Setting up email channels in Zoom Contact Center
Zoom Contact Center admins can enable the Office 365 Email channel to receive and respond to consumer emails through Zoom Contact Center flows. This allows integrating email engagements into existing workflows to provide a unified cross-channel experience. Consumers benefit from personalized and automated email responses.
After setting up the email channel, agents can use email controls in the Zoom desktop client.
This article covers:
Prerequisites for setting up email channels
How to change email queue settings
After creating an email queue, you should pay attention to the following settings. Learn more about queue settings.
- Distribution: Set to Most Available and can’t be changed.
- If “Prioritize routing to the last agent the consumer was contacted by” is checked,
- then the consumer replies to an open engagement are prioritized to be assigned to the same agent, provided he is available.
- If the last responding agent is not available, then the entire engagement (with all the previous threads in the email) gets routed based on the set “Most Available” distribution
- If “Prioritize routing to the last agent the consumer was contacted by” is not checked,
- Then the response along with the entire engagement gets routed based on the set “Most Available” distribution
- Email Signature: Admins can configure email signatures for your agents at queue level and at account level (in preferences). This configuration can be locked or unlocked at account level.
- Service Levels: Service Levels can be configured for the email channel at account level and queue level. Learn more about the Service Level metric.
- Note: Currently, the email channel does not support alerts for service levels
How to connect an email account
To establish email channels:
- Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
- In the navigation menu, click Contact Center Management then Preferences.
- In the Email Engagements section, click Connect New Email and click Sign in with Microsoft.
- Sign in with your Microsoft account and follow the on-screen instructions to connect to your Microsoft account.
- (Optional) Click the ellipses icon, then click Rename to change the Sender Name for the connected email account. The Sender Name is the display name shown to consumers that receive the email.
How to add the connected email account as an entry point
Once the email account is successfully connected, you will see the email address with a Connected status. The connected email account will be available as an entry point for email flows. Follow the instructions to add an entry point to an email flow.
How to change account-level email engagement settings
After setting up an email queue, flow, and connected accounts, change email engagement settings like handling rules and email signature.
- Sign in to the Zoom web portal.
- In the navigation menu, click Contact Center Management then Preferences.
- In the Email Engagements section, change these settings:
- Inactive Engagements
- An active engagement is one in which the end-user is currently actively participating in the conversation, which usually is highly asynchronous in an email engagement. So the engagements assigned to an agent and awaiting an agent response can be considered active because the expectation is that the agent will need to spend time reading and responding to the user’s last message
- An inactive engagement means the consumer is not participating in an email engagement after a period of time (time threshold can be different based on channel type). An email engagement becomes inactive once an agent click Mark Awaiting Reply after sending a response to the end-consumer. Inactive engagements are weight less than active engagements. They take less capacity of the agent so that they can be focused on other active engagements
- Change these settings to determine how inactive engagements are handled:
- Weight of inactive engagements: Active and inactive engagements can be assigned different engagement weights to optimize agent efficiency. Specify a “weight” that adjusts an inactive engagement’s proportion of the agent’s allowed maximum concurrency. The range is 0.01 to 1.
- Example:
- Maximum concurrent email engagement = 15
- Active engagement weight = 1
- Inactive engagement weight = 0.5
- So for example - The agent currently has 15 engagements assigned out of which 13 are active and 2 are inactive.
- Actual concurrent email engagement = (13 * 1) + (2 * 0.5) = 14
- In this case, the agent can receive one more email engagement.
- Auto-close inactive engagements if the consumer doesn't reply after: Set the number of hours that an engagement needs to be inactive for it to be auto closed.
- File Sharing: Click the toggle to enable or disable agents’ ability to send files in email engagements.
- Restrictions: If file sharing is enabled, set file type and size restrictions.
Note: For security reasons, certain file types such as .sh, .exe, .bat, .js, .msi, .asp, .cmd, .com, .scr, .cpl, .msc, .ps1, .vbs, .wsf, .pif, .reg, .sct, .msh, .msh1, .msh2, .mshxml, .msh1xml, .wsh, .app, .command, .csh, .bash, .pl, .py, .rb, .osx, .scpt, .applescript, .php, .bin, .jar, .jsp, .vb, .zsh, .tcsh, .apk, .dll, .terminal, .cgi and .run are blocked.
- Email signature: Auto-populate a unified email signature for users when they compose an email (signatures don’t sync with your email provider).
Note: You can also change this setting at the queue level. To prevent users from changing this setting at the queue level, click the lock icon 
, and then click Lock to confirm the setting.