E-Mail Response Management System (ERMS) allows you to create business rules to process, acknowledge, route, and respond to incoming customer emails automatically using defined email templates and routing rules. Using ERMS, customer emails are assigned to the most appropriate processor, and then routed to the Agent Inbox of the assigned group or employee for processing. Agents then work down through the items in their inbox, processing each email in a timely manner — at least in an ideal world.

However, in the hectic world of contact centers where emails and agents are both constantly flying in and out, sometimes emails can be temporarily overlooked or neglected. To ensure that every email is processed within the appropriate time frame, ERMS provides escalation capabilities that automatically send an email notification to the contact center supervisor when the initial response time for any email has been exceeded. The initial response time is calculated as the time between when an email is received in the system and when an agent processes the email from the Agent Inbox. The determination of the appropriate initial response time period is calculated based on IMG configuration, customer service-level agreement (via service contract), or business rules — depending on how you have configured the system.

SAP CRM receives the emails, which ERMS then evaluates and handles by using business rules defined in the rule modeler. Optionally, depending on the results of the rule evaluation, ERMS may assign the email directly to an employee or organizational unit for manual processing. In this case, the email is routed to the Agent Inbox of the appropriate person or group using standard CRM partner determination.

If an email is not processed within the appropriate response time (as determined by ERMS rule evaluation), the email is escalated, triggering an email notification automatically to the contact center supervisor. This escalation procedure happens before the email is ever touched by an agent. It is independent of the user interface and works for both the IC WinClient and IC WebClient. After reviewing the escalated email, the supervisor can reroute the email or decide on another course of action to speed up processing.

Here are six steps to enable ERMS escalation. This process applies to SAP CRM 2005 and above, including SAP CRM 2006s, SAPCRM 2007, and SAP CRM 7.0. For additional information, consult the SAP Notes listed in the sidebar at the end of the article.

Step 1. Maintain directly called services for your service manager profile (e.g., DEFAULT). Access SAPGUI transaction CRMC_ERMS_SM_PROF or follow IMG menu path IMG > Customer Relationship Management > E-Mail Response Management System > Service Manager > Define Service Manager Profiles.

Make sure to maintain the highlighted services in the exact sequence shown in Figure 1 before the RE_RULE_EXEC rule execution service (shown in invocation order 36). You can review the details of this process in my January 2007 article. Basically, the service manager executes the services sequentially in the order that they appear. The role of the fact-gathering services is to gather data about the email and the related business partner, which is used later in the actual rule evaluation (which is triggered by the RE_RULE_EXEC service).

Figure 1

Maintain key fact-gathering and escalation-determination services before rule execution service

It is vital that these highlighted fact-gathering and utility services be triggered before the actual rule execution occurs. Otherwise, if you include the fact-gathering services after the rule execution, then you won’t have the necessary information about the email (and the related business partners) at the time of the rule evaluation. Your rules will likely fail or otherwise perform incorrectly.

The most important services of the highlighted entries are FG_WI_CONT, FG_ESCALTIME, and UT_ESCALDETERM. The FG_WI_CONT service retrieves the original email recipient from the ERMS factbase. The other two services are responsible for determining escalation and for updating the determined escalation date, time, and type back to the ERMS workitem container. To reiterate, ensure the two services FG_ESCALTIME and UT_ESCALDETERM are maintained in the same invocation order as shown in Figure 1, particularly before the rule execution service RE_RULE_EXEC.

Step 2. Maintain the escalation method for your service manager profile (e.g., DEFAULT). In transaction CRMC_ERMS_SM_PROF, select the service UT_ESCALDETERM and click the Properties folder. Enter a property value of 1 for the Property ID METHOD if you want to determine escalation solely using the duration defined by the service level agreement (SLA) based on the service contract of the customer.

Enter 2 in the Property Value field, as shown in Figure 2, if you want to determine escalation based on the minimum duration of all three available methods, which are discussed later in more detail:

• Duration specified in SAPGUI transaction CRMC_IC_AUIGNADR, mapped to the respective inbound system email address
  
  
• Duration specified in the rule modeler using the Response Time Duration attribute of the Set Attribute action
  
  
• Duration defined by the SLA based on the service contract

Figure 2

Specify the method for determining escalation

Step 3. Configure the ERMS_ESCALMSG service manager profile. Exit your service manager profile, go back to the IMG, and open the ERMS_ESCALMSG service manager profile. This profile controls the ERMS escalation functionality. This service manager profile only has one service, UT_SEND_ESCL, as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3

Verify that the ERMS_ESCALMSG service manager profile contains the UT_SEND_ESCL service

Configure the UT_SEND_ESCL service with the properties FORMNAME, RECIPIENT, and SENDER_ID (Figure 4).

Figure 4

Select the desired mail form, recipients, and sender ID for escalation notification

FORMNAME: Determines which mail form template the system uses as the basis of the email notification sent to the manager. You first need to create a mail form (using the mail form creation tool). Ideally, it should include attributes such as Escalation Type, Escalation Date/Time, Email Sender, and Email Subject.

You can access the mail form tool from the IC Manager business role in SAP CRM 2007 and above, and from SAPGUI transaction CRM_ERMS_MAILFORMS in SAP CRM 2005 and below. Note that you will need to create a mail form, such as the one shown in Figure 5, before you can enter the mail form ID in the FORMNAME parameter.

Figure 5

Create a mail form with desired text and attributes to be used for sending escalation notifications

RECIPIENT: Specifies the email address of the contact center supervisor who receives the escalation notification. You can maintain more than one recipient in the same RECIPIENT property by separating them with a semicolon.

SENDER_ID: Determines the email address that appears in the From field when the supervisor receives the email escalation notification.

Step 4. Assign your service manager profile to your incoming (system) email address. Access SAPGUI transaction CRMC_ERMS_SM_PDET or follow IMG menu path Customer Relationship Management > E-Mail Response Management System > Service Manager > Assign Service Manager Profiles. Create two entries, as shown in Figure 6:

• One entry with no email address where you map the ERMS_ESCALMSG service manager profile against ObjectID 15107965. This is the CRM workflow task that triggers the service manager profile ERMS_ESCALMSG with the associated service UT_SEND_ESCL.



• A second entry in which you map your ERMS service manager profile (e.g., DEFAULT) against your incoming (system) email address

Figure 6

Maintain appropriate service manage profile assignments

Step 5. Set up SAP Business Workflow settings. Access SAPGUI transaction SWU3 or follow IMG menu path Customer Relationship Management > Basic Functions > SAP Business Workflow > Maintain Standard Settings for SAP Business Workflow.

Under the node Maintain Runtime Environment, select Schedule Background Job for Missed Deadlines (Figure 7). Enter the desired value (in minutes) for the Interval until the next deadline check field (Figure 8). This value controls how often the system checks whether any emails are escalated. For example, if you enter a value of 3, the system checks every three minutes to see if any emails sitting in the queue have exceeded their initial response time durations.

Figure 7

Maintain automatic workflow customizing

Figure 8

Maintain frequency intervals for checking for emails that have exceeded initial processing times

Step 6. Set up customizing, SLAs, or business rules to trigger escalations.

The final step is to define the configuration and rules that trigger the email escalations to the contact center supervisor when an email exceeds its initial response time. As mentioned in step 2, you have two options for determining email escalation time periods. Based on the settings made in the UT_ESCALDETERM service, the system either determines the escalation time period based solely on the customer’s SLA, or on the lowest of three values using the SLA, customizing, and business rules.

Customizing-based escalation: In customizing you can specify that all emails sent to particular inbound system email addresses should have particular response time durations (e.g., four hours for the Gold queue and two days for regular queue). You can set a time period for each system email address with transaction CRMC_IC_AUIGNADR or by following IMG menu path Customer Relationship Management > Interaction Center WebClient > Agent Inbox > Settings for Asynchronous Inbound Processing.

Enter a system email address and then specify the deadline period and unit of measure (Figure 9). Here the Deadline Period is a number specifying, together with the unit, the time period for deadline monitoring (e.g., three minutes). If the customer email is not processed within this specified time, the email is escalated and the contact center supervisor receives an escalation notification email (depending on the settings made in your ERMS service manager profile in step 2).

Figure 9

Optionally, maintain a deadline period directly for specific incoming email addresses

Rule-based escalation: You can also use flexible business rules in the ERMS rule modeler to determine the desired response time duration (Figure 10). For example, you can specify that emails from one particular customer have an aggressive response time (e.g., one hour) while emails from another customer have a slightly more relaxed response profile (e.g., one day). You could also differentiate the response profile based on other attributes, such as email subject, category, or product.

Figure 10

Optionally, create business rules to override desired initial response time

The attribute ES_DURATION (response time duration [hours]) is defined in the ERMS Repository. You can set this attribute by a rule that the system then evaluates in the utility UT_ESCALDETERM.

SLA-based escalation: Another option for determining the response time duration for emails is to use the SLA based on the customer’s service contract. In this case, the system uses the service contract that is assigned to the business partner, reading the response time duration from the response profile associated to the service contract. The following configuration is necessary to use SLA-based determination:

• You must first maintain a response profile in SAPGUI transaction CRMD_SERV_SLA and assign a period of time for duration until first reaction to the profile
  
  
• You must maintain one or more service contracts in transaction CRMD_BUS2000112
  
  
• You must assign a service contract to the business partner
  
  
• You must assign a service product as an item of the service contract
  
  
• You must assign the response profile (from the first point above) to the service product item of the contract

John Burton

John Burton is a director of product management at SAP and is responsible for the SAP CRM Interaction Center (including ERMS) and social CRM topic areas. John has 13 years of experience at SAP and has been involved with SAP CRM and the Interaction Center since 1999. He is also the author of Maximizing Your SAP CRM Interaction Center, available at the SAPinsider Store. John is an alumnus of the University of Michigan and Central Michigan University. John can be found on LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/sapjohnburton.

You may contact the author at john.burton@sap.com.

If you have comments about this article or publication, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the editor.

Vinod C

Vinod C is the developer at SAP for SAP CRM Interaction Center. Vinod has four years experience with Interaction Center and has been involved in SAP CRM since 2005. He specializes in SAP CRM Interaction Center (both WinClient and WebClient), ERMS, and Call List functionality. His current responsibilities include support and maintenance of the SAP CRM Interaction Center.

You may contact the author at vinod.c@sap.com.

If you have comments about this article or publication, or would like to submit an article idea, please contact the editor.