Filling In The Blanks: Customer Service Email Automation

A leading North American electricity and natural gas distributor wanted to streamline and standardize how their personalized customer email communications were generated and sent from existing templates. The client used a number of different email tools and templates regionally and wanted to have more consistency over their company branding and better provide internal technology support for their business teams. The current method of email and document creation was labor-intensive and required someone to manually extract customer data from a legacy ERP system and load it into a tool to populate the email templates. These email communications supported crucial customer correspondences like Credit Letters, Rejection Letters, and Contract Terms & Conditions.

In addition to optimizing the process, the company was also investing in Salesforce as its primary customer relationship management platform. So going forward, the customer data for these types of communications would be sourced from Salesforce. After evaluating various products for email template management, the team selected Conga Composer for its seamless integration abilities with Salesforce, its out-of-the-box reporting capabilities, and the user-friendly WYSIWYG template editor. These capabilities would enable business teams to self-serve when sending customer communications.

The client wanted to enable users to create, manage and send communications all from within Salesforce so that they did not have to utilize multiple tools. Our team embedded Conga in their Salesforce instance using a Lightning Web Component (LWC), Conga Composer REST API endpoints, and included Salesforce Lightning Email Templates. This solution enabled the client’s team to generate and send time-sensitive email communications in real time, leveraging live data from the Salesforce platform.

Customer service representatives could easily use a template creation wizard in Salesforce to generate documents on-the-fly and have confidence that the template included current customer data. Additionally, once a document is generated, it could be sent via email to the customer and at the same time, their Salesforce Account record is updated with a copy of the same document for visibility. A representative would be able to see the full history of customer communications for an account in a central location and be better equipped to serve the customer during future customer service calls.

The templates were thoughtfully set up so that a Salesforce Admin could manage adjustments to templates, content or styling quickly and easily with point-and-click configuration without IT involvement. This was enabled through a pre-configured Conga Composer solution with Salesforce Lightning Email Templates and mail merge fields.