Effective Dispatch of General Inquiry Emails

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Effective Dispatch of General Inquiry Emails

Handle your generic email account as a team!

Sebastien Tien

The Challenge

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, as a non-profit cultural organisation supported by public funding, cares deeply about its non-professional public. We have to be available for their questions, big or small. We are committed to answer timely to their general inquiries by email, but our small team has often a large workload. Unfortunately, the current operational issue often seems more urgent than general inquiries, until it is resolved, and the next one appears...

In addition, if most team members can access our email account for general inquiry, there’s no reliable way to track if an email has been already responded to, leading to unanswered emails and double replies.

Last, our general email account receives a substantial amount of spam, as it is displayed on our website, and used without our consent for registration to promotional material.

Goal of this Doc

We want to ensure that each message sent to our general inquiry email account receives a timely reply (but only one) by the most suited team member.

What can this doc do?

Extract all messages from a general inquiry email address — even if it’s not a Gmail account —,

Automatically dispatch the messages where a team member is mentioned — even if their name is misspelled —,

Allow asynchronous discussion about more complex inquiries, before their dispatch,

Alternatively, assign the remaining messages to a default team member, or to all (randomly, for load balancing),

To fit their personal workflow, let team members choose if inquiries are dispatched to them as email forwards, or as new tasks in our task tracker,

Filter out spam and other unsolicited promotional messages.

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To receive here the emails of a non-Gmail account, we actually use a Gmail address which is configured to access that non-Gmail account. Then the dedicated Gmail pack is used to funnel these emails in Coda.

To have the same setup:

select “Accounts and Imports” and

in the section “Check email from other accounts:”, select “Add an email account”.

Then fill in the information required for your non-Gmail account.

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Examples

These typical emails should be processed automatically, following different scenarios.

📥 Inbox

📥 Inbox

About yesterday

From:

abc@gmail.com

To:

Received

Sep 1, 10:00 AM

Message:

Hello Sebastián, following our chat yesterday, I write to confirm that we will be meeting...

Scenario

My book on your shelves

From:

def@hotmail.com

To:

Received

Aug 31, 1:00 PM

Message:

Hi there, claire told me I can submit my book for your consideration

Scenario

Our newsletter you didn’t subscribe to

From:

jkl@spam.com

To:

Received

Sep 1, 11:00 PM

Message:

We’re sure you need to hear about our coverage!

Scenario

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A Note for Makers

Implementation notes are available throughout this doc, to explain what is happening under the hood. By default, they are not visible but are indicated by a

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button that trigger their display. Alternatively, you can choose to

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show all implementation notes.

The notes are also gathered in the “Implementation Notes” page.

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