A Dovetail CRM integration story…
Recently I was investigating various ways of integrating our Dovetail CRM product with the Telligent Enterprise collaboration software. Telligent Enterprise is a tool that allows people within organizations to collaborate and share information and knowledge. It has wikis, blogs, forums, and even social media-like features (imagine a Twitter + Facebook hybrid, but for employees inside your organization).
I liked the thought of customer service agents and managers collaborating on cases together. I thought that I would try to bring these two tools together. I imagined two simple scenarios:
- Alerting coworkers about new cases: When a case is created in Dovetail CRM, post a activity message to Telligent Enterprise. Activity messages are somewhat like “tweets” on Twitter.
- Link discussions about cases to the case itself: When someone mentions a case in Telligent Enterprise, log an internal note to the case in Dovetail CRM so that agents can see when the case is being discussed by coworkers.
In this blog post, I’ll cover the first scenario: posting an activity message when a new case is created in Dovetail CRM.
Alerting Coworkers about New Cases
In this scenario I want to let coworkers, who may not be customer service agents, know that a new case has been created on behalf of a customer. This is useful because salespersons or executives may want to be aware when new cases are created.
Creating the Command Line Script
Telligent Enterprise makes it easy to create new activity messages because they expose a REST-based Web Services API. Specifically, they expose a “Create Activity Message” service that makes it easy. They have full documentation and even code examples.
Using their code examples, I was able to write a small C# command-line application in .NET that would call this web service and pass data to Telligent Enterprise. I called this application “AddActivity.exe.” Alternatively, I could’ve used the “curl” tool which allows you to invoke URLs from the command-line.
Creating the Event Rule in Dovetail CRM
In Dovetail CRM, I created a new event rule called “Create new message in Telligent when a new case is created.” In this rule, I selected “When a case is created” as the trigger event. I chose no condition as this rule will apply to all cases. I added a single action to execute an application from the command line. Using the “Execute a process from a command line” action in the rule, I can pass parameters to my command line application such as the case identifier, case title, case priority, etc.
Let me digress for a moment and say that I could’ve added a condition for, for example, only HIGH or higher priority cases, or only cases for specific customers. I also could have added multiple actions here to do various things when this event happens and the conditions are met. In this case, however, I’m keeping the rule simple to demonstrate the ease of integration with Telligent Enterprise.
Here’s what my rule looks like now (click image for full screen view):
Trying it Out
Now, I just simply create a case in Dovetail CRM and I should see an activity message appear in Telligent Enterprise. To test this, I created a case called “Example case to demonstrate integration.” The powerful automated workflow and rules engine behind Dovetail CRM sees that a new case was created and then executes my rule. When I go back to Telligent Enterprise’s web interface, I see that a new activity message was created.
Here’s the activity message that appeared in Telligent Enterprise (click image for a larger view):
Summary
In this blog post, I covered the scenario of alerting another system (i.e. Telligent Enterprise) when something interesting happened in Dovetail CRM (i.e. a case was created).
In the next blog post, I’ll cover how other systems can integrate with Dovetail CRM.
