Email Attachments – Basic, Dynamic and Conditional

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes | Target users: Supervisors

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use the advanced features of VCC Live’s email attachment management.

In VCC Live, there are multiple ways to include attachments to your emails.
You can attach them:

• Manually from the omnichannel agent interface,
• Automatically to an email template, applying them to every outgoing email
• Automatically, but with certain conditions based on specific field values
• As Dynamic attachments, with dynamic fields included within the attachment itself.

You can combine the last three features mentioned above to, for example, send dynamic attachments based on predefined conditions.

In this lesson, you will learn:

• What the supported file formats for each attachment type are
• How to add a basic attachment manually
• How to set up an attachment to be sent automatically with your emails
• How to set up attachment sending conditions
• How to create dynamic attachments
• What possible advanced attachment use cases are

1. Supported file formats for Email Attachments

VCC Live supports several file formats that you can use as email attachments.

• As Basic attachments, you can upload almost any document-type attachment. The only limitation is that your attachment may not exceed a size of 5MB.
• As Dynamic attachments, you may only upload PDF files.

2. Adding a Basic Attachment Manually

Managing various communication platforms from an agent perspective can be done within the omnichannel agent interface. Here an agent can quickly reach the email section, compose a message and choose an appropriate attachment.

1. Navigate to the Omnichannel agent interface
2. Select the ticket you want to reply to from the left-hand side of the screen.
3. In the middle of the screen, select the Email column. Here you can see details of emails sent or received within the selected ticket. Choose Reply, Reply to everyone or Forward. If there has been no previous email history, click on New email. (If necessary, click on New ticket first.)
4. The email editor window opens, and you can write your message. Once you have composed your email, click on the Attachments icon.
5. Select your attachment, and then press Send.

3. Setting up an attachment to be sent automatically with your email

Enhancing your email templates with an attachment is a useful way to customize your campaign message. Here is how you can do it in VCC Live in a few simple steps:

Note: To perform this action, you have to be logged in to VCC Live as a supervisor.

1. Navigate to Project > Channels > Email
2. Select one of your templates. If there is no template in your project, then create one by clicking on New email template
3. Select the Attachments tab.
4. Select Upload attachment.
5. Choose your attachment in the pop-up window, then click on Finish.
6. A new row appears, where you can find your added attachment with its details. To attach it to your template, mark the checkbox in the first column.
7. Press Save.

Once you have set up the attachment(s) for your email template, the email can be sent via disposition triggering, mass email sending or from an agent script, using an email template controller. In each case, all assigned (marked) attachments are sent with the template.

Tip: To learn more about Emails and using Mass emails for your templates, visit our user guide and tutorial sections.

Note: Attachments are independent of templates, meaning that you can see all uploaded attachments for each of your templates. In order to use an attachment for your template, mark its checkbox in the first column. You can mark and unmark attachments for your templates at any time.

4. Defining conditions for sending attachments

When designing your email campaign, you may decide to include strategies in which you do not send attachments to everyone, but rather only selected recipients, based on information you already have about them. Such information could include things your agents have noted on customer records, or details regarding customer locations, interests, etc. It is also possible to send one type of attachment to a certain group of customers, and another type to other groups.
In such situations you can set up conditions for your attachments, so your recipients would get them only if those conditions are met.

1. Navigate to Project > Channels > Email
2. Select one of your templates. If there is no template in your project, then create one by clicking on New email template
3. Select the Attachments tab.
4. Click on the icon that appears when you hover your mouse over one of your attachments.
5. Here you can select the Field you wish to have your condition based on. This can be either a Single or Multiple parameter field. Once you have selected a Field, its Values appear below.
6. Choose the values you wish to apply for your attachment.
   • If the values chosen here match with the values the system has for the recipient, the attachment will be sent.
   • If the values chosen here do not match with the values the system has for the recipient, then the attachment is will not be sent.

5. Creating Dynamic Attachments

The content of dynamic attachments (as the name suggests) can vary from customer to customer. Dynamic attachments significantly reduce the time agents spend in Afterwork status working on, for example, agreements to customers. If your company uses templates for agreements using the same version for every customer, but integrating personal information from database values, then it is the ideal feature for you.

In order to insert and use text variables, you need a software program that is capable of creating and inserting text variables. Such software programs include Adobe InDesign or Libre Office. Below, we describe a step-by-step guide on creating a dynamic attachment with text variable fields in Libre Office.

1. Open a new Text document. Prepare the non-variable parts of the document.
2. To add dynamic fields: navigate to View -> Toolbars -> Form controls. Turn on Design mode.
3. Add a Text box and right-click on it to enter the Control menu. Here you can select the name of the variable, which should equal the variable name in VCC Live. Do not include the curly brackets { }.
4. Once the document is ready, save it as a PDF ( File -> Export as PDF).
5. In VCC Live navigate to your project’s Email section and choose one of the email templates.
6. Go to the Attachments tab and click Upload dynamic attachment
7. Choose the saved PDF file. Once it is uploaded, don’t forget to make it active, and then press Save.

>Note: Using the same field multiple times in a dynamic attachment requires an automatic creation of new fields with the same values, which can easily be done using javascript. If you need help, our Support team is happy to provide assistance.

6. Use Examples

Creating a dynamic email attachment can be helpful in a number of situations.. Here are some examples that may inspire you when creating your own project:

• Sales, product offer: Automatically include a product offer, so your customers can become familiar with the product before agents call them again. Sending of the attachment can be set as conditional, depending on whether the customer was interested in the product or not.

• Sales, contract management: Send the draft of a contract to your customer right after a call without having to prepare it manually. The variable information (name, address etc.) will already be in the contract.

• Debt collection: Send a mass email to overdue debtors, in order to inform them about further debt collection actions. You can also include the relevant terms and conditions document.

• Customer care: For general queries or specific issues, you can send a pre-edited reply PDF using text variables, with a description of the suggested solution.