Exciting news for all Email to Case Premium users!
Your requests have been heard, and we're thrilled to announce a major enhancement that will transform your agent experience: rich text comments are now fully visible in Timeline!
This highly anticipated feature, along with a suite of other powerful updates, is designed to provide a more seamless, informative, and efficient support process.
A Glimpse into the Future: Rich Text in Action
With this update, you’ll gain access to a vibrant and clear support Timeline that displays all the nuances of your customer interactions.
Rich Text from the Agent's Perspective
No more compromising on your communication! As an agent, when you compose a reply using a Canned Response or draft a new message, your rich text formatting — including emojis, bold text, bullet points, and colors — will now be perfectly rendered in Timeline. This means your internal notes and public replies will be as visually informative as they are textual.
Rich Text from the Customer's Perspective
This rich text functionality extends to customer replies as well. When a customer responds via email, their rich text, colors, and even inline images will now appear directly in Salesforce, within the Email to Case Premium Timeline. This provides a complete and accurate view of the conversation thread, eliminating the need to open external email clients to see full message content.
You'll also notice a new message notification system. When a customer replies, a subtle flash will alert the agent, and Timeline will automatically refresh, displaying the new rich text response, including any inline images. This ensures agents are always up-to-date without manual refreshes.
No More Compromises: Why the Timeline is Your Best Bet
For too long, some users felt they had to choose between the robust features of Email to Case Premium and the visual fidelity of a standard email composer. That era is over!
Previously, opting for a standard email composer meant sacrificing:
- Canned responses with rich text, inline images, and default attachments
- Intelligent responses utilizing generative replies
- Flow triggering from email actions
- Knowledge integration for seamless content insertion
- Field editing while composing a message
- Scheduled comments
- Text extraction from images
- Screenshot captures
- File viewer in the timeline
- Clean case comments (which remove email signatures and unnecessary clutter)
With this update, you no longer have to make these sacrifices. All the powerful features of Email to Case Premium are now fully compatible with rich text display in Timeline.
Extending the Experience: Reply & Timeline in Communities
The enhanced rich text experience isn't limited to the internal Salesforce agent view. Our Reply & Timeline component within Experience Cloud communities also fully supports rich text.
This means customers interacting with their cases in your community can see all the rich text and inline images from agent replies. And, when customers compose their own replies in the community, they too can use rich text, and that formatting will be perfectly reflected in the agent's Timeline in Salesforce. They can also use the File Viewer and Text Extraction tools, creating consistent and enriched communication across the entire customer service experience.
Ready to Upgrade? Here's How.
Updating to the latest version of Email to Case Premium and enabling these new features is straightforward:
- Upgrade on AppExchange: Simply go to the AppExchange and upgrade to the latest version of Email-to-Case Premium.
- Setup Wizard Configuration: In the setup wizard, ensure you're using the Standard Mode and that the "Enable Rich Text" setting is turned on. (If you've been using the new comment page for rich text composition, this setting should already be enabled for you.)
- Review the "Exclude Most Recent Comment from History Text" setting: During testing, we found that enabling "Exclude Most Recent Comment From History Text" is crucial to avoid duplicate content in your email threads, especially with rich text and inline images. This ensures the most recent comment appears once at the top, without being repeated in the history text below.
- Update Email Templates with New Merge Fields: To ensure rich text is consistently displayed in your email threads, you'll need to update your email templates with three new HTML merge fields:
• History Text (HTML) (for public comments)
• History Text Inc Private (HTML) (including private comments)
• History Text Private (HTML) (for private comments only)
Update all email templates used with Email to Case Premium to these new merge fields for full rich text display.
What Else is New? Beyond Rich Text
We're not stopping at rich text. This update also includes several other significant enhancements:
- Extended Invocable Method Functionality: Our invocable method now supports:
• Creating draft comments
• Scheduling comments for later sending
• Attaching files
• A new "comment-only mode" which acts as a "note to self," allowing agents to add comments without recipients. This eliminates the need to manually remove recipients for internal notes. - Long Message Conversion to Attached Files: For exceptionally long customer messages, we'll now truncate the message in Timeline and convert the full content into an attached file, ensuring you always have access to the complete information.
- Cleaner Case Comments: We've further refined our ability to scan HTML email messages, automatically identifying and removing email signatures. While not yet perfect for every email client, this significantly improves the cleanliness and readability of your case comments.
Need Assistance? We're Here to Help!
Should you encounter any questions or need support with these new features, don't hesitate to reach out to our dedicated support team. You can:
- Chat with us
- Email us to open a case
- Open a case through our community (if you have access)
- Give us a call
