Using Templates in Language I/O Case for Salesforce

Salesforce allows for the use of email templates. Email templates can be useful to respond quicker and have several models of answers ready to use based on the most common user queries, for example.

The purpose of this article is to show you how to use templates with your Language I/O Case integration, to translate your responses or add content to pre-translated templates.

Using Language I/O to store your templates

You can request to store email templates with Language I/O. In this scenario, you only store the primary language template within Salesforce, and the translations are stored in the Language I/O database (See also Differences between hosting with Language I/O vs hosting in Salesforce below).

The primary advantage of this setup is that it offers a mix of human and machine translation: human translation for the body of the template, and machine translation for the ad-hoc text that you add, delimited by brackets in the template.

Creating a template

A template is typically formatted like this:

“Hello,
Thank you for contacting support. We have identified the following solution for your problem:
[placeholder]
Best regards,” 

As shown, use square brackets '[]' as a placeholder to mark the areas of the template that the agent can edit. This is where they would insert the relevant response to this particular user, for example how to renew a password, or office hours for a business, etc.

To store template translations with Language I/O, submit a Support request to provide Language I/O with your translated templates. If you only have templates in the source language and need to have them translated, contact your Language I/O Customer Success Manager.

Inserting a template in an email

1. To insert a template, simply use the native button in the Salesforce email screen to select the desired template:
   
2. Complete the answer as required. Edit only the part between brackets (highlighted below). Your email draft is saved automatically. 
   
3. Click the "Translate" button in the Language I/O section to the right:
   
4. You can now see the translation of your email in the body, ready to send (You may remove the brackets and auto-responder text):
   
5. To see your original text, as well as other translations for this case, click the Language I/O tab at the top:
   

Formatting templates (advanced)

When you create templates, to identify content that should be translated, content that should be passed through as is to the target template, and the template ID to identify the localized sibling templates, follow these best practices:

• Surround the variables (called merge fields in Salesforce) that you want passed into the target template with <span class="liomaintain"></span>.
  
  Important: Merge fields in the source template must match the merge fields in the target template. If the fields are empty, or if they are deleted from the source template, the translations will fail.
• Markup areas where agents enter custom content that is to be translated [TranslateStart][TranslateEnd]. (These markers are removed automatically from the translation results.)

Language I/O Support will create and insert the template ID after mapping the sibling templates in the database: <span style="display:none">|~|Unique Id Here|~|</span>.

Example

Below is an template example that demonstrates these three pieces:

Hi <span class="liomaintain">{!Contact.FirstName}</span>,<br>
[TranslateStart][TranslateEnd]<br>
<br>
Your subscription is now cancelled. We're sorry to see you go.<br>
<br>
We won't take any further payment from you, although you can still enjoy watching until <span class="liomaintain">{!Contact.LastModifiedDate}</span>.<br>
<br>
If you change your mind and would like to continue watching TV with our services, simply go to My Account before <span class="liomaintain">{!Contact.LastModifiedDate}</span> to reactivate your subscription.<br>
<br>
<GO TO MY ACCOUNT> CTA<br>
<span style="display:none">|~|ACMEINC-EN_US|~|</span>

Note about word counts

When you translate a template, the system processes every word in the template for translation, including the pre-translated content. This means that the word count that you see in your reports will match the entire template, and not only the dynamically translated text. 

Language I/O tracks which words match a pre-translated template, and which are marked for machine translation processing (this is the portion of the template that the agent edited). Language I/O’s translation service processes the entire length of the template, identifies which sections are dynamically translated, and recreates the template with both human and machine translated content merged for final delivery. These processing steps blend the benefits of machine and human translation to create a high quality translation output.

This is why it is important that you do not modify the parts of the template that are not pre-bracketed for agent input, as doing so would no longer match stored translations.