Service automation
With the 5.1 update, Exxas becomes a comprehensive all-in-one system for customer service, support, and email management. This release enables you to improve key processes using shared mailboxes – all the way up to automating task distribution.
Service automation supports important business processes
Shared mailboxes such as info@muster.ch, jobs@firma.de or support@contoso.com are essential in almost every company. Many important processes in a company start with an incoming email in a central mailbox; an inquiry from a potential customer, an incoming job application or an invoice from a supplier. Sales, support, customer service or office management teams in particular depend on these general email addresses. These mailboxes serve as a central hub for communication with customers, suppliers and other people. The incoming emails are processed by an employee regarding sales opportunities or service orders (e.g. tickets). When emails are sent using the mailbox, replies must also be forwarded to the right places. Depending on the size of the organization, this is quite a lot of work, which is, above all, repeated constantly. With the new service automation, we provide you with a bundle of functions to support these processes.
Manage your mailboxes
With Exxas 5.1, you will find the new “Mailboxes” menu item in the Team functional area. You can create both personal and shared mailboxes. You can add Microsoft 365 (Exchange Online) mailboxes or IMAP mailboxes. Due to the technical possibilities, automations can only be configured with Microsoft 365 mailboxes. You can store the login details for an e-mail account in your mailbox or authenticate yourself with the email service. The “Inbox” tab shows you all received emails from the configured mailbox that were neither moved to a folder nor deleted. You can reply to, forward or delete these emails — just like in your email client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook). The added value, however, is that you can save these emails in Exxas, create activities from them, or start automations. Automations can be set up so that they are executed for every incoming email and generate, for example, a ticket or a supplier invoice.
Automate your mailboxes
By activating automation, you can determine whether a service order (e.g. ticket), a project, an opportunity or a supplier invoice should be created for an incoming email. To use automations, you should channel your email traffic. Instead of just using an info@ mailbox, you should, for example, receive applications on jobs@, invoices on invoice@ and inquiries from interested parties on sales@. Of course, this only makes sense if you also state this on your website. Mailboxes with lots of incoming spam messages aren't suitable for automation. For example, provide contact forms on your website that send content to unpublished email addresses, such as formular147@muster.ch. You can define extensive settings for the automations. For example, you can set the category, status, or even dates for automatically created activities.
Automatic assignment of activities
You can have activities created in such a way that they must be accepted by users (“queue principle”). However, you can also automatically distribute activities to users and groups. With the default setting, the round robin method is used. This assigns a new activity to the user who has not received an assignment from this automation the longest. Unfortunately, this procedure rarely works in practice. That is why we have the function Include calendars created. This takes into account both the users' calendars and their working times. Weekends, holidays, absences and vacations as well as appointments are taken into account. We're a bit proud of that, because very few ticket or service management systems have such deep integrations for automatic work distribution. However, users must keep their calendars tidy.
Your receipt of your bill is transferred
Like many of our customers, you probably use invoice receipt to receive and process invoices from your suppliers via email. Before the update to Exxas 5.1, receipt of invoices is located under the Finances functional area in the “Creditors” menu item. After the update, receipt of invoices is available as a separate mailbox under “Mailboxes”. You can now also set up that supplier invoices should be automatically generated from incoming emails — without having to start this step manually.
HTML as standard
Receiving and sending emails has been possible in Exxas for a long time. E-mails can now also be sent with HTML formatting. You can use extensive formatting, such as enumerations, tables, colors, and markers. Images integrated into the email content are now also possible.
Response emails for service orders and projects
When you send emails from a service order or a project, a new code is added to the email. If the recipient replies to your email and doesn't delete the code, Exxas will save the reply email in the activity and notify the user responsible for the activity.
