Email Service—It’s Not Just Another Phone Call
When the first email was sent in 1971, what started as a way to send files to network printers has become the definitive communication tool of our generation. Today, email is everywhere, with estimates of more than 650 million users worldwide sending 35 billion emails every day.
Besides personal communications, consumers regard email as an effective method for interacting with businesses. Surveys show that about 80% of customers want email as a service option. Organizations have also realized that they have a great deal to gain from email. They have found that it improves customer satisfaction and reduces costs because answering email inquiries is considerably less expensive than phone interactions. It can even be an ideal venue for cross-selling.
However, for successful email service, it is important not to emulate phone management techniques. Let's examine the typical phone management process: Phone service usually involves three technologies from disparate vendors. ACD/CTI vendors capture and route calls to agents, accounting for about 5% of a call's total cost. Agents manually log calls into a CRM system, which accounts for 15% of the cost. Finally, agents may use a knowledge management tool to help them resolve the inquiry. Unfortunately, agents typicallyspend a lot of time understanding the question, hunting for answers and delivering a (hopefully!) useful response. Typically, phone handling time is 6-8 minutes per call with more than 6 minutes devoted to the resolution process.
While email management solutions can offer a golden opportunity to transform the quality and efficiency of customer service, too often they perpetuate this phone process. The result is huge backlogs of unanswered inquiries and unhappy customers. Rather than copying the inefficiencies of the phone, look for solutions that enable you to change the process so that the email management system—not the agent—does the bulk of the time-consuming work. Here are some key capabilities you will need to optimize email service:
- Do more than capture emails. Eliminate manual data entry using automation to capture and document the content within the CRM system.
- Use intelligence to interpret and suggest an answer before the email reaches the agent's desktop. Analyze content and automatically present the agent with the most likely answer. When agents just clarify the inquiry, evaluate the suggestion and send the answer, it's easy to chop that typical six minutes of resolution time down to less than four.
- Make the most of intelligent analysis to automatically reply to customers. Simple and repetitive inquiries—such as expected ship date or where to send returns—are the perfect candidates for auto-replies that eliminate agent involvement and deliver the shortest resolution time possible.
Use customer context to further streamline and automate the process. Leverage CRM data to classify and prioritize each inquiry. Automate resolution of transactional inquiries, such as billing adjustments or fee disputes, by retrieving real-time information from back-office systems and making it available to agents without complex customization.
Email management that intelligently manages all aspects of incoming emails can produce significant time savings over traditional phone service. Inquiry times can drop by as much as four minutes each, enabling agents to manage approximately twice the number of emails per day. With email management that re-engineers the inquiry process, you can achieve a level of customer service that exceeds customer expectations at dramatically lower cost.
Michael Fields, KANA Chairman and CEO With more than 30 years of experience managing enterprise software companies, Michael Fields has spearheaded successful sales organizations at several large corporations, including Oracle U.S.A, where he served as president, Applied Data Research and Burroughs Corporation. In addition, he was a founder, chairman of the board and CEO of OpenVision Technologies, Inc, which was acquired by Veritas in 1997. Currently, Fields serves on the boards of Imation Corporation and ViaNovus. He has served on the advisory board of the Ford Motor Company Customer Service Division from 1999 through 2001.
Kana is a leading provider of customer service solutions that enable companies to transform their service operations and resolve inquiries quickly and accurately across multiple channels.