Email

Syntelate XA’s email channel gives agents the ability to handle customer emails directly from their agent desktop.

An agent desktop can be set up for either basic email handling or advanced email handling.

Syntelate XA also supports automated emailing. See: Key Features.

Simple Email Handling

Where simple email handling is used, agents can reply to customer emails or create unsolicited emails (emails that are not sent in response to a customer email).

Simple email handling is intended for contact centers where there is a one-to-one relationship between a customer email and an agent’s reply.

Advanced Email Handling

With an advanced email-handling setup, agents can forward and transfer emails, as well as access additional features when creating or replying to emails.

Unlike with simple email handling, many emails can be grouped into a single interaction record. For example, in response to a single customer email, an agent could:

• Reply to the email saying that they are going to pass the customer’s query on to another department.
• Forward the email to another department.

Similarly, let’s say a customer sends an email and then shortly thereafter sends a further email with additional details (such as “Forgot to add the attachment!”). With advanced email handling, these two emails would be presented to the agent at the same time.

The agent could view both emails and then decide to respond to just one or both of them.

Key Features

Some of the key features of email support that are common to both simple email handling and advanced email handling are described below.

Record Matching

When an agent opens a customer email in their unified agent desktop, Syntelate XA automatically matches upon the customer’s email address and, for existing customers, retrieves the customer’s full details.

This provides the agent with the necessary context to fully understand the customer’s email. For example, a desktop can show the customer’s full interaction history across all channels, allowing the agent to view previous emails with the customer, web chat transcripts, and so on.

HTML Emails

Agents can compose HTML emails to customers that include formatting such as bold, color, links and so on.

Snippets

Snippets are small chunks of content that an agent (or email rule) can insert into an email, such as a response to a common question or an email signature.

They help agents by removing the pressure of writing to customers. Instead of writing emails from scratch, agents use snippets as building blocks to compose an email quickly.

Snippets can include references to data. For example, the above video shows the insertion of an email signature that includes the agent’s first name.

See Snippet Editor for more information.

Rewriter

Agents can use Rewriter to paraphrase part or all of their email message before they send it.

See Using Rewriter to learn how an agent uses Rewriter.

Sentiment Analysis

The sentiment analysis feature is available as an add-on and is provided by Syntelate XA's Sentiment Analysis connector to the Azure OpenAI API.

Inbound Behavior

When enabled, sentiment analysis is performed automatically on all inbound emails prior to passing them to the agent desktop.

The analysis checks the language used in the message and scores it on sentiment quality, using a classification of positive, neutral or negative. The result is displayed in a sentiment rating bar that's displayed at the foot of the inbound email window.

Outbound Behavior

Sentiment analysis of outbound emails is not automatic but instead is done on demand.

An agent can choose to submit their email draft for sentiment analysis before they send the email. They can do this by selecting the body of their draft email message and clicking the Sentiment button in the HTML Editor toolbar.

When an agent clicks the Sentiment button, the selected text will be analyzed and rated. Syntelate XA displays the sentiment rating in a dialog on the agent desktop. The agent can choose to dismiss the dialog and either send or edit the email.

If they choose to edit the email, they can use sentiment analysis again if they wish.

Configuration

If you add Sentiment Analysis to one of your channels, Inisoft Support will configure it for you.

When it is implemented, you have the ability to control whether Sentiment Analysis is on or off. You can switch Sentiment Analysis on and off using the SentimentAnalysis setting in the GENERAL table.

Availability

The AI features in Syntelate XA are powered by the Azure OpenAI API and are available individually as add-ons. See Channels for more information.

Agent Experience

For more information on the agent experience of Sentiment Analysis, see Email Sentiment Analysis.

Sentiment Analysis Reporting

You can add a Sentiment Analysis report to your Syntelate XA Dashboard Desktop. With this report, supervisors can monitor the average sentiment ratings of customer interactions by channel. See Sentiment Analysis in the Dashboard Desktop topic.

Rewriter

Agents can use Rewriter to improve their email and chat messages. Rewriter is an AI-powered assistant in Syntelate XA that:

• Analyzes the agent's written content,

• Corrects any spelling, grammatical, and punctuation errors,

• Rewrites it in a formal style,

• And presents the agent with suggested replacements.

Configuration

If you add Rewriter to one of your channels, Inisoft Support will configure it for you.

When it is implemented, you have the ability to control whether Rewriter is on or off. You can switch Rewriter on and off using the AIRewrite setting in the GENERAL table.

Availability

The AI features in Syntelate XA are powered by the Azure OpenAI API and are available individually as add-ons. See Channels for more information.

Agent Experience

See Using Rewriter to understand how it works in practice for agents.

Outbound Email Options

Syntelate XA supports the following outbound email options as standard:

• New
• Reply
• Forward

On request, we can implement Reply All, too.

Mailboxes

You can monitor multiple email mailboxes, such as personaltravel@inisoft.com and businesstravel@inisoft.com. Emails to each email address can be assigned to a specific agent group.

Agents’ replies are sent from the appropriate email address.

Read Receipts

Read receipts are an optional feature of Syntelate XA for Microsoft Exchange mailboxes.

When the read receipt feature is enabled, a Read receipt check box is displayed on the agent desktop. Agents can request a read receipt for an outbound email by selecting that check box.

If you would like to enable read receipts on your Microsoft Exchange email channel, contact your Inisoft professional services consultant to discuss your requirements.

Workload

Emails that Syntelate XA assigns to an agent are put into that agent’s workload. The agent can then freely work through emails in their workload in the order that they see fit. For example, an agent may wish to first quickly reply to all “easy” emails before then returning to “harder” emails.

An agent can start to compose a reply and then return to it later. In addition, where you blend different types of activity, an agent working on an email can be interrupted by an inbound call.

To move between items in their workload, agents use a Workload control on their desktop.

Route to Supervisor for Approval

Syntelate XA lets you route an agent’s email to a supervisor for approval before actually sending the email to the customer.

Maybe you only wish to do this for certain agents, such as newly trained agents. Or perhaps you only wish to do this where the agent has manually edited the email but not where the email consists only of snippets.

With Syntelate XA, this is all possible.

Attachments

Syntelate XA supports email attachments, allowing agents — right from their agent desktop — to view any photographs or documents that a customer has attached to an email. Syntelate XA also lets agents attach files to outbound emails.

For Office 365 integrations, the maximum file size for attachments in an outbound email is 15 MB.

Change Priority over Time

You can change the prioritization of emails over time. This is achieved via the Fulfilment Server.

Supported Email Providers

Syntelate XA currently integrates with the following email providers:

• Microsoft Exchange
• Microsoft Office 365
• Gmail
• Any provider that offers SMTP

The following email functionality is supported:

Functionality	Exchange	Office 365	Gmail	SMTP
Inbound messages	x	x
Outbound messages	x	x	x	x
Booking appointments	x	x	x	x
Syntelate Studio compatibility	x	x*	x*	x*

* Requires additional information from the email account holder to be compatible with Syntelate Studio.

Technical Details

An inbound email from a customer adds a record to the INTERACTION_X table, as with all other types of interaction. This is then picked up by the Worklist Engine and assigned to an agent.

For outbound email, you simply need to add a new record to the INTERACTION_X_NEWMESSAGE table. This is then picked up the Outbound Gateway service and sent to the customer.

You can add new records to the INTERACTION_X_NEWMESSAGE table in a variety of ways. For example:

• You can add an Email control to your agents’ desktop that writes to the INTERACTION_X_NEWMESSAGE table.
• You can add an action to a completion button that writes to the INTERACTION_X_NEWMESSAGE table.
• You can set up a Fulfilment that runs at set intervals and, where certain conditions are met, adds new records to the INTERACTION_X_NEWMESSAGE table.

Settings

Advanced configuration options for emails are held in App Settings files.

It is in the app settings that you, for example, configure the file name extensions to allow for email attachments. If a customer tries to send a file that is not in the permitted list, it will not be saved and your agents will not be able to view it.

More Information

Section	Description
Designer	Explains how to design desktops for your agents.
Message Gateways Configuration	Explains how to configure the monitoring of mailboxes. Monitored mailboxes can also be used to send outbound emails.
Email Rules	Explains how to set up email rules.
Snippet Editor	Explains how to configure snippets for email.
Fulfilment Server	Explains how to set up Fulfilments, which you can use for automated email communication.