Automatic email routing

You can set up automatic routing of emails received from customers in the Email channel by defining routing conditions. The automatic routing capability means that the Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Email makes an informed decision to assign the received email content to an operator, route it to a work queue, or create a top-level regular case of case type. For example, a received email from a customer reporting a problem with a credit card transaction can be automatically routed to an operator, and a regular case created to help track the issue.

Note: You must purchase a separate license before using Pega Intelligent Virtual Assistant for Email in your application.

Routing conditions

You can define routing conditions that are based on the following criteria:

  • Email from (both email and name) header.
  • Email to header.
  • Email subject header.
  • An entity that is extracted from the content of the email using text analysis.
  • A category that is guessed for the content of the email using text analysis.
  • A sentiment value between 0 and 1 that is calculated based on the content of the email using text analysis.

If a routing condition holds true, then its action is automatically triggered in the application, for example, a top-level regular case is opened with the received email content.

You can set up any number of routing conditions for intelligent email routing. However, in the Otherwise area you must specify what to do when:

  • By default, no routing conditions were defined.
  • None of the defined routing conditions hold true.

If more than one routing conditions defined holds true, the action defined in the first routing rule from the top of the list is triggered by the application. If none of the routing conditions hold true, then the rule specified in the Otherwise area is applied.

Email content text analysis

The text analysis settings for an Email channel interface consist of entities, categories, and sentiment. These settings provide sentiment analysis, text (category) classification, intent detection, and entity extraction of text-based content for the received email. The settings are used in routing conditions. These routing conditions help you determine whether to assign the received email content to a user, add it to a work queue, or whether a top-level case is created with the information. For example, the location entity that is defined in a routing condition helps the Email channel determine where to route the email based on the value extracted for location from its content.

Default settings from a text analyzer rule are used for each Email channel interface. You can configure the text analyzer categories directly from the Text analysis tab so that the Email channel can recognize responses in received emails correctly. You can also edit the text analyzer rule which defines the natural language processing (NLP) model for the Email channel - the sentiment analysis, text (category) classification, intent detection, and entity extraction settings.

Category confidence threshold

When you define a routing condition with a category, you can also specify the confidence score threshold with which to decide whether a category matches the input text, the content of the received email. The confidence threshold is used in text analyzer classification analysis and gives you more control over which text content is assigned to a category. For example, in a routing condition you can define that a category is determined to be a greeting message only with a confidence score of 0.8 or higher.