Customizing the Agent Experience in Salesforce Email-to-Case: All You Need to Know

Have you ever wondered why support agents go through different motions in a high-volume support environment? The daily caseload, repetitive queries, and lack of contextual information can lead to low morale and reduced productivity. Even after using Email-to-Case, the native functionality of Salesforce Service Cloud, support agents can feel bogged down, leading to delayed responses and a less-than-ideal customer experience. The functionality falls short when it comes to providing a smooth, efficient experience for agents.

That’s where Email-to-Case Advance (E2CA) comes in. It is an advanced case management solution that helps agents overcome these challenges, empowering them to deliver a faster, more personalized, and satisfying customer experience, all without leaving Salesforce. 

In this blog post, we will explore E2CA’s features and how it transforms agent experience from inefficient to frictionless.

What is E2CA?

Email-to-Case Advance is a Salesforce Email-to-Case enhancement tool. It optimizes case handling, cleans up duplicate cases, streamlines communication, and automates manual tasks. It offers an array of features and benefits that enhance agent experience and improve case resolution time.

How E2CA Helps Transform Agent Experience in Salesforce?

Clean Case Comment Creation from Email

Support agents often deal with repetitive queries that clutter the case timeline. This feature efficiently streamlines email-to-case communication by:

• Automatically creating case comments from incoming emails, removing redundant email threads
• Cleaning comments by selecting from incoming customer emails, outgoing replies, or both 
• Overwriting To/CC fields using actual email headers for accurate tracking
• Enabling case history comments on the timeline based on selected tracked fields
• Supporting private comments based on defined email domains

Key Benefits for Agents

• Eliminate cluttered comment threads for better readability
• Maintain a structured communication history
• Reduce manual clean-up effort
• Gain visibility into field updates directly on the comment timeline
• Protect sensitive information via private comment domains

Keep Everyone in the Loop

E2CA keeps stakeholders informed and aligned through intelligent, configurable notifications by:

• Notifying additional recipients via To, CC, BCC
• Supporting both Workflow-based and Apex-based email flows
• Excluding irrelevant participants from email flows

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Relevant stakeholders always stay updated
• Minimized noise from irrelevant emails
• More focus on communication that matters

Add Watchers on Cases

Collaboration can break down when stakeholders aren’t informed. This feature enables seamless internal visibility without extra overhead by:

• Letting the admin include watchers on the account and case levels
• Notifying watchers whenever case updates occur
• Defining default roles to notify and add to the case
• Setting default recipient roles and using the account team as the case team

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Keeps cross-functional teams aligned
• Fewer missed internal updates
• Reduces back-and-forth by proactively keeping the stakeholders informed

Manage Communication on Closed Cases

Customer replies on closed cases can be confusing. This feature provides full control over what happens next by:

• Choosing to reopen, create a new case, or take no action
• Setting the appropriate status for reopened or newly created cases

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Prevent duplicate efforts on old cases 
• Maintain SLA compliance with clear workflows on reopened cases
• Provide a customized experience to customers post-case closure

Prevent Email Looping

Prevents multiple case creation in Salesforce from the same sender within defined timeframes, protecting against email loops and autoresponder issues. This feature safeguards your system by:

• Blocking case creation caused by email loops from autoresponders
• Allowing configuration of loop detection thresholds based on email count and time
• Tracking the number of cases generated within a specific period

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Fewer duplicate cases
• Maintaining cleaner and more relevant case queues
• Protect system integrity from automation errors

Auto-Attach Attachments

Manual file management is tedious. E2CA makes sharing attachments seamless and consistent by:

• Automatically attaching files to case comments
• Supporting both Salesforce Files and Attachments
• Allowing direct file uploads from the comment page 

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Save time attaching files
• Enables sharing complete case context 
• Maintain clean and traceable documentation

Manage Forwarded Cases by Internal Team

Internal team members often forward customer issues. This feature ensures proper case handling by:

• Identifying the original customer sender
• Creating cases in the customer’s name, not the internal sender’s
• Setting record type and status

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Avoid confusion from internal emails
• Retain context and accountability
• Reduce manual reassignment efforts

Handle Cases from Non-Customers

Not all incoming emails deserve to be registered as a case. This feature effectively filters out noise and automates intake by:

• Auto-closing and notifying users to register
• Creating contact with automatic account linking
• Creating leads or stopping case creation entirely

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Focus on genuine support queries
• Convert leads more efficiently
• Automate intake for non-customer workflows

Enable Duplicate Case Merge

Duplicate cases can create havoc by confusing agents and wasting their precious time. This feature keeps things clean by:

• Identifying duplicate cases and either marking them as duplicates or merging them with a selected master case
• Preserving all communication history 

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Streamline case queues
• Avoid repeated work on similar cases
• Maintain a clean, organized case view
• Resolve the common duplicate case issue that leads to cluttered timelines and reduced agent efficiency

Enhanced Comments (Beyond 4K Bytes Limit)

Standard comment limits can truncate important info. This feature ensures full communication is captured by:

• Creating a custom object to store long comments
• Viewing and managing extended case communications with enhanced comments

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Overcome the challenge of hitting the case comment limit that Salesforce imposes
• Preserve full communication context
• Avoid truncation of long messages
• Improve clarity on complex cases

Personalize the Case Comment Page

As the name suggests, this feature allows personalizing of the case comment page by:

• Enabling a rich text editor, canned responses, and templates
• Setting field order for improved visibility
• View existing comments while adding new ones

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Provide faster, personalized replies
• Maintain message consistency
• Reduce context switching

Case Comment Timeline

A fragmented comment history on a particular case slows everything down. This feature improves case visibility by:

• Automatically displaying emails, history, and comments in a single timeline
• Searching comments using keywords
• Enabling different colors for various comments
• View, edit, preview, or delete a comment from the timeline

Key Benefits for Agents:

• Get the full case history at a glance
• Easy tracking of previous discussions
• Make better decisions, faster

Add Case Comment Page

Switching between tabs and fields slows agents down. This feature centralizes everything they need in one place by:

• Enabling agents to draft comments, update case fields, view case summary, manage recipients, and review existing comments, all on a single page
• Suggesting recipients automatically based on case context
• Supporting message drafts, previews, and scheduling for flexible responses
• Enabling canned responses for quick, consistent replies

Key Benefits for Agents:

• A streamlined, personalized workspace
• Smart automation to reduce repetitive tasks
• Better collaboration tools for faster resolution

Final Words

Support agents today need more than a case management tool; they need an advanced solution that can streamline their workflows, reduce friction, and elevate their productivity & experience. With Email-to-Case Advance, you can equip your agents with a faster, cleaner, and more intelligent way to manage support cases. From eliminating email clutter and automating repetitive tasks to enhancing visibility and streamlining collaboration, E2CA is built to meet the real-world needs of high-performing support teams.