Email Forwarding & Escalation Recommendations

Overview

Before you begin setting up your Email Forwarding & Escalation settings its important to consider a few logistics. In order to be able to escalate messages properly, you need to know how you will divide up escalated questions among your organization's staff.  You can then determine who will be receiving escalations and what data is needed for any rule-based suggestions. Once you know these details, you are all set to begin configuring these settings. 

Define Your Staff and Logistics 

Determine who in the staff will respond to which questions. Different institutions may want to distribute incoming emails in different ways.

We recommend you have a general email address that all questions are sent to. However, you can also assign questions by topic areas or using students’ last names or geographic areas and associated counselors. You can configure rule-based forwarding suggestions in order to ensure that the question is forwarded to the correct email based on contact data. Check out Email Forwarding & Escalation settings for more. 

Define What Contact Information is Needed

If the way you are dividing incoming escalated questions is based on a characteristic of the student (ex: admission status, geographic area, last name, etc.), we will need the data fields of those characteristics to be included in the student data you share with us. This is to ensure that the system can identify which staff member they should escalate a question to.

For example, if you would like to escalate questions to counselors based on the contact’s geographic area, you will need to initially share the counselors’ names and email addresses as well as what counties and/or states should be associated with each counselor. When you upload contact data in the dashboard, you will also need to include each student’s zip code. Check out Creating Contacts for additional information.

Setting Up Email Forwarding & Escalation Settings 

First, you need to add the email domains for any email you plan on escalating messages to. If the domain is not listed, you will not be able to escalate a message to that email. Once you do this, you can begin listing the allowed staff emails. These emails will be available for manual forwarding on the Conversations page. 

To set up Manual Forwarding, visit Email Forwarding & Escalations (and see documentation at Email Forwarding & Escalation settings). Once you've set this up, you will be able to begin forwarding messages. (See Manually Forward a Message in Conversations.)

To set up Automatic Escalations, again visit Email Forwarding & Escalations (and see documentation at Email Forwarding & Escalation settings).