as a touchpoint on the Account Timeline. 

 2. If you want to log an important customer email (e.g., customer feedback), you can forward the message to touchpoints@totango.com, and the message will be recorded as a touchpoint on the Account Timeline. 

3. If an email you're sending to a customer needs to be logged as a touchpoint, you can bcc: touchpoints@totango, and the message will be recorded as a touchpoint on the Account Timeline.  

The touchpoint type is set to Email.

In both 2 and 3, the touchpoint participants are parsed from the email content and added to the touchpoint. The domain from the email address of the person forwarding the email is treated as an internal participant, and all other emails addresses with a different domain are treated as external (customer) participants. To determine the right account, the system queries accounts with the external user to whom the original email was sent.

If no accounts are retrieved, the system tries to find any account with users of the matching domain and logs the touchpoint against that account.

Let's understand this with an example

joe@simplecompany.com sends an email to jill@customercompany.com and bcc's touchpoints@totango.com. The system uses the following steps to identify a matching account for Jill to log this email as a touchpoint.

1. An email was sent from joe@simplecompany.com; hence it finds all emails that don't belong to the domain simplecompany.com. It does this to identify customer email domains and skip internal users. The system finds jill@customercompany.com and marks it as a customer email domain. If no accounts are found with the specific user email address, the system now tries to find accounts with other users with emails with the domain "customercompany.com."
2. The result can be 0, 1, or more than 1 account.
   1. If the system finds 1 account, it logs the touchpoint against that account
   2. If it finds 0 accounts it sends a failure email that it could not detect a match
   3. If the system finds more than 1 account, it proceeds to break the tie as follows
      1. Find the account (from the set of accounts queried earlier Step 2) with a touchpoint logged from the sender in the past 1 week. This is done to identify an account where communication exists. If a touchpoint is found, the touchpoint is logged against this account
      2. If the above does not yield a result, the system tries to find the account with ANY touchpoint from anyone with the sender's domain logged in the past 1 week. If found, the system logs the touchpoint against this account
      3. If it is unable to identify the account uniquely, it sends an email confirming the same.

If the touchpoint could not be logged because Totango could not identify the account or participants, you will receive an email letting you know why it was not logged.

An organization using multiple email domains

In Step 1, if an organization uses multiple email domains, they can enter the domains, so the system knows to skip the internal domains to identify the customer domains.

Note if the user chooses to edit this touchpoint in Totango, the system gives the user the option to notify new participants or all existing participants if new participants are added or the content of the touchpoint has changed.

Troubleshooting Error Messages

Here are 2 error messages that you may receive and how to fix them. 

1) Email is associated with more than 1 account

If more than 1 account has the same contacts (customer participants) in the system and the system cannot determine a matching account described above, an error message email is sent back to the user.

Resolution: Ensure the external participant/contact's email address is only associated with one account in Totango and resend OR log touchpoint manually within Totango. 

2) Email address is not associated with any account

Resolution: Make sure the user's email address matches the email address in Totango exactly and resend OR log touchpoint manually within Totango. 

Requirements

• You MUST have the exact email address of the customer (as it appears in Totango) in the "To:" "Cc:" "Subject" line of email text. 
• Unless you use user email as the user ID (which is case insensitive) OR all user emails in Totango are in all lower case - the email casing in the outbound email must match exactly what is in Totango.
• The customer email address must belong to a user that Totango has tracked at least once. 
• The sender of the email must be a user with a Totango login.
• Emails sent must be properly encoded as UTF-8; otherwise, some characters might not appear right in the Account timeline.
• Touchpoint will not be recorded for an email that has + extension.

FAQs 

Question: How can I change the SuccessFlow that email touchpoints are logged under?

Answer: Touchpoints created via Email-to-Touchpoints are automatically logged under your instance's default SuccessFlow. 

Question: Why is my touchpoint not saving, and I have not received an error message?

Answer: If your email were empty, it would not log a touchpoint.

Question: I am getting an error message that the email is associated with more than one account, but I only see it associated with one account.

Answer: If you keep contacts at multiple levels of your account hierarchy (parent and child, for example), this will be counted as multiple accounts, and the touchpoint will not be logged.

Question: What if I send the email to the customer and BCC'ing touchpoints@totango.com, but I am not the account owner. Will the touchpoint still be logged?

Answer: Yes, as long as you are a Totango User.