Forwarding Email/ Email Infrastructure

Question

We are trying to improve our email infrastructure in our small company. We use a web hosting solution that has all our email addresses(so no exchange server, google, etc).

Here is a scenario:

We have a sales addresses and an employee is in charge of assigning emails to individual employees(email from client to sales to employee email address). Lets say an email was assigned to Joe. He deals with the customer for a couple days, but then Joe calls in sick for a couple days.

In the scenario above, how would you continue helping that customer out when its all going through Joe's email? I would think setting everything to forward from Joe to temp employee would be an easy solution but it would be annoying to have to forward it, then change it back when he gets back.

So in other words, is there a recommend design pattern to follow with setting up an email infrastructure if that makes sense for this particular situation? I would think this problem has been solved already with an easier solution out there. We are using outlook. Thanks!

Answer 1

Forwarding everything from Joe to someone else doesn't handle the overall situation for ongoing work as it only forwards future mail. Both this and giving someone else access to Joe's account also has confidentiality problems, as Joe may receive some mail that's intended as personal, used for password recovery purposes etc. Using personal addresses for customer care or sales purposes has these kind of problems, but luckily there's many approaches to solve this.

• Automatic replies.
  • You can add a reply that the customers may contact someone else during absence.
  • Cons: Customer needs to take action. Spammers will get responses, too.
• Distribution lists.
  • It's a server-side feature, but not limited to Microsoft Exchange.
  • Everyone gets the same message.
  • Cons: Hard to ensure that someone else hasn't replied / isn't working on the same case.
• Shared email accounts / mailboxes. sales@example.com / support@example.com, etc.
  • A single, easy contact point to the customer.
  • Microsoft Exchange allows sharing using own credentials, other may require sharing the actual account information with all the members.
  • Using different signatures you can know who has replied, and Outlook's Show as Conversations view helps keeping track on the case.
  • You may add a mailbox structure that helps handling the workflow & phases, e.g. John\unfinished, John\waiting-for-reply, John\finished. This way you can claim the case for you, but anyone else can transfer the case to e.g. Jane\unfinished.
• A ticket system.
  • An upgraded version of shared mailboxes, with advanced tracking and monitoring.
  • Doesn't work within the email system alone, but may require a (web) server.
  • Open source: OsTicket & OTRS Free.
  • Free: Freshdesk, Spiceworks, C-Desk & ngDesk.
  • Many commercial solutions, but might be out of scope, knowing you're on low budget.
  • Depending on the level of confidentiality you may need one that you host by yourself.