When it comes to sending transactional emails straight from business applications, Retarus for many years has been providing one of the leading and most powerful services on the market – Retarus Transactional Email. We are working closely with our customers across numerous projects to continuously optimize the associated workflows, always looking to be even better.
Building on these efforts, our product experts and developers are currently working on a completely new complementary service, available to all customers as part of the modular Retarus Secure Email Platform in fall 2021. The new feature can be employed wherever transactional emails that have gone astray need to be found quickly and easily by (support) employees and resent to their intended recipients. That’s why we have named this new service: “Trace & Recover”.
New, intelligent temporary storage for transactional emails from business applications
To put it simply, this new service is a sophisticated short-term storage for all messages generated in business applications and sent using the Retarus platform. The basic idea behind the service is probably best explained by way of a real-life example recently put it into practice with a large pilot customer.
The customer in question is a multinational retail chain with an affiliated large-scale online shop. Shoppers have the option of picking up the goods they ordered online from their local stores (click & collect). It was often the case that customers collecting their orders no longer had the required pick-up vouchers on hand. Due to the extremely complex application environment and workflows in place, the company’s support workers were previously unable to generate these email vouchers again directly from within the application – at least not without investing huge efforts, whether through research or basically recreating the customer’s order from scratch. The same complex challenge applies to re-generating associated emails such as warranty certificates or invoices. Especially concerning the latter, accounting rules and processes tend to make it impossible to simply issue an invoice again without additional procedures.
Complex application environments complicate the resending of emails
We have observed similar scenarios at other customers. Often the landscape of the company’s processes is very complex or includes many different (legacy) applications. This potentially can mean changes need to take place across many of those applications along the workflow, requiring a disproportionate amount of effort – assuming the changes are even at all possible. This is where the new Retarus service comes into play:
The service stores all transactional emails generated by an application and sent using Retarus Transactional Email in a temporary storage the moment the message is initially sent. In this step, additional reference details (e.g., customer or process numbers) can be added or included to ensure that emails can be found more easily when searched for later.
Simple search and transmission options for support workers
Should end customers require an email to be sent again, they get in touch with the retailer’s contact center. There, support workers with the required authorization have direct access to the Retarus admin portal EAS, where they can use E-Mail Live Search to call up the respective email quickly, display it in the preview, and easily resend transactional emails with Trace & Recover. It is even possible to modify the recipient’s address subsequently – for instance, if a typo has crept in when the customer was originally set up or registered via a browser entry mask.
The resent email then runs through the regular Retarus Transactional Email infrastructure. The new transmission is, in turn, then also archived in the temporary storage for easy future retrieval in the EAS portal.
New Retarus service to be launched fall 2021
The scenario outlined above is, naturally, only one of many potential use cases within “Trace & Recover”. You will find out more about the forthcoming service when it is officially launched in fall or already today from your local Retarus representative.
