Case management through email

BMC Helix Business Workflows enables users to request services by using self-service tools such as BMC Helix Digital Workplace Advanced and BMC Helix Chatbot or by calling an agent. When employees of a company do not have access to the self-service tools for raising a request, a case business analyst can set up BMC Helix Business Workflows to support requests for services via email. When an employee sends an email to request a service, a corresponding case is created in BMC Helix Business Workflows. For example, when a Calbro Services employee sends an email to the dedicated email ID of the company to request access to OneDrive, a corresponding case is created in BMC Helix Business Workflows.

Email-based case management provides the following advantages:

• Employees are not limited to self-service tools to request for services.
• Faster, two-way communication can occur between agents and the case requester.
• Automatic case creation requires no manual intervention by agents.

To enable automatic case creation when an email arrives, an administrator must configure an incoming and outgoing mailbox, and a case business analyst must configure an email ID for a company.

Who can send emails to automatically create cases

The following types of users can send emails to raise requests:

• Internal users—Employees of a company whose email addresses are registered in the BMC Helix Platform Foundation library. For more information about the Foundation data, see Setting up Foundation data for custom applications .

• External users—Users outside of a company whose email or domain IDs have been mapped to employees registered in the BMC Helix Platform Foundation library.

Examples of when external users send emails to raise requests

Consider the following scenarios where employees of ABC Software send emails to Calbro Services to raise requests:

• Employees of ABC Software have queries about the insurance policies that Calbro Services provides. The employees raise their queries by sending emails to insurancesupport@calbroservices.com. Cases corresponding to the queries are created for the employees.
  In this scenario, all ABC Software employees are able to send emails because the company's email domain (@abc.com) is mapped to an employee of Calbro Services.

• Alex Wilson, head of the HR department at ABC Software, finds a key issue in the medical policy that Calbro Services provides. Alex sends an email to the dedicated email ID of Calbro Services to register the issue with the company.
  In this scenario, Alex is able to send an email because Alex's email ID is mapped with an employee of Calbro Services.

Automatic case creation from email

When a user sends an email to raise a request, the system searches for an employee with whom the email address is mapped. Then, based on the email subject and content, a case is automatically created. 

The following table describes how the cognitive service helps to create cases from emails:

After the case is created, the user who sent the email receives an acknowledgement email with the case ID. Further, when the user sends emails to update the case, acknowledgement emails are sent to the user. Also, the content and attachments of the user's email are displayed in the case activity feed. Case agents can also communicate the case updates to users who do not have access to the case through emails. However, the users must be Foundation users or a trusted domain users. The communication between the case agents and users is displayed in the case activity feed.

Agents can also use emails to communicate with other agents or the requester of a case. For example, an agent composes an email from a case in the following scenarios:

• To ask the requester for additional information.
• To get approvals from the managers of an employee.
• To ask other agents in the same company to help with resolving a case.

Where to go from here

• If you are the case business analyst and you want to automate case creation from emails, see Configuring email IDs to enable users to create cases by sending emails.
• If you are responsible for working on cases and sharing their updates, see Communicating case updates.