Email Handling

Estimated reading time: 7 minutes | Target users: Supervisors

Table of Contents

• 1. Setting up an email account at VCC Live
• 1.1 Setup for inbound emails
• 1.2 Set up an email account using the VCC mail server
• 1.3 Optional – Set up your email account using an SMTP server
• 1.4 Optional – Set up your email account using OAuth 2.0 authentication
• 2. Creating an Email template
• 3. Assign agents to your project + further settings
• 4. Handling emails from the agent’s perspective
• Open
• Contact
• Ticket
• Reply

In this tutorial, you will learn how to set up an inbound email account in VCC Live, that is capable of handling inbound emails.

Imagine this scenario! You would like to use VCC Live to receive incoming emails from your customers, so your agents can process their requests and reply to them

This use case covers the following:

1. Set up an email account at VCC Live
2. Create an email template, including testing the template and including snippets
3. Assign agents to your email queue
4. See how agents can handle emails on the agent interface, including agents assigning it to a ticket and replying to it

1. Setting up an email account at VCC Live

1.1 Setup for inbound emails

1. From the VCC Live menu, select Contact Center > Global Settings.
2. Select the Email accounts tab.
3. Press New account. Enter a name for the account.
4. From the Protocol drop-down list, select Email forwarding
5. In the Project drop-down list, you can choose which project your inbound emails should be routed to.
6. Press Save

Once you save your account, you will see an auto-generated email account in grey in the Forward emails to field. This means that your customers should send their emails to this email address in order to contact your company.
Since this is a rather complex email address, we suggest setting up an email address that is easy to remember (eg. [email protected]), and then in the settings of your email provider, set up a forwarding address to the auto-generated email address you see in grey in the Forward emails to field.

1.2 Set up an email account using the VCC mail server

This is necessary to let your agents reply to incoming emails.

1. From the VCC Live menu, select Contact Center > Global Settings.
2. Select the Email accounts tab.
3. Press New account. Enter a name for the account.
4. From the Protocol drop-down list, select VCC Live mail server
5. Enter the email address you want to show as the sender email address
6. Press Save

1.3 Optional – Set up your email account using an SMTP server

Instead of using VCC Live’s mailing server, you can choose another SMTP server to handle your email-sending duties. In this example, we will show how to sync your account with your email client.

1. From the VCC Live menu, select Contact Center > Global Settings.
2. Select the Email accounts tab.
3. Click on the “…” icon, and then select the New account option.
4. From the Protocol drop-down list, select Use SMTP server
5. Enter the details in the following fields:
   • Authentication method: LOGIN
   • Security protocol: STARTTLS
   • Mail server: Your mail server address, for example: smtp.office365.com or smtp.gmail.com
   • Default port: 465 or 587 (which one is authorized)
   • Username: Your email address
   • Password: your email password or, in Google’s case, the 16 characters password generated for VCC Live by Google’s App passwords
   • Email address: Your email address
   • Display name: the name that appears to your customers when they receive an email from your agents
   • Default: By marking this checkbox you set this account as your default sender account.
6. Press Save

1.4 Optional – Set up your email account using OAuth 2.0 authentication

You can use OAuth 2.0 authentication for email communication. In this example, we will show how to sync your account with Google.

1. From the VCC Live menu, select Contact Center > Global Settings.
2. Select the Email accounts tab.
3. Press New account. Enter a name for the account.
4. From the Protocol drop-down list, select SMTP XOAUTH2
5. Enter the details in the appearing fields
   • Authentication method: LOGIN
   • Mail server: smtp.gmail.com
   • Default port: 465
   • Username: your Google username and password
   • Email address: the email you wish to assign
   • Display name: the name that appears to your customers when they receive an email from your agents
   • In OAuth Settings enter your:
     • Client ID
     • Client Secret
     • Authorize URL
     • Access Token URL
     • Scopes: In case of Google, enter “openid profile email https://mail.google.com/“
6. Press Save

Note: You need to make sure that you also set up a Redirect URL in the format of: "https://{customer}.asp.virtual-call-center.eu/oauth", where ‘customer’ refers to your VCC account name, which you are using when logging in manually to VCC Live. Read more about redirect URLs here.

2. Creating an Email template

1. Select a project from the project list, then select Channels > E-mail.
2. Press New email template.
3. Enter the name of the template in the Template name text field.
4. Enter a subject.
5. Enter an email address or select a database field in the Recipient drop-down list to set the recipient.
6. Enter one or more email addresses in the CC and BCC text fields if required.
7. Enter or select an email address from the Sender drop-down list. This address is displayed as the sender to the recipient.
8. If it is not marked, mark the Active checkbox.
9. Select the Message tab, then enter and format the desired message, or enrich it with image and video.
10. Select the Attachments tab to insert an attachment.
11. Press Save.

Tip: At this point, you can test your template by sending it to any email address with the Save and send test email button.

Email snippet tab
Snippets are a lot like templates, only they are smaller and shorter in form. Think of them as small building blocks or objects of text you can create beforehand, and then your agents can use them by selecting them when composing a message. This is useful if you want to offer effective phrases and expressions that represent your company’s profile and adhere to the voice and tone of your business.

3. Assign agents to your project + further settings

1. Go to project > Agents
2. Assign your agents to the project by dragging and dropping them from left to right.
3. Go to project > Emails
4. On Email sender accounts, select the sender email account you created in step 2.1, and click Use as default
5. On Email templates at the bottom of the page, mark the templates you want to make available to your agents.

4. Handling emails from the agent’s perspective

Now that you have set up your email account and template, let’s take a look at how an agent can receive and reply to an incoming email. These are the steps they should follow:

Open

When an agent logs in to the project and receives a new incoming email, this icon appears in the upper left-hand corner:

Contact

Opening a ticket, they can either

• Create a new contact for the email by pressing +New contact, or
• Assign the email to a preexisting contact

Ticket

Then the email can be assigned to:

• A new ticket by pressing +New ticket, or
• A preexisting ticket by selecting one of the appearing tickets. Select it and then press Assign to ticket in the upper right-hand corner.

Reply

The agent can now compose a reply message, and then send it to your customer.

• Templates and snippets can be inserted here: for templates, use the Template drop-down, and for snippets, use the icon.

Learn more about:

• Outbound and Inbound Emails
• More information on setting up emails
• The Email log, available for supervisors