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Solution · Customer service

The shared mailbox stops being a pile of unknowns and becomes a sorted work list

Every customer email classified and routed on arrival

Every message in the customer-service mailbox is read, labelled by intent and urgency, turned into a case in the service tool and sent to the right queue.

DepartmentalMicrosoft TeamsHuman in the loopAI where it earns its place
26,000emails a month reach the customer mailboxes of this illustrative energy retailer. Six people decide by hand where each one goes.

Executive summary

Challenge

Your best agents spend their morning sorting mail instead of answering it.

What changes

The classification layer is trained on your own mail.

Business value

Messages reach the right queue in minutes instead of hours, so the deadline is worked against from the first hour rather than from the moment…

Systems involved

Dynamics 365 Customer Service (cases, queues, SLA); the billing system for account and invoice lookups; Power BI dashboards

Business problem

Request triage

A single published address is the easiest thing a customer can use, so everything ends up in it. Meter readings, invoice copies, payment plans, tariff questions, moves, damage reports, authority letters and marketing mail arrive in one stream with subject lines that describe almost nothing. Someone must look at each message and decide what it is, and because that is judgement it lands on the most experienced people, who are also the best at answering.

The sorting is not what hurts most. It is what sorting hides. A message enters the workflow only once a person has recognised it, so the response clock and the queue position depend on the order a supervisor works through the list. Two agents pick up one thread from two folders and the customer receives two different answers. Nobody can say how many meter disputes arrived last week, because that number exists only as a feeling.

At volume the mailbox becomes the constraint before answering capacity does. A price announcement or a storm doubles the inbound stream, and the narrowest step breaks first: two supervisors reading everything. The company then hires or works overtime to widen a step that answers no customer at all.

How it works today

  1. PersonA supervisor opens the shared mailbox each morning and reads the subject and first lines of every new message
  2. PersonMessages are dragged into topic and owner folders; some are forwarded to a personal mailbox and leave the shared view
  3. WaitingAnything unclear waits for the afternoon round, or for the person who knows this customer to return from leave
  4. PersonAn agent looks the account up in the billing system and opens a case by retyping what is already in the email
  5. Risk of errorUrgent categories are caught only if the reader gets far enough in; the sentence that matters is often the last one
  6. Risk of errorThe same thread is worked from two folders, and two answers leave the company on the same day
  7. PersonThe service manager counts folder contents on Friday to estimate the backlog
PersonWaitingRisk of error

Why the current process costs more than it appears

The bill that never reaches the budget.

  • Sorting consumes the people who are best at answering. An hour spent deciding where a message belongs is an hour away from the cases where experience changes the outcome.
  • Response deadlines run from arrival, not from recognition. Days in an unread list are days against the clock, and they stay invisible until a deadline is missed.
  • Double handling appears in no report: the message routed to the wrong team, sent back and routed again, or the second answer that contradicted the first.
  • Reporting stops at folder counts. Without a record of what customers write about, staffing cannot be argued and billing never learns which of its processes generates the mail.
  • Peaks hit the narrowest step first. When volumes double, sorting capacity does not, so a backlog forms before the answering team has delayed anything.

Cost of inaction

Twelve months of hand-sorting before anyone answers≈ €478,400
The same routine held for three years≈ €1,435,200
If a tariff change lifts the mailbox to 34,000 a month≈ €625,600

The best readers in the team end up in the folder tree rather than with customers. Every price change and every billing incident produces the same emergency: hands moved onto sorting, a backlog that clears three weeks later, and customers answered twice or answered late. Reporting stays at folder counts, so the case for more staff is never quite provable.

The quieter exposure is regulatory. Deadlines run from arrival, and a message that sat unrecognised for four days has spent much of its window in a list. When a regulator or a court asks when a letter was received and what was done with it, the answer is reconstructed from folders and personal mailboxes instead of read from a case record.

Illustrative scenario

A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.

Organisation

An energy retailer supplying electricity and gas to households and small businesses in Poland: roughly 600,000 supply points, a 40-person customer-service team in two locations, Microsoft 365 E3, Dynamics 365 Customer Service and its own billing system.

Volume

26,000 emails a month across three shared mailboxes (customer service, billing, faults): about a third meter readings and invoice or payment questions, a quarter contracts, tariffs and moves, the rest damage and supply-interruption reports, complaints, authority letters and roughly 15% that needs no answer.

Current process

Two supervisors sort the mailboxes twice a day into folders, agents open their own cases in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, urgent items are found by reading, and the weekly backlog comes from counting folders.

Bottleneck

Around four minutes per message of reading, classifying, re-routing and duplicate handling before anyone starts to answer, plus an afternoon queue that never clears and a statutory clock that starts on arrival.

Solution

Every message is classified by UiPath Communications Mining into intent and urgency, with customer number, supply point and invoice number extracted from the text; robots open or update the case in Dynamics 365 Customer Service, route it by skill, fulfil standard requests and raise urgent categories in Microsoft Teams.

Potential outcome

In the modelled case, triage effort falls to the share the model cannot place with confidence (10 to 15% at first, decreasing as thresholds are tuned), first response begins on the day of arrival, and duplicate answers stop. These figures are modelled, not measured.

Proposed solution

The classification layer is trained on your own mail. We analyse a sample of mailbox history, agree a label set with the supervisors who sort it today, and have your team label training examples in UiPath Communications Mining: meter reading submitted, invoice copy requested, payment plan, tariff change, move-in, supply interruption, damage claim, complaint, and mail that needs no action. The model also extracts the fields routing depends on and returns a confidence score for every prediction. This is supervised machine learning on your correspondence: it recognises and extracts, it does not write.

What follows is deterministic and auditable. A robot checks whether the thread already belongs to an open case, matches the customer in the billing system, then creates or updates one case carrying the intent, priority, due date and the original message. Routing follows a rule table the service manager owns, not the model. A defined set of standard requests is fulfilled from approved templates without an agent: an invoice copy, an account balance, the status of a case, confirmation that a meter reading was recorded.

People meet the flow in Microsoft Teams. Urgent intents are posted to a channel with a link to the case as soon as they are recognised. Messages below the confidence threshold arrive as Action Center tasks in Teams, where a team leader confirms or corrects the label in seconds and the correction returns to the training set. One boundary is worth stating plainly: this solution resolves nothing. It decides what each message is, how urgent it is and who owns it, then hands complaints to the process that resolves complaints.

Native capabilities used

UiPath Communications Mining intent labels, field extraction and confidence scores; UiPath Orchestrator queues, triggers and audit; UiPath Integration Service connectors for Microsoft Outlook 365, Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM; UiPath Action Center tasks completed in Microsoft Teams; Dynamics 365 Customer Service queues, skills and SLA clock

What we build

The intent taxonomy and urgency definitions, the training and review loop, the routing and priority matrix, case creation and thread deduplication, robot flows for standard fulfilments on approved templates, Teams alerting and the Power BI dashboards

Custom integration

Account, invoice and supply-point lookups in your billing system over its own API, and archiving of the original message against the case record

How the automated process works

  1. AutomationA message arriving in any of the three shared mailboxes is collected through the Microsoft Outlook 365 connector and queued in UiPath Orchestrator
  2. AutomationCommunications Mining assigns intents, an urgency score and the extracted fields, each with a confidence value
  3. SystemA robot matches the customer in the billing system and merges the message into the open case if the thread already has one
  4. AutomationA case is created or updated with intent, priority, due date and the original message, then routed to the queue that owns the skill
  5. AutomationStandard requests are fulfilled from approved templates without an agent: invoice copy, balance, case status, meter-reading confirmation
  6. PersonMessages below the confidence threshold become an Action Center task in Teams; the team leader's correction feeds the next training round
  7. AutomationUrgent intents, including supply interruption and letters from an authority, reach a Teams channel with the case link within minutes
AutomationSystemPerson

Human-in-the-loop model

Automation handles

  • Classification, urgency scoring and field extraction on every message, in every mailbox, at any hour
  • Case creation, thread deduplication, priority and routing to the owning queue
  • Standard fulfilments from approved templates and the acknowledgement of receipt
  • The SLA clock, reminders before a due date and the daily queue status in Teams

People decide

  • What the intents are, what counts as urgent, and which requests may be fulfilled without an agent
  • Every message the model cannot place with confidence, confirmed or relabelled in Teams
  • Any answer touching money, a contract change, a complaint or a vulnerable customer
  • When a retrained model is released, after reviewing the month's corrections

Before and after

BeforeAfter
Triage and re-routing per message~4 minseconds, for the unclear share only
From arrival to the right queuehours, or the next sorting roundminutes
Cases in the service toolopened and retyped by the agentcreated and pre-filled on arrival
The same thread answered twicediscovered by the customerprevented by one case per thread
What the mailbox containsfolder counts on Fridayintent mix and ageing, live

Systems and integrations

Every entry can be checked in vendor documentation. The evidence class is stated next to each one.

Inputs

  • Outlook shared mailboxes for customer service, billing and faults
  • web-form messages delivered into the same mailboxes
  • correspondence forwarded from branch offices

Automation layer

  • UiPath Communications Mining
  • UiPath Orchestrator
  • UiPath Robots
  • UiPath Integration Service
  • UiPath Action Center

Target systems

  • Dynamics 365 Customer Service (cases, queues, SLA)
  • the billing system for account and invoice lookups
  • Power BI dashboards

Human touchpoints: Teams alerts for urgent intents; Action Center tasks in Teams for unclear messages; the agent's queue in Dynamics 365 Customer Service

Outlook shared mailboxes for customer serviceUiPath Communications MiningUiPath OrchestratorDynamics 365 Customer ServiceTeams alerts for urgent intents

Technologies used

UiPath Communications Mining (IXP)

labels each email by intent, scores urgency, extracts customer, supply-point and invoice fields

A
UiPath Robots + Orchestrator

queue messages, run the routing rules, create cases, fulfil standard requests, retry and log

A
UiPath Integration Service (Microsoft Outlook 365, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM connectors)

reads the mailboxes, writes cases, posts alerts over APIs

A
UiPath Action Center in Microsoft Teams

low-confidence labels confirmed or corrected without leaving the chat

A
Dynamics 365 Customer Service

case record, queues, skills-based assignment and the SLA clock

A
Microsoft Teams

alerts for urgent intents and the daily queue status

A
Power BI

intent mix, ageing, first-response time and automation share

A
Averified product capability (vendor documentation)

Illustrative economic model

The arithmetic is open, so it can be argued with.

Illustrative model
26,000 emails a month × 4 minutes of triage and re-routing= 1,733 h / month
1,733 h × €23 fully loaded hourly cost= €39,867 / month
× 12 months≈ €478,400 / year
Annual capacity released (illustrative)≈ €478,400

Answering is not in the model; it stays with people. The four minutes per message cover reading, classifying, moving, opening the case by hand and the rework that follows a wrong route. Those minutes and the rate below come from typical ranges, not from a measurement at a client. €23 is a fully loaded hourly cost for a customer-service role in Poland, and we model capacity released, not headcount removed.

Run the numbers on your data

hours released per month
of annual capacity released

An illustrative estimate from your own inputs. It models released capacity; it is not a promise of savings.

Business benefits

  • Messages reach the right queue in minutes instead of hours, so the deadline is worked against from the first hour rather than from the moment somebody noticed
  • Senior agents stop sorting and start answering, and the same team absorbs a price announcement without overtime
  • One case per thread ends the duplicate answers that damage trust more than a slow answer does
  • Invoice copies and meter-reading confirmations are handled around the clock without entering the queue
  • Urgent categories surface on their own: a supply interruption or an authority letter is visible in Teams within minutes
  • There is finally a reliable count of what customers write about, which billing, product and field teams need to reduce the mail at source

The management view

  • The mailbox becomes measurable: intent mix, arrival pattern, ageing per queue, first-response time and the share that never needed a person
  • Staffing is argued from volumes by intent rather than folder counts, and peaks can be forecast from the same data
  • Routing rules and urgency definitions live in one owned table, so a policy change takes effect the same day in every mailbox
  • Nothing depends on the supervisor who knows which folder a message belongs in, so holidays stop moving the backlog

Board-level KPIs

first-response timeshare of messages routed without a personthreads answered twiceresponse deadlines missed per monthcost per handled message

Security and governance

Trust in automation is built on the audit trail, not on a promise.

  • The service principal that reads mail is scoped to the three shared mailboxes with RBAC for Applications in Exchange Online and reaches no other mailbox
  • Correspondence never reaches a public model. The messages, the model trained on them and the cases they open stay in your Microsoft 365 tenant, with UiPath Automation Cloud processing them in its EU region
  • Nothing is generated: every outbound message uses an approved template, and its version is recorded on the case with the rule that triggered it
  • Taxonomy, thresholds and routing rules are changed by named roles only, versioned, and reviewed before release
  • Messages carrying identity or payment data are marked restricted at intake and retained under your Microsoft Purview policy

Why now

01

Deadlines are counted from the day the customer writes: in the Polish electricity market a supplier answers a billing request or complaint within 14 days of submission (§ 49 pkt 8 of the Minister of Climate and Environment regulation of 22 March 2023 on the operation of the electricity system). Sorting delay spends that window before anyone reads the case

02

The sorting step alone accounts for the modelled 1,733 hours a month, capacity that answers no customer and appears in no budget line

03

Communications Mining is a capability of UiPath IXP with ready connectors to Outlook, Teams and Dynamics 365, so classification is configured and trained on your mail rather than built as a data-science project

Relevant executive roles

Customer Service Director

first response stops depending on who is at their desk, and the queue is visible before a customer complains about the silence

COO

capacity moves from sorting to answering, and a volume peak is absorbed by the classification layer instead of by overtime

CFO

the modelled 1,733 hours a month spent before the first answer become a line with a number attached

CIO

one governed integration between mailbox and service tool, instead of Outlook rules and mail forwarded to personal mailboxes

Common questions and objections

Our customers write long, untidy emails with three questions in one message.

That is the normal case. A message can carry several intents; the routing table decides which one owns the case and which becomes a linked task. Where confidence is low the message goes to a person rather than to a guess.

Is this not the complaints agent already on your site?

No. That solution takes a recognised complaint and works it to a resolution. This one decides what every message is, how urgent it is and who owns it, then hands complaints to the process that resolves them.

Will it start writing answers to our customers?

Communications Mining is a machine-learning classifier, not a text generator. It predicts labels and pulls fields out of text, learning from examples your team confirmed. Replies sent by robots come from templates your business signed off.

When this is not the right solution

  • Below roughly a thousand messages a month, a duty roster and a few mailbox rules cost less than training and maintaining a model
  • If the mailbox is effectively one topic, the value sits in resolving that topic rather than sorting it, and a complaints or order-status design fits better
  • If there is no usable history, because the address is new or mail is deleted weekly, collect and archive for a few months before training anything

A question for the next management meeting

Who sorted the messages our customers sent us last month before anyone answered, and what did that sorting cost?

Implementation approach

Delivery runs in stages, so it can be stopped at any point.

We deliver

  • Analysis of a real sample of your mail history: what arrives, in what proportions, and how it is routed today
  • The intent taxonomy and urgency definitions, agreed with the supervisors who sort the mailbox now
  • The Communications Mining project: labelling sessions with your team, training and confidence thresholds per intent
  • Case creation, thread deduplication and the routing and priority matrix in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
  • Robot flows for the agreed standard fulfilments, Teams alerting, Action Center tasks and the Power BI dashboards
  • A monthly review: corrections examined, thresholds adjusted, taxonomy changes versioned

We need from you

  • Twelve months of mail from the shared mailboxes, with the outcome of each thread where you have it
  • A service manager who owns the taxonomy and two team leaders to label the training sample
  • Application access to the shared mailboxes and a service account in Dynamics 365 Customer Service
  • Your queue, skill and priority definitions and the reply templates already in use

Stages

Discovery

Mail sample, intent taxonomy, urgency definitions, volumes and today's routing rules

Design

Label set, confidence thresholds, routing and priority matrix, fulfilment scope, security model

Train

Labelling sessions, training and review until the thresholds hold on unseen mail

Shadow run

The model classifies live mail while people still route it, and the two are compared daily

Go-live

Intent by intent, starting with the clearest categories, with supervision and hypercare

Departmental. Effort is driven by how many genuinely distinct intents the mailbox contains, how usable the mail history is as training material, and how many standard requests you want fulfilled end to end.

Somewhere in today's mailbox is a supply interruption filed under a newsletter.

Send us one month exported from the shared mailbox with the folder structure you use today. You get back an intent taxonomy drawn from your own mail, the share that could be routed without a person, and a written assessment.

Read one month of your mailbox with us

The neighbouring process usually has the same problem

Industries we deliver this in most oftenManufacturing & industryRetail & e‑commerceEnergy & utilities

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