Is there a piece of software that can act as a receptionist for email? For example, our receptionist answers the phone. Customer asks to speak to their inside sales person. Sorry that person is unavailable, let me give you another inside sales person. And so on.

If someone emails said sales person, and they are OOO, they have their email set up to auto respond telling the person that and they need to call or email someone else. The problem we have is that apparently our customers are morons. Either they don't comprehend the whole "I'm out and won't be checking my emails for a week" thing, or they just ignore it. But we get people who want to order stuff and have it delivered next day and they will never follow up. Just bitch when they don't get it.

So anyway, we wanted to have something like our receptionist that does the same thing for emails. If your email address ends with @companyxyz.com forward to this person. If it ends with @companyabc forward to this person. If someone is not there or if it's an "unknown" domain than it forwards to the next person in the queue. And so on and so on.

Does that makes sense? This was a lot more writing than I planned.

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/30/2015 07:17AM by bazookaman.

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bazookaman
...we wanted to have something like our receptionist that does the same thing for emails. If your email address ends with @companyxyz.com forward to this person. If it ends with @companyabc forward to this person. If someone is not there or if it's an "unknown" domain than it forwards to the next person in the queue. And so on and so on.

Does that makes sense? This was a lot more writing than I planned.

You want a service running on your email server that 1. recognizes when people set out of office messages; 2. compares senders to a list; and 3. forwards messages to other accounts based on that list?

That's a heck of a custom job. Expensive.

Here's what we do at my office: We have public and private email accounts.

The public account is a distribution-list account that uses our whole names before the @ symbol. Messages to this account are forwarded to BOTH the employee and his/her manager. The manager figures out what to do when the employee is unavailable and a response is necessary.

The private accounts are the actual email accounts for us and only people in the organization have this email address. Messages to this account go straight to the employee's inbox.

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nevermind



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/30/2015 07:56AM by Drew.

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Onamuji

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bazookaman
...we wanted to have something like our receptionist that does the same thing for emails. If your email address ends with @companyxyz.com forward to this person. If it ends with @companyabc forward to this person. If someone is not there or if it's an "unknown" domain than it forwards to the next person in the queue. And so on and so on.

Does that makes sense? This was a lot more writing than I planned.

You want a service running on your email server that 1. recognizes when people set out of office messages; 2. compares senders to a list; and 3. forwards messages to other accounts based on that list?

That's a heck of a custom job. Expensive.

Here's what we do at my office: We have public and private email accounts.

The public account is a distribution-list account that uses our whole names before the @ symbol. Messages to this account are forwarded to BOTH the employee and his/her manager. The manager figures out what to do when the employee is unavailable and a response is necessary.

The private accounts are the actual email accounts for us and only people in the organization have this email address. Messages to this account go straight to the employee's inbox.

The two email thing would never work here. And we DO have certain addresses that go to a group. But most often the Branch Manager is included giving them a TON of emails to sift through. If we just had one person whose only job it was to sift through emails that would be fine. But the Branch Managers often get overwhelmed with that plus their other duties.

But since it's a custom thing and not an off the shelf thing, I'll run it by our programmer. He's a pretty low level (or is it high level?) guy and could probably write something like that. He's just swamped too.

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Keep in mind that someone will also have to have and maintain a database of accounts, account-reps and backup-account-reps for this to work the way that you've described.

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Yep. I figured that.

I guess I was just hoping that someone had already done it and I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel.

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"apparently our customers are morons"........



I always thought it was a business' job to service and take care of customers......



In your company, it obviously works the opposite way.

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testcase
"apparently our customers are morons"........



I always thought it was a business' job to service and take care of customers......



In your company, it obviously works the opposite way.

Nope, the business's job is to make money. I'd gather that if you could call your moron customers morons to their face and still get business most people would.

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C(-)ris
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testcase
"apparently our customers are morons"........



I always thought it was a business' job to service and take care of customers......



In your company, it obviously works the opposite way.

Let's see. You (the customer) orders a part that you need tomorrow. You order that via email. You immediately get a response back telling you that the person you emailed is out of the office. They are NOT checking their email.And if your email is important to please call this number.

Now I don't know about you, but needing a part the NEXT day would qualify as important.

Anyway. They don't call that number. They wait. And wait. And wait. And then when the part is sufficiently late, they call and complain that they never got the part.

Yes. They are morons.

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Can you build a rule that makes the email reply with the OOO message and then it forwards to the receptionist?

That seems pretty simple to me...

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

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jdc
Can you build a rule that makes the email reply with the OOO message and then it forwards to the receptionist?

That seems pretty simple to me...

That was one thing we had considered. While not optimal it might do what we want for now. Getting it set up and used would probably be the hard part.

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Time for a new policy...
"Orders required Next-Day may NOT be ordered via eMail - Orders placed via email for Next-Day delivery will be rejected".

Just IMHO...

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Paul F.
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A sword never kills anybody; it is a tool in the killer's hand. - Lucius Annaeus Seneca c. 5 BC - 65 AD
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Good is the enemy of Excellent. Talent is not necessary for Excellence.
Persistence is necessary for Excellence. And Persistence is a Decision.
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Eureka, CA

I know nothing about this product: Email Receptionist

Im sure you are aware of this, but email rules only take a few seconds to setup... adding a forward to a OOO should only take a few clicks...

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

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jdc
Im sure you are aware of this, but email rules only take a few seconds to setup... adding a forward to a OOO should only take a few clicks...

There are plenty of things that only take 1 click I can't get some people to do....

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C(-)ris
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C(-)ris

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jdc
Im sure you are aware of this, but email rules only take a few seconds to setup... adding a forward to a OOO should only take a few clicks...

There are plenty of things that only take 1 click I can't get some people to do....

Lol. So true.

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Roswell, GA (Atlanta suburb)

Like Doc says, it can get pricey for a custom job. I wrote a few systems that ran chron servers that attended to such details, moving emails and messages around office personnel based on selectable criteria, so that issues could automatically escalate thru the company according to the terms of the applicable service level agreements. Pretty straightforward database stuff; if this -> then that, just loop thru on the chron server, and branch and act per the defined structure. The systems I wrote evolved over months, and years as the features and company sizes grew. The basics remain the same; you need your pool of resources to draw from on one side of the database, you need your set of rules/structure as to what goes where, when, and why (and how much time the recipient is allotted to clear the pending task before it gets escalated to the next level), and then you need your chron server to continuously loop and branch thru everything, moving/sending stuff where it belongs according to the rules. There are many ways to attack such a project, it really depends on how many resources are involved, and how many possible/likely permutations will be used. A good initial design spec is imperative. Good luck.
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Not really sure what you are selling or how sales are handled, but is there a way to automate ordering rather than having to a sales guy?

Do they make commissions or able to modify the price on the fly -- or a lot of upselling/upgrading?

How about a form based system like jotform? Pretty easy to setup... but might be limited if you have thousands of products with variable pricing, or some other custom selling system...

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Edited 999 time(s). Last edit at 12:08PM by jdc.

How about all purchase/sales emails go to a central mailbox and users pull them to work when received? That ensures nothing is ever missed, and might speed overall processing time based on user availability.