Email-to-Case — Notifications on a new Email for an existing Case

The Email-to-Case functionality of the Salesforce Service Cloud is a great tool to tackle your inbound email communication with your customers. It automatically creates a Case from any inbound email (forwarded by your Email-Server to Salesforce), and is also able to link replies to an existing Case.

Also an out-of-the-box feature is the automatic notification of Case owners, when a new email arrives related to an existing Cases. But this functionality is a simple email-notification, with predefined non-configurable content, and can only be switched on/off completely for the whole organisation.

If there is need for more specific functionality, you can solve these with a Process Builder or Apex Trigger implementation. Here are a few example use cases that require a custom implementation:

• Only send a notification to Case Owners who have opted-in for the notifications
• Do not send notifications for Cases that are owner by Queues (the out-of-the-box functionality would send a notification to all Queue Members)
• Customize the email-content of the notification
• etc.

The process builder implementation of these use cases is actually quite simple:

• The Process is started by a new “Email Message” record
• The filter criteria depends on the use-case, but can be a simple formula: ISNEW() && [Email Message].ParentId != NULL && LEFT([Email Message].ParentId, 3) == “500”
• The action(s) also depend(s) on the use-case, but can be a simple email-alert with a customized email-template

Since Summer ‘19 Salesforce offers a possibility to display in-app notifications to users from the Process Builder. This is also a very convenient way of letting Service agents know that there is a new email from a Customer, without cluttering the agents email inbox.

For this purpose you need to create a new Custom Notification with useful content (e.g. “You have a new Email on Case <casenumber>”). In the Process Builder this notification can be sent to the Case Owner as a new action, using the configured Custom Notification.

Have you implemented a custom notification functionality like this? Let me know how you did it!

Need help?

If you need help implementing this or any other functionality in Salesforce, feel free to reach out.