The email-to-touchpoint feature allows you to record activity to Totango directly from your email inbox. Touchpoints recorded from email are viewable on the related account profiles in Totango.

Global admins can also configure an integration to sync touchpoint activity to Salesforce.

Use email-to-touchpoint

There are 3 ways to use the email-to-touchpoint feature: 

• Record a meeting summary by sending an email to touchpoints@totango.com
• Record emails that you send by adding touchpoints@totango.com to the BCC or CC line
• Record customer emails you receive by forwarding to touchpoints@totango.com

How touchpoint participants are identified

Touchpoint participants refer to anyone who participated in an interaction, but they are not required. Refer to the above scenarios (1, 2, 3).

• Scenario 1: There is no participant. The system uses the customer email address added to the subject line to identify the associated account. See below.
• Scenarios 2 and 3: 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.

Within Settings > My Account > Email Domains, global admins can specify one or more email domains as internal so the system knows how to identify internal participants. 

How touchpoint accounts are identified

To determine the right account for associating the touchpoint, the system queries accounts with the external (customer) user to whom the original email was sent.

• If the user profile is associated with multiple accounts, the touchpoint is logged to the associated account that has the attribute TouchPoint Default BCC Email set to true (see below). If this attribute is not set, or if the contact is associated with multiple accounts that have this attribute set to true, then the most recent account associated with that user is used (also known as the recency rule). 
• 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 BCCs touchpoints@totango.com. The system uses the following steps to identify a matching account for Jill to log this email as a touchpoint.

  1. Identify email addresses for customers. An email was sent from joe@simplecompany.com; hence it finds all email addresses that don't belong to the internal domain simplecompany.com. The system finds jill@customercompany.com and marks it as a customer email domain.
  2. Find related account. If no Totango accounts are found with the specific user email address, the system now tries to find accounts with other user profiles with email addresses that have the customer email domain, "customercompany.com."
     
     • If the system finds 1 account, it logs the touchpoint against that account.
     • If it finds 0 accounts, it sends a failure email that it could not detect a match.
     • 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.
          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.

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

Touchpoints recorded from email always have "Touchpoint Type" set to Email and "Flow" set to the default. You can optionally set a default "Touchpoint Reason" in touchpoint settings.

Requirements

• You MUST have the exact email address of the customer (as it appears in Totango) in the "To:" "Cc:" or "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.

Override the recency rule

The recency rule is used to determine which account to associate to a touchpoint if the related user profile belongs to multiple accounts (e.g., the most recent). If you want to instead always associate a particular account with a user, you can override the recency rule using the Touchpoint Default BCC Email account attribute. This option is often used for contacts who are associated with multiple accounts, but may only be primary for a single one (e.g., third-party consultants, contractors, or distributors). 

Troubleshoot error messages

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

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. 

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. 

FAQs 

Question: Does a user need to be a contact for email-to-touchpoint to work?

Answer: Email-to-touchpoint works as long as the person you are emailing has a user profile in Totango. The person does not need to be designated as a contact.

Question: How can I change the flow 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 was 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.