Outbound Call Center Featured Article

Have You 'Outgrown Outlook?' eGain Shows 10 Signs

By Brendan B. Read
Senior Contributing Editor

Many organizations and employees have started out - and still use - Outlook tomanage customers’ and prospects’ e-mails. It is easy to use and very effective, a fact that is self-reinforcing.

Yet eGain points out that when e-mail volume increase, Outlook fails to scale; it is designed for individual use, not for providing efficient, mission-critical customer service. Anand Subramaniam, vice president, worldwide marketing says the program does not treat e-mails as part of a larger case that needs to be tracked and managed to closure, it has no understanding of service levels and it does not treat e-mails as valuable conversations with customers.

An e-mail response management system “ERMS” he saysis a logical next step in the evolution of customer e-mailmanagement in growing businesses.

The eGain executive says the move from Outlook to ERMS mirrors the move in phone systems from PBXes to ACDs. The ACD industry emerged when the phone became a preferred interaction medium between businesses and their customers. As call volume surged, businesses outgrew PBX (News - Alert) systems for handling customer calls. They switched to ACDs, which unlike PBX systems are built to enable businesses to handle large volumes of customer phone calls carefully and consistently.

“Just as the ACD is the main building block of a call center, an ERMS is a key component of successful contact centers,”says Subramaniam.

Organizations that use Outlook to handle customer e-mails face some typical challenges when their e-mail volumes begin to grow. Here are 10 telltale signs that he says customer service managers can easily spot:

1. You get more than 1,000 e-mails per month from your customers

Volume is the leading indicator of the need for change from an Outlook-based e-mail response solution to an ERMS. As volumes grow, service teams usually have to add more agents to the team. As a result, coordination and tracking become increasingly difficult without the right tools.

“As a rule of thumb, if your business is getting about 50 customer e-mails per day, and the volume is growing, you should begin to explore ERMS options,” advises Subramaniam. “Otherwise you may be unprepared when the volume becomes unmanageable in the Outlook environment. 100 e-mails per day or about 2,000 e-mails per month is the tipping point where an investment in ERMS more than pays for itself in a year or less.”

2. You cannot find a customer e-mail from six months ago

Outlook is great for small working sets of e-mails but storing and searching large numbers of e-mails is not an Outlook strength. Users may be setup to delete older e-mails every couple of months unless they are filed in specific folders. But customers have long memories, and they will likely follow up on communication that you deleted as part of one’s last Outlook inbox clean up.

“As consumers, we know how valued we feel when we call or e-mail a company and they remember our past interactions,” he explains. “When we do not offer the same quality of service to our customers, we risk losing them. Most ERMS systems will allow you to maintain complete interaction history for each customer, as well as associate related e-mails as a single case.”

3. You spend an hour every day categorizing and routing e-mails to agents with different skills

One of the most common early signs of outgrowing Outlook says Subramaniam is that service managers spend large amounts of time every day sorting through customer e-mails, categorizing them, and allocating the work to agents. This process tends to be slow, error prone and expensive.

4. One of your service agents calls in sick. There are customer e- mails stuck in her inbox

“As a customer service manager, you dread the days when an agent calls in sick,” says Subramaniam. “You have no idea how to handle the customer e-mails that are locked in the agent’s inbox. Even if you override the password and forward unanswered e-mails to another agent, you cannot identify related e-mails that should be forwarded as well to enable the agent to create proper responses.”

5. A livid customer is on the phone. You forwarded her support request to your engineering team, but no one ever followed up

Do customer queries fall through the cracks fairly often? “Even if you have the best intentions for customer service, if you fail to respond to a customer’s service request, you communicate that you do not care about them,” he warns.  

6. Agents are constantly responding to the same set of e-mail inquiries

The 80/20 rule is very evident in customer e-mail handling—80 percent of the queries will be about 20 percent of the issues. But as the e-mail volume grows, your agents complain about the pain of composing similar replies or constantly cutting and pasting from stored responses, while customers complain about getting varied responses to the same query from different agents.

An ERMS includes a common knowledge base for all your agents to store frequently used responses, explains Subramaniam. Agents insert the right knowledge base article into their responses.  Not only does the knowledge base increase agent productivity and ensure consistency in responses, it is the key to a whole range of possible efficiencies. An ERMS, using its categorization capabilities, can create auto-replies and auto-suggestions from knowledge base articles. Advanced ERMS will even allow publishing parts of knowledge bases onto websites as frequently asked questions.

7. Agents spend a large amount of time looking for the information they need to answer queries

 To effectively resolve a query, an agent usually needs access to the customer’s account and interaction history, information about the company’s products and policies and related information such as shipping status.

“Outlook is not designed to make access to this information easy for agents as they reply to e-mails, but an ERMS is,” says the eGain executive. “An ERMS includes specialized workspaces for agents with quick single-button access to key information. In fact, ERMS providers are increasingly moving towards thin, web-based applications that can be used from anywhere, anytime including from home.”

8. You want to handle spikes in e-mail traffic by getting temporary help, but the administrative overhead kills you

Businesses have spikes; some have more spikes than others. The capabilities of a personal e-mail program such as Outlook do not lend themselves to coordinating and distributing work across a team of individuals, Subramaniam points out. If the team needs to scale on short notice with temporary agents, the problem quickly becomes overwhelming for the supervisor. New agents must be trained, and their responses to be audited or reviewed. The trade-off between scale and quality becomes stark without the right ERMS capability.

9. You spend hours sorting customer e-mails in order to create weekly trend reports

The simplest reports are a nightmare for service managers who use Outlook for managing customer e-mails, explains Subramaniam. They have no choice but to physically count the e-mails to create Excel reports. While this manual process works for small volumes the overhead becomes unacceptable as the volume grows. Moreover, as customers use the e-mail channel for service, they also provide additional feedback through their interactions that can be mined using ERMS capabilities. In contrast, Outlook fails to extract the valuable information that can be gleaned from incoming e-mails and fed back to the marketing and product teams.

10. Your boss keeps pushing for better service level compliance, but you have no way to measure service levels

Problems with value-based service and meeting service level agreements (SLAs) become more acute with e-mail. Often, your best customers don’t have the time to hold on the phone, and prefer to use e-mail and the Web to communicate with your business.

“When you are using Outlook, you cannot even measure SLA, much less enforce it; Outlook lacks the capabilities to report and track customer service,” Subramaniam points out. “When SLA compliance becomes a significant key performance indicator for your job success, insist on moving from Outlook to an ERMS.”