External answer review

When an answer email arrives in the RefTracker monitored Answer importing email address it will be imported into RefTracker with the body of the email as the answer and any attachments as answer attachments.  The question will be closed with the sender of the email recorded as the staff member who provided the response (even if the question is already allocated to someone else), and the date and time that the email was imported as the “Date closed”.

The question will be “Closed successfully”, but, according to how your System administrator has set up your system, if there are any mandatory closing fields yet to be completed (Time used, Expertise, Category, Closing comment) or any form fields not yet completed (such as Matter number or client’s department) the Question may be closed with a status of “External answer review”. 

For full details of how to use the Answer email importing – see the “Email imported that provides an answer to an existing question” section in How questions for follow up arrive in your system.
System administrators can find setup instructions at “Answer email importing” in the Email importing help page.

If an “External answer review” status is set, the question will continue to appear in the “Open questions” screens until that status is removed by using the “External answer review” screen. 

If you click on the External answer review status hyperlink, or the question number of any question in External answer review status, in any Open questions screen, you will be taken to the “External answer review” screen for that question, where the missing mandatory closing information such as Time used can be added.  Closing status, and all the closing fields, “Include in KB”, can also be amended if included for that Request form.  In fact any attribute of the Question can be changed by expanding the appropriate division heading in the “External answer review” screen.

“Date closed”, and “Closed by” (but only for Supervisors and above), will also appear and can be changed if post date has been allowed for the form in use.

Any fields that MUST be completed are highlighted with a red cross on the right, and a validation message at the top of the screen.

Using External answer review does not change the Date closed or the staff member who closed the question, but if the Date closed and by whom needs to be hanged, Supervisors and above can that in the version of the External answer review screen that they see, or in the QA review screen.

You can also access the “External answer review” screen from the Actions menu list for any question in “External answer review” status (QA review and KB review will not appear in the menu list for questions in this status as they are irrelevant).
Your System administrator can arrange for a reminder email to be sent re adding closing information to questions closed by importing an answer email, but if they have not, staff will need to remember to enter any closing statistics.  We recommend that staff look for all questions in “External answer review” status, at the end of each day, to ensure that they can add the extra details while they still remember things like how much time they spent on closing question.  An easy way to find them is by going to the “My questions” Open questions screen and looking for questions with an italicized hyperlinked status.
If your system has been set to send reminder emails when questions go into Answer review status, as a reminder to enter time and other closing attributes, you will receive an email that looks like this.  Use the “Answer review” link to go directly to the External answer review screen to enter the closing details.

If you do not want to receive these reminder emails because you are in the habit of checking for questions in External answer review status every day, we recommend that you set up an email client rule that automatically puts questions from the RefTracker email address with the Subject line you are seeing for this email, into a specified folder from where they can be ignored or bulk deleted.