Using Email-to-Touchpoint to Simplify Your Workday

CS teams and executives benefit from being able to record 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's 3 ways to utilize the Email-to-Touchpoint.

1. When you need to log a customer interaction, you can simply type your notes in an email and include the email address of the customer 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 that have the external user to whom the original email was sent to. 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 so it can log this email as a touchpoint

1. Email was sent from joe@simplecompany.com hence it find all emails addresses that don't belong to domain simplecompany.com. It does this to identify customer email domains and skip internal users. System finds jill@customercompany.com. If no accounts are found with the specific user email address the system now tries to find accounts with users that have emails with 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) that has 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 that has 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 uniquely identify the account it sends an email saying it was unable to determine the account to log the touchpoint

In the event that the touchpoint could not be logged because Totango could not identify the account or participants, you will receive an email letting you know and the reason it was not logged.

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 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

In the event that more than 1 account have the same contacts (customer participants) the system and the system is unable to determine a matching account as described above, an error message email is sent back to the user.

Resolution: Make sure the external participant / contact's email address is only associated to 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 or 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 as 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 was empty, it will not log a touchpoint.

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