Email To Case Automation Overview with Various Features and Functionalities

Email To case Automation Overview with various Features and Functionalities

We use Cases in Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM to track issues or problems that need resolution. When a constituent sends an email to support mailbox (to an address you designate), Work 365 Email to Case Automation add-on automatically creates a Case in CRM and auto-populates Case fields from email body. To understand the business benefits and the high-level process flow for Email to Case Automation, please refer my earlier blog "Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM Service Automation - Email to Case". 
 While Email to Case is pretty awesome, there are few downsides that you may come across over a period of time. This blog provides an overview of various features and functionalities that have been added to overcome these gaps and pitfalls based on experience with our customers.  The functionality has been broken down into following sections:  
  1. Case Exclusion Settings 
  2. Case Creation Settings 
  1. Case Owner Assignment Settings 
  1. Existing Case Check Settings 
  1. Automatic Response Email Notification Settings 
1. Case Exclusion Settings  Spam: Support addresses like support@ or help@ will get a lot of spam. If you do not have a mechanism to filter this spam then you will end up with lot of junk cases In Email to Case Automation add-on, you not only specify the domains and email list that you would like to exclude from case creation but also configure the keywords that would be matched with the email subject.  Email looping: A best practice for Email to Case is to have an auto-reply going back to the constituent with case number and information on how to get back in touch. This is fantastic unless/until that person also has an auto-reply. However, it's still not that worse compared to an infinite loop of emails and cases that could happen if the receiver also has some email-to-case mechanism. In Email to Case add-on, there is a built-in mechanism to identify and break the loop from happening. This is also configurable.  Re-Creation of Cases on restarting of CRM Email router: CRM Email router fetches all emails from the mailbox into CRM and creates an email activity. If you follow a practice of deleting the unwanted email activities from CRM (but not from mailbox) and by any chance, you need to restart the router then all the old email activities will get re-created automatically and will result in a lot of unwanted cases.  In Email to Case add-on, you can specify the exclusion criteria for emails to be ignored if older than X hours.   

 2. Case Creation Settings  When a Case is created in CRM using Email to Case add-on, the title of the case is populated by the email subject whereas the description of the case is populated by the email body.  Stripping of HTML from Email body: Most of the emails today are in HTML format and directly pasting the body to description will display a lot of junk text. This App will extract the email body, strip the HTML content and then copy it to the Case description.  Attachments: Wouldn't you like the attachments from email to be easily available along with the Case? Email to Case add-on has the option to extract the attachment from incoming email and pushing it to the Case Notes for easy reference. 
Case Closure or escalation email notification: One of the important use cases is sending of Case Closure email to the constituent who had sent email to support. We know that this can be easily achieved by writing an out-of-box workflow which would send this email when Case status changes to resolve. However, when building this workflow, you will soon realize that it is not possible to send email to the Case Customer field. So, in a workflow, you will need to use "Responsible Contact" field. Email to Case add-on allows setting of the "Case Responsible Contact" to a Contact in CRM by searching the Contacts database with the sender's email id. This is very helpful in sending case closure or case escalation emails thus keeping your contacts informed about the latest status of the cases. 
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