Our organization has grown past the point where one person can handle the inbound e-mail from our members. I'm looking for best practices from the community on how to handle this.
We don't want to give all of our staff access directly to the e-mail account. As staff come and go, we would have to connstantly change the password to that account. Also, giving everyone direct access to the account would require a tagging system to know who is handling what message. This seems less than ideal.
We could adopt a ticketing system, either something like osTicket or something like Zendesk. But I think it would be nice to have all of our interactions with our members in one clear place. After all, isn't that what a CRM is supposed to do for you?
I looked at CiviCase and at first glance it appears to be exactly right. But for some reason out of the box CiviCRM does not create a new case for each new inbound e-mail. Discovering this got me thinking that perhaps opening a case for each inbound e-mail is not the right approach?
So I'm looking for input from the community: for those of you who have grown past the point of 1 or 2 staff to handle inbound email, what do you do to capture the email and respond to it?
Thank you
EDIT: I looked at CiviRules, but unfortunately it lacks some conditions and some actions to make this possible:
- I could say "Take an action when an activity of type Inbound Email is received"
- But I could not say that the action should be to create a case.
- Presumably I also could not say to assign the activity to the case.
- I also could not say "Only take this action if the activity is not already associated with a case" (e.g. if the email subject has a case ID)
