Tips for creating a correspondence

You can quickly and easily create an outgoing or incoming letter, fax or email from contact or case forms using the respective function. The contact data is already inserted as the addressee in a suitable template. For project folders or sales cases, the contacts of the case are automatically inserted as recipients. Incoming letters and emails are also managed as activities so that correspondences can be tracked.

If you use the templates supplied with the system, you should always check whether you have entered all important data as the sender in the My data form. You should also check whether the recipient data has been entered correctly.

Please note that the entries for internal employees and also for internal companies to which an employee belongs are used for correspondences. If these entries are missing, the system uses those for the internal company.

In the My data form, you can also change the settings for emails and standard correspondence templates.

Existing correspondences can be reused by duplicating the record concerned and assigning other recipients, or creating the relation with a special case.

Creating a correspondence takes four steps:

• Create a letter, fax or email with recipients.
• Aadapt the template (boilerplate) used if necessary
• Generate the letter, fax or email (edit).
• Print out the letter and send it by post, or send the fax or email electronically.

The language of a correspondence is preset with the communication language of a contact. This means that the CRM automatically selects the correspondence templates that match this language. However, you can also select templates in a different language, whereby the correspondence language is automatically changed on request.

When an email is created, the communication language of the creator is initially used as the email correspondence language. As soon as the first recipient has been assigned, their communication language is used, also for all other recipients. This happens automatically if you create the email directly at the addressee using the Email function.

• When this recipient is replaced, the language doesn’t change anymore. This only happens if the recipient is removed again.
• If a Cc or Bcc recipient is assigned first, it determines the communication language.
• If the content of the email (email body) is empty, then the template automatically changes to the new language. Thus, during template selection, a dedicated search is performed for the new language.
• For incoming emails and other correspondences, the communication language of the sender (Language) is entered, even if the correspondence is assigned to a case with a different language.
• The correspondence language of response emails is copied from the source emails. When Forward­ing, the standard language of the loged-in user is used.

The correspondence language of new follow-up correspondence is copied from the original activity if this is a correspondence with language (for the recipient). Otherwise, the default language of the logged-in user is used.

When generating serial correspondence, the template matching the recipient's communication language is automatically used. This means that it is not necessary to create language-dependent recipient lists and create a separate serial correspondence for each language.

This assumes that there are correspondence templates in the relevant language.

The Project field in a correspondence is automatically preset with the source case. The recipient field (To) remains empty as the recipient cannot be clearly determined. You can select the recipients (the recipient selection is preset with the contacts in the case) and edit the correspondence afterwards.

As a user, you can normally only use templates that have been released. Other templates (in development) cannot be selected. However, when creating or editing templates, in special cases you have the option of testing the template by sending the email created with it to your own email address (also for serial emails).

To be able to select a template that is in development, your administrator needs to change the environment variable PSC_RPT_STA_QUE, which has the value PSA_RPT_RLS by default (only released templates), or assign it to a corresponding group. In this case, the value should be PSA_RPT_RLS PSA_RPT_DEV (only released templates and templates in development). The variable lists the template statuses in which a template may be in order to be offered in a template selection dialog.

The environment variable is replaced by the Template administrators profile. Therefore, no developer license is required.

The documents (first structure level) of the main process that can be found in the document relationship of the main participant or “For contact” are already preset in the document selection dialog.