Emailing customers for support

I am looking for the best way to move away from using outlook email templates and keep more things inside CommitCRM.

When our monitoring system detects an issue with a customers machine, we email them using outlook. This gets the message to them, but it is hard to track who sent the message, when, how long ago it was sent, etc.

I would like to email those customers from CommitCRM so it can keep a track of the communication better.

We don't want to (always) open a ticket each time because some things the customer chooses to ignore. I want to be able to send them something from CommitCRM, and have them respond to CommitCRM so we can track/log/parse/etc.

Then we can better track theses maintenance issues. What is the best way to do this? Email templates come to mind, but how?

You can save emails, sent to customers from Outlook or received from them to Outlook, by dragging the emails directly from Outlook and into the relevant Account (or Ticket/Asset/etc.) in RangerMSP. As a result, the email will be saved under the Account (or Ticket/Asset/etc.) History as a document. This action will also add the employee name to this record.

When starting a new email from the Accounts window in RangerMSP (using Email button on the toolbar) - after sending the email, with Outlook, the sent email message will be automatically saved under the Account History as well. Such an email can be sent from Outlook directly to the customer email address, unlike emails that are sent through Email Connector.

Tracking entire communication with customer in RangerMSP is definitely possible, it requires creating a ticket for the topic being discussed and have the customer reply to your emails. In other words use the regular email threading feature of the email connector.

I want to stop using outlook templates to begin this process. Should I create account email templates or ticket email templates?

In case you wish to manage all conversations under Tickets (and use the Email Connector for email threading) - use Ticket level Email Templates, otherwise use the Account level ones.

We'll create email tickets templates for these so it can be better tracked.

I tried to create an email template for contracts, and it isn't listed as a data source, even though you can filter by contracts.

When you hit new, there isnt a "for contracts" option.

Thank you for the update. Contracts data source isn't there. Email Templates are supported for accounts, tickets, assets, opportunities, quotes and many more but not for contracts. Also note that to manage everything threaded under a ticket you may want to configure ticket based email templates or use other data sources to initiate the email and then add the relevant ticket number to the subject line of the email so when the customer replies it'll get filed under the ticket/thread. I will go ahead and add a request to support contracts as the data source for email templates, thanks for asking.

How do we send system emails related to contracts / renews / etc?

You can email these as PDF. Freely design the layout using the report designer and then email it, with the contract details, as an attached PDF.

Hope this helps.

Is this an oversight or was it designed to not have any templates available for contracts?

The Email Templates feature was launched with support for several areas, then over time we've added more per users demand and demand for contracts has probably been low. I've taken a note and we'll look into that. Thanks.