In this day and age, everyone is looking for prompt responses to e-mails and support requests. In this blog post I’m going to cover integrating FOAAS into e-mail using Taskcentre in order to provide prompt responses to support requests.

By responding quickly to emails, it can greatly improve satisfaction levels, plus also using FOAAS’s technology can also reduce the number of support requests*.

* by increasing the likelyhood of a P45.

In order to integrate the solution, we need to break it down into 3 major steps:

• Intercept Email
• Call Web Service
• Send Response

Intercept E-Mail
In order to intercept the email, we use a standard “SMTP” input trigger. This trigger stores the following into variables:

• From E-Mail
• E-Mail Subject
• E-Mail Body

Additionally, we also need to use the “Text Parser” tool in order to extract the following from the “From E-Mail”

• Sender Name
• Sender E-Mail

Call Webservice
FOAAS is a REST based webservice. So I’ve built up a web service call, passing through the following parameters:

• Sender Name
• From Name

This web service returns two values:

• message
• subtitle

Additionally, the web service requires custom headers which have been amended using the tool

Send Response
A response is then sent to the inbound e-mail automatically, using the following steps:

1. XML to Recordset (HTML Tool only recognises recordsets)
2. HTML (To build up an email)
3. Outbound SMTP

Example
Below you can see an inbound email from a used. As you can see, the email contains both a subject and a request for the support helpdesk. In my VM, the “From” name is “James – Demonstration”, as I use the VM for testing and demonstration purposes.

Here is the response to the email, including the automated response to the web service:

Source Task and Installation
Below is the download link for the example, plus also the web service connector. In order to install the task, the install needs to be done in the following order:

1. Import Web Services Connector
2. Import Task

FOAAS Web Service Connector
FOAAS Task

This task has been provided for humour/educational use only.