9 Billion emails will be sent this year!

The Internet has provided an easy, low cost channel for providing customer service and customer interaction. As a result, email communication is growing faster than any other means of customer interaction. Email inquiries used for customer service are expected to increase to 9 billion messages this year.

The explosive growth in email communication means that a company’s online relationship with its customers will be critical to customer satisfaction and retention.

Email is a popular customer service channel.

While email is the fastest-growing channel for customer service, a surprising number of companies don't bother to read the e-mails they receive, let alone respond to them. Meanwhile, experience shows that for the companies that do answer e-mails – the reply time can take from 24 hours to as long as three days.

The reason for this failure in customer service is that companies rely on traditional email infrastructure and have not deployed an email response management system. Many organizations are still relying on Outlook or other homegrown applications and have not yet invested in the appropriate technologies.

And the problem is not going away any time soon. Timely responses will become more of a challenge in the future, because industry experts estimate that the volume of email for customer support will increase from 30 to 100 percent annually over the next two years. With the cost of call center service requests by email being a fraction of telephone support queries cost , companies should encourage and respond to email as the preferred means of communication.

"How do your customers contact you?

Most business managers understand that delivering timely responses to the customer is paramount to excellent customer service and generating revenue. However, many businesses fail to identify and implement practical technology and processes that actually work to deliver those responses.

For example, Customer Relationship Management is a term often used, based on the premise that the organization is in the business of acquiring customers, maximizing their value, servicing their needs, retaining them and that all processes work to support that effort. Managers understand that well enough, but struggle with the complexity of traditional CRM solutions that take major commitment and cultural changes within the organization to implement.

Organizations struggling with how to better service the customer, need to realize that CRM is nothing more than a general set of principles that provides an actionable framework when the customer interacts with the company. Communication has to be at least a dialogue with the customer. Many businesses have achieved a higher level of communication via the phone and face-to-face.

How do you respond?

Automatic Call Distributors and Integrated Voice Response systems effectively route customers to the appropriate service agent trained in being responsive to what the customer wants and needs. But how do businesses that have incorporated sales, service, and marketing into the online channel where no human contact exists? A web site provides content that outlines the benefits of products and services allowing buyers to transact on their schedule. It is designed to be attractive and informative; however it frequently falls short in understanding the complete customer experience. The buyer is left on their own to navigate through the self-service on-line environment of the Internet.

Managers need new tools to effectively manage corporate email assets flowing in and out of the organization, to better service the email customer.

"..When we installed Response Manager, we kept our service level goal of a 12-hour response time and disabled the Auto reply feature. We want the email equivalent of “First Call Resolution.” We now have the ability to manage our email traffic and achieve our service level goals nearly every day. Best of all, our customers have noticed. We’ve received many emails expressing surprise and delight that we’ve answered so quickly. With customer service being an important differentiator between companies, we’re pleased with these results..."

Katherine Beinecke, Workforce Management, Cornerstone Consolidated Services Group

Founded in 1995, Cornerstone Brands Inc. is a family of leading catalog companies for the home, leisure and casual apparel. The fulfillment operations of Cornerstone Brands are based in a 970,000 sq. ft. world class distribution center located in West Chester, Ohio.

Email response management software is similar to a phone system Automatic Call Distributor.

The business manager needs a way to visualize the customer’s needs and implement tools to deal with customers that interact through the Web so they are never lost, mismanaged, avoided, or forgotten.

Do you know how much email is received each day in your customer service corporate Group Mailboxes?
Who replied to those emails?
How long did it take?
What are customers asking?
Are they being given the right answers?
Who followed up later with those customers?
Where are those email messages now?
Where are those customers now?
How much is it costing you to pay someone to manually route and answer email?

Route. Track. Report. Archive. Confidence!

Email response management software is designed to allow businesses to categorize, prioritize, route, track, respond to, store, and learn from customer inquiries submitted via email. This software automatically analyzes email, generates automatic responses, and intelligently routes email to the appropriate service agent. At the same time, status reports allow administrators to monitor response time and search detailed communication history providing an audit trail for reviewing customer issues and escalation resolution. These critical reports help managers understand key information on how customers are “won” or “lost”.

Email messages cannot be lost, avoided, forgotten or mismanaged.

Automatic email Distribution and Management software provides a win-win situation for both email customers and companies, since email customers get speedy and appropriate responses, and businesses are able to satisfy their customers with timely professional email. Like Automatic Call Distributors (ACDs) which handle call volume and improve responses for call center customer service, this software helps organizations effectively manage high volumes of incoming email, understand their customers’ needs, and customize services and marketing efforts accordingly.

A recent study uncovered major weakness in customer service email experiences.

A major flaw identified in the customer service email experience is the failure to deliver appropriate answers. In short – what did the customer service agent write when they replied to the customers email request? For the customer that did not receive an adequate email response, they are highly unlikely to return to this method of communication, eliminating an opportunity for low-cost service. An additional concern is determining if your agents even attempt to address the question asked by the customer, or do they rely on a short-cut of redirecting inquiries to a toll-free number or FAQ website page.

Are you sure all your customers are getting a response?

“Previously our customer service agents struggled to respond to emails within five days. Our management team had absolutely no oversight. We had no ability to see how far behind the agents were, whether the agents were providing accurate answers, nor what types of questions our customers had. Since deploying our email management solution, our agents are answering all emails within a day. The quality of their responses has skyrocketed, due to our ability to review their replies and give them specific feedback when a reply is incorrect or can be improved. The category reports have enabled us to identify the types of questions our customers ask, and we can improve these areas of our operations to reduce the need for customer support.”

Jennifer Tattenbaum, E-Commerce Manager

Make sure you answer the question!

Most people that have tried customer service by email will have had an experience at some point where the organization did not answered the real question asked. How do you make sure a customer service agent not only answers the question, but goes the extra step to offer further relevant information detailing exactly what a customer should do next? Having the ability to review and approve agent’s responses is a critical aspect of getting it right when it comes to answering the question.

Financial services organizations have unique requirements.

The financial services sector fully understands that delivering prompt, courteous and accurate responses to potential investors and customers is crucial to long-term success.

When dealing with email inquiries, most financial companies are required to provide a detailed audit trail of all correspondence, and, in investment inquiry cases, would need a compliance officer to approve the email replies.
An email response management system provides the infrastructure to guarantee that staff is providing legally accurate information, as well as creating the detailed audit trail that can be accessed on demand. All incoming and outgoing messages are stored in the relational database, providing management with the ability to track email, view group activity, be alerted of messages that are not completed within a designated time frame, and access the full reporting engine – including a full audit trail of all historical correspondence to a potential investor.

Further compliance workflow can be established by leveraging the ‘Approval’ routing capability to have specifically defined outbound email replies routed to a compliance offer for approval before the final delivery to investors.

A growing Email management opportunity!

The steadily growing volume of inbound email presents a business opportunity for the management team of customer-centric organizations. The content of these emails can be critical, involving communication concerned with orders, payments and customer service requests.

Online consumers expect exceptional customer service and purchasing decisions are negatively impacted if emails go unanswered or answered several days later. By providing management with visibility to all email correspondence and reporting on agent reply times and service levels – problem areas can be easily identified and corrected.

“Our email response time has improved dramatically and the deployment of the software was virtually seamless. I couldn’t be happier! “

Lori Pollard, Customer Service Director, HCPro, Inc

Key return on investment opportunities identified.

• Control and reduce the administration and opportunity costs of managing these important customer communications.
• Opportunity cost – ongoing lost revenues due to poor “email” customer service.
• Eliminate manual reporting tasks.
• Improve marketing messaging by identifying, categorizing and reporting on email inquiry trends.
• Easily Identify “High-Maintenance – Low Value” customers.
• Easily identify effective and high performance customer service agents.
• Provide proof and confidence to management that the agents have the ability to more rapidly and accurately respond to service and sales requests.

Emailtopia has assisted clients of all sizes tackle their email management challenges for a decade.

Providing email response management solutions since 1997 to such companies as ING Direct, AmeriCredit, Virgin Mobile, Napster and many more, emailtopia has become a proven market leader.

To learn more about the competitive advantage that emailtopia’s email response management solution can provide your business, visit www.emailtopia.com or email sales@emailtopia.com.