Multiple Shared Inboxes to Case Creation

[Kathryn Compton]

Our HR department has MANY shared inboxes for employee requests.  These inboxes are "messy".  They also receive mail from a variety of sender types; not only current employees, but former employees, new hires, external candidates, government agencies, and vendors, etc..

ServiceNow allows redirection of email to create cases; intended for employees or external parties who can't get to the ESC for some reason.  Here's the closest article I could find:  Redirect Email to Instance 

I've been told it usually goes like this:

• a single, new company shared inbox is created solely for this purpose
• that inbox is redirected to the single email address associated with our instance of ServiceNow
• redirected emails create a general case
• HR Agents review and transfer that general case to the existing, specific service case (if one applies)

For my company, we have (right now) 6 inboxes that we can't (for a variety of reasons) disable completely and we'd like to have each inbox redirect to ServiceNow to  create a specific case type that we've named after the inbox.

Example:  emails to Garnishments@MyCompany create a case for the service named Garnishments Inbox.

As if multiple inboxes creating multiple service cases weren't enough, we also have a Risk decision that says that my company will not allow external emails to be redirected to a 3rd party (ServiceNow) so only @MyCompany senders will be redirected. 

Has anyone come up against any or all of this?  🙂

[michaelj_sherid]

Hi Kathryn,

In HRSD we have introduced the concept of machine learning for inbound emails. You can "train" the process to create a specific case in a COE, whereas in your case would be the HR Service. 

There are other options as well where other deployments have used inbound actions that key in on items like the To field to send to a particular HR Service/CoE.

With the machine learning option it will take some records to be created to be able to train the application to route as expected. One of my Colleagues conducted an Ask the Expert session on this Machine Learning topic, which should prove to be valuable. You can find the session here:

2/13 Ask the Expert: HR Agent Intelligence (Machine Learning)

Regards,

Mike

[Kathryn Compton]

Very cool.  I'm interested in the machine learning and will work with our implementation partner on this but I know that can be a relatively longterm strategy as there is a substantial number of records necessary to support.  Thanks for this!

[jayesh mohan2]

Kathryn,

We had a similar scenario in our implementation and I will indicate the solution that we implemented out of the two options below. While you explore the Agent Intelligence feature of ServiceNow, the options below might be useful with your current environment:

1. We asked our HR department to create one email box and asked them to configure forwarding on all the 10+ boxes that they were using to this new box.

Note: This forwarding is not something that is setup by the end user and needs to be done by the Outlook/Email Admin

Once you do this, all your emails from several other mailboxes will flow into one box which can then be forwarded to ServiceNow. Now coming to the ServiceNow side, there is an option to find where the email was originally sent to (even though it was forwarded to a box and then to ServiceNow). Based on where it came from, in inbound actions, you can make decide the COE and HR Service on which the case should be created.

Your example in this context will be:

a. Email comes to Garnishments@MyCompany 

b. Email is forwarded using forwarding rule to SingleHRMailbox@MyCompany

c. Email from SingleHRMailbox@MyCompany is forwarded to YourCompany@servicenow.com

d. Inbound actions can be used to create a case for the service named Garnishments Inbox.

In this approach as you have all your inbound actions on the HR Case level, you can decide the COE and HR Service right when the email is receiving eliminating the need for transferring the case from one COE to another. In the project that I was involved, I asked our HR department to go with this approach, but the only difference is that we were using only a single COE to receive all the cases. This worked for us we have a front line support team which is able to handle multiple types of requests without reassigning or transferring the case.

2. As a second approach, instead of creating a intermediate box you can forward all your boxes to ServiceNow. In ServiceNow, you can have a lookup table which provides the HR Service based on the sender email address. So your lookup table will provide output as Garnishments Inbox as the HR Service if your sender is Garnishments@MyCompany. We are using something similar for our other ITSM implementations.

Lastly, if your company does not allow forwarding to an external mailbox, you can always configure your own mailbox and add it into ServiceNow. This article talks about configuring a mailbox of your own.

[Kathryn Compton]

Wow!  Jayesh, this is such a detailed response and you clearly understand what we're trying to do.  The only thing we're struggling with  is the difference between forwarding email (manually) or redirecting email (automatically).  Due to risk constraints, my company does not allow the redirection of external email or the automated forwarding (Outlook rules) so the control is that we must manually forward.  In that scenario, we lose the original sender and some other important 'header' info.  We can still make use of this great ServiceNow feature (as you say) but with a moderately degraded experience for fulfillers until we are able clean up those shared inboxes.