Convert Free-Form Emails Into Structured Forms
Transform unstructured customer inquiries into organized data with Aide
Many customers prefer to reach out via free-form emails, often omitting crucial details or burying them within lengthy messages. This creates a challenge for support teams, who must spend valuable time sifting through these emails to extract the required information.
Aide’s Collectable Fields feature offers a solution to this problem by identifying and extracting key information from free-form messages. By setting up Topics and Workflows tailored to specific types of inquiries, you can effectively transform unstructured emails into structured data, streamlining your support process and ensuring that no important details are overlooked.
What you’ll accomplish
By following these steps, you’ll configure Aide to detect specific types of inquiries in free-form emails and automatically extract relevant information as if it were submitted through a structured form. This setup will focus on two common scenarios: Bulk Order Quotation Requests and Personalized Product Engraving Forms. Once implemented, your support team will have access to organized, form-like data for these inquiries, reducing the time spent on manual information gathering. As you become more comfortable with this system, you can expand it to cover additional types of customer requests.
Pre-requisites
- Helpdesk integration (Zendesk, Front)
- Aide Collectable Fields feature enabled
Task outline and guidelines
For this use case, you will:
- Create Topics for “Bulk Order Quotation” and “Product Engraving Request”
- Define Collectable Fields for each Topic
- Set up Workflows to extract Collectable Fields based on the detected Topic
- Create Macros with Auto Replies to confirm the extracted information
Keep the number of Collectable Fields manageable to ensure that the most critical information is captured without overwhelming your team.
Setting it up in the app
Tip: You can import the “Free-Form to Structured Form” Workflow template to get started quickly. This comes packaged with the necessary Topics, Collectable Fields, and Workflows for both Bulk Order Quotation and Product Engraving Request scenarios.
Otherwise, follow the steps below.
Create the Topics
- Go to the Topics page and click +create topic
- Create two separate Topics:
- Name: “Bulk Order Quotation”, Description: “Customer requesting a quote for a bulk order”
- Name: “Product Engraving Request”, Description: “Customer inquiring about personalized product engraving”
- Optionally add example conversations for each Topic to improve accuracy
Define the Collectable Fields
- Go to the Workflows page and click the Collectable Fields tab
- For Bulk Order Quotation, create fields such as Product Name, Quantity, Desired Delivery Date, Company Name, and Contact Person
- For Product Engraving Request, create fields like Product SKU, Engraving Text, Font Style, Engraving Placement, and Quantity
Create the Workflows
- Go to the Workflows page and click +create workflow
- Create two separate Workflows:
- Name: “Bulk Order Quotation Form”
- Condition: Topic is “Bulk Order Quotation”
- Add all Bulk Order Quotation Collectable Fields
- Name: “Product Engraving Form”
- Condition: Topic is “Product Engraving Request”
- Add all Product Engraving Request Collectable Fields
- Name: “Bulk Order Quotation Form”
- Enable and save both Workflows
Create Macros with Auto Replies
- Create a Macro for each Workflow with an Auto Reply confirming the extracted information
- Example for Bulk Order Quotation:
Thank you for your bulk order inquiry. We've received the following details:
Product: {{ collectable_fields.product_name }}
Quantity: {{ collectable_fields.quantity }}
Desired Delivery Date: {{ collectable_fields.desired_delivery_date | date: "%B %d, %Y" }}
Company: {{ collectable_fields.company_name }}
Contact: {{ collectable_fields.contact_person }}
We'll prepare a quotation based on this information and get back to you shortly.
Test it
- Send two test emails to your support inbox:
- One mimicking a bulk order quotation request
- Another requesting information about product engraving
- Verify that the appropriate Topics were identified for each email
- Check that the Collectable Fields were correctly populated in your inbox app
- Confirm that the Auto Reply Macros were triggered with the extracted information
Next steps
- Regularly review and provide feedback on Topic predictions to improve accuracy
- Consider adding more Collectable Fields if needed for your specific use cases
- Identify other common types of inquiries that could benefit from this structured approach
- Set up auto-tagging for conversations based on the detected Topics and extracted fields