12

Inbound Email

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Implementing Oracle Engagement Cloud 12 - 1

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you should be able to:

• Describe how the inbound email feature operates in Oracle Engagement Cloud
• Set up inbound email

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 Inbound Email Processing

• Is a feature that automatically processes service-related emails received by the system

from a customer
– Email sent to the company's service email address is redirected to the Engagement
Cloud mailbox and handled there by the inbound email processing system
• Creates a new service request (SR) associated with the email, or adds the message to
an existing SR as appropriate

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Release R12 allows you to respond to customer using email as a channel

Release R13 also provides the ability to:
• Process inbound email from a customer or a partner and create an SR
• Process follow up emails from customers or partners and update the associated SR

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Default Inbound Email Processing
Email
received
Filters check for
• When the system receives an email, it: spam, other
1. Applies optional filters to reject possible issues N
Pass No further
emails with specified values in filters? processing
specified fields
Y
2. Checks to see if the email is Y
N Existing
related to a previously created SR SR?
or not Create inbound
message Determined by
3. Creates an Inbound message checking the SR
object reference number
Extract
attachments
4. Extracts attachments
5. Creates an SR in the Email Create SR
channel

... ...
Continued...

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• The response template automatically attaches the SR reference number to the response
Email sent to the customer. When the customer replies to this email, that number is then
included with the customer's reply, and can be used by the incoming mail processing system
to identify the email as related to the original SR, rather than a new email for which a new SR
should be created.
• Note that a customer can choose to opt out of automatic email processing via the
SVC_ENABLE_INBOUND_EMAIL_DEFAULT_PROCESSING profile value. If the customer
does not choose automatic processing, the process stops as soon as an inbound message is
created, and any attachments are separated from it.

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 Default Inbound Email Processing
For example, add
new contacts or
• When the system receives an Email, it: ... team members ...
6. Sets or updates SR values for
contact, account, and team based Set SR values Edit SR values
from Email as needed
on fields in the email
7. Adds email to the SR as a Add Email to
customer entry message SR
8. Adds attachments to the SR Add
attachments
9. Adds a system response
acknowledging the email and Create
providing the SR ID number response Email
with SR ID
10. Sends the response to the
customer Send
acknowledgement

Processing
complete

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If a contact is not found for the sender of the email, the flow is similar to an email from a known
customer except for the following
The system checks the appropriate profile option (discussed subsequently) to see if an SR should be
created for a unknown contact
If the option is set to No:
• A contact is not set on the SR
• An account is not set on the SR
• The system response sent to the customer states that a customer record could not be
identified
If multiple contacts are found for the sender of the Email, the flow is similar to an email from a known
customer except for:
• A contact is not set on the SR
• An account is not set on the SR
• The system response sent to the customer states that a customer record could not be
identified

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Mapping Email Fields to SR Fields

• When an email is used to create an SR, these SR fields will be populated from fields in
the email
Email Fields Service Request Fields

Subject Title

Sender Primary Contact

To Channel (Channel Account Name = To Email Address)

Other To/CC SR Contacts or SR Team

Email Body (first 1000 characters) Problem Description

Email Body SR Message of type "Customer Entry"

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Implementing Oracle Engagement Cloud 12 - 6

Auto-populated SR Fields

• When an Email is used to create an SR, these fields will populated automatically

Email Fields Service Request Fields

Subject Title

Sender Primary Contact

Auto-populated Account = Primary account of the Contact
Auto-populated Channel Type = Email

To Channel (Channel Account Name = To Email Address)

Auto-populated Creation Date = Today()

Other To/CC SR Contacts or SR Team

Email Body (first 1000 characters) Problem Description

Email Body SR Message of type "Customer Entry"

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Implementing Oracle Engagement Cloud 12 - 7

Implementing Inbound Email Processing

• Enable default processing

• Redirect inbound customer emails from the company mail system to Engagement Cloud
mailboxes
• Create a channel for support email to receive redirected external email
• Create email filters as needed
• Set email profile options
• Set up an Enterprise Scheduler Service (ESS) job to process email

More

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 Enable Default Processing

• Use the 'Manage Inbound E-Mail Profile Options" task to enable default processing and
to specify whether SRs will be created for emails from customers who are not already
identified as contacts

PROFILE NAME PURPOSE DEFAULT

SVC_ENABLE_INBOUND_EMAIL_DEFAULT_PROCESSING Enable default processing of Email Yes

Specify if an SR should be created

SVC_EMAIL_PROCESS_UNKNOWN_CUST Yes
for Emails from unknown customers

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Customers are identified as contacts either by self-registering on a Digital Customer Services page
or because an agent creates them as contacts in the system, for example, when creating and
handling a SR that was initiated by telephone.

Implementing Oracle Engagement Cloud 12 -

 Redirect Inbound Email

• Customers typically send support requests to an email address on the primary domain of
the company
• To redirect these emails so that Engagement Cloud can process them:
– Locate the value in the SVC_INBOUND_EMAIL_ADDRESSES profile option
— This profile option is set at the time of provisioning
— This is the external email address in Engagement Cloud to which emails will be redirected
• Set up redirection rules
– On the company domain, set up rules to redirect email to the external email address
previously located

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Note that if there are multiple addresses in the SVC_INBOUND_EMAIL_ADDRESSES profile option,
use the address that includes the word "external".

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 Create a Mailbox Channel

• Use the "Manage Communication Channels" task to create a channel of type E-Mail for
incoming email that has been redirected from the company's external support email
– An SR created from this redirected email will show this as its originating channel
• The account name for this channel is the company's external support email address

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There is also a seeded channel of type E-mail. After you have created a channel for emails that
arrive through the company's email, only inbound emails that do not come through redirection from
the company email will show as originating from the seeded channel.

Note that the company's external support email address is the profile value for the
SVC_INBOUND_EMAIL_ADDRESSES profile, which is pre-seeded.

Also note that, if needed, you can set up multiple channels for multiple company email addresses, if
you want to distinguish between various possible email addresses to which a service request may
have been sent.

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 Create Email Filters

• Use the "Manage E-Mail Filters" task to

set up email filters to block certain
emails
– For example, you can
automatically reject emails from
known spam addresses
• Are created on specific fields:
– Sender
– Reply To
– Subject
– Attachment file type/ mime type
– Email header
• Can use pattern-matching rather than
literal text strings

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The Field Name value is only used if you want to specify a filter based on a particular field within the
email header, such as Authentication-Results.

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Set Profile Options

• Use the "Manage Service Request E-mail Message Profile Options" task to further
configure inbound email processing

PROFILE NAME PURPOSE DEFAULT

Specify the total size (in MB) of attachments in 10
SVC_INBOUND_EMAIL_MAX_ATTACH_SIZE inbound email

Indicates the reply to email address that will be

used for acknowledgment emails sent to
SVC_INBOUND_REPLYTO_EMAIL noreply@oracle.com
customer. Typically this will be a no-reply email
address.

Email template to use for auto-

SVC_SYSTEM_RESPONSE_TEMPLATE_NAME
acknowledgements

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Implementing Oracle Engagement Cloud 12 - 13

 Set up a Processing Schedule

• Use the Enterprise Scheduler Service (ESS) to schedule the "Retrieve Inbound E-Mail
Messages" job using "Advanced" options
– Set a schedule for retrieving and processing emails

Email will be
checked and
processed every 2
minutes

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Release R12 allows you to respond to customer using Email as a channel

Release R13 also provides the ability to
• Process inbound Email from a customer or a partner and create an SR
• Process follow up Emails from customers or partners and update the associated SR

Implementing Oracle Engagement Cloud 12 - 14

Troubleshooting

• If SRs are not created for inbound emails check:

– Make sure redirect rules have been set up for the email address
– Confirm that there are no filters rejecting the email
– If a contact does not already exist for the sender, make sure the
SVC_EMAIL_PROCESS_UNKNOWN_CUST profile option = Y
• If the email received by the customer does not contain the content of the SR message:
– Make sure that the Email template has the tag #MessageContent#, which indicates
the location where the SR message content will be added
• If a customer has received an email, but did not receive the attachment in the SR
message:
– Check the value of the SVC_SR_EMAIL_ATT_SIZE profile option
– If the attachment size is larger than the profile option value, the attachment will not be
included in the email

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Lesson Highlights

• You can set up a job for processing inbound emails automatically

• The process can:
– Recognize whether a new service request is needed or an old service request should
be updated
– Create or update a service request based on the contents of the email
– Send a return acknowledgement email
– Filter out questionable emails so they are not processed

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Implementing Oracle Engagement Cloud 12 - 16

Practice

• Observe settings for inbound emails

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