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Routing Email or a Message (Workflow Subprocess)

Email messages usually are routed to agents by setting the Owned By field in the Activity record, allowing an agent to see the message in their Inbound Item List view. New email messages and follow-up email messages are routed differently. Follow-up messages from a customer contain a thread ID, new messages do not. The routing and queuing methods you use to identify the correct agent are other Xfactors that determine how messages are routed. Figure 19 illustrates this process.

Figure 19. Route Email (Route Message) Subprocess

• New Message Routing. New messages do not have Thread IDs. Therefore, new messages are identified by the absence of a thread ID in the message. When a new message is found, the workflow checks to see which routing process is employed (Siebel Assignment Manager, custom routing and queuing, or manual routing) on the process property contained in the following table.

  Process Property	Default Value	Description
  Enable Assignment Manager	FALSE	When TRUE, Assignment Manager should be configured to route email messages.

  NOTE:  Only one routing process property should be assigned a value of TRUE or the workflow might not work properly.

  If the Enable Assignment Manager process property is set to FALSE, agents have to manually route each message.

  • Assignment Manager. If the Enable Assignment Manager Process Property is TRUE, Siebel Assignment Manager assigns messages to the appropriate agent. Using assignment rules and criteria, Assignment Manager assigns specific activities to employees based on their skills, competencies, and other email assignment attributes. Assignment Manager can assign emails to employees dynamically, interactively, or by assigning a batch of emails to an agent.
  • Manual routing. Each new message must be manually routed to an agent.
• Follow-up message routing. A follow-up message is an incoming email message containing a thread ID. By default, a follow-up message is routed to the agent who handled the original email message. For example, if Casey Cheng was routed the initial email message, the follow-up message will be routed to Casey Cheng if the thread ID is detected in the response from the customer. However, if the agent escalated the email message to a Service Request (SR) and assigned the SR to a different person, the message will be routed to the SR owner, not to the original email owner.
  • Assignment Manager. If the initial agent is not available then Assignment Manager can route the email to another agent capable of handling the message based on the defined assignment criteria.
  • Manual routing. Each follow-up message must be manually routed to an agent.