Sabio offers guidelines to help organisations integrate customer emails into their contact centre operations

Top Five disciplines contact centres should adopt to handle customer emails

Highlights importance of integrating customer email channels with organisations’ existing processes

LONDON –6 June, 2006 – Sabio the innovative contact centre services and solutions company, has produced the Top Five disciplines that organisations should adopt when handling emails from their customers. With analysts such as Jupiter Research already estimating that email is one of the fastest-growing channels for customer service - volumes are expected to more than double by 2010 - Sabio’s guidelines highlights the pressing need for organisations to establish clear customer service standards when processing customer emails. Sabio also urges businesses to acknowledge that email is an increasingly important communications channel, and one that should be treated as an integral part of a company’s contact strategy.

“While there are already proven email response management systems that can help automate message routing and provide customers with a near instant response, less than 25 per cent of organisations have so far moved to deploy this technology. That means that potentially three out of four companies aren’t dealing with their email enquiries effectively, and that’s a significant missed opportunity,” commented Sabio’s Founding Director Adam Faulkner. “To help address this challenge we’ve come up with a set of disciplines for email best practice approaches that will help put contact centres on the right email management track without necessarily having to invest in more complex email management solutions.

“As consumers, we all know that email provides a very personal and cost-effective way for both individuals and organisations to communicate. However, it has to be treated as part of a consistent customer experience that meets customers’ ongoing brand expectations,” continued Adam. “With consumer use of email now reaching mass adoption levels, it’s important that organisations take steps to handle emails in a professional manner. For contact centres, the challenge is how to take advantage of the inevitable cost benefits that email contact can bring, while still providing a quality service that meets customers’ brand expectations.”

Sabio’s Top Five Email Management checklist covers:

1. Set the right service level for email operations – for many contact centres, email is what you do when the voice traffic slows down. If you treat email as a second class channel, your customers will soon notice and look for a supplier who doesn’t
   
2. Set a clear service level expectation – there’s no point promising a three hour response if it’s going to take two days. Organisations should identify an appropriate email response time – for many customers a 24 hour response is fine – and then manage adherence to these SLAs in line with their other quality operations
   
3. Ensure agents are fully trained in email management – handling email enquiries is a very different skillset to fielding calls – agents need to have appropriate writing skills, they need to be trained in selecting and using standard responses, and they have to ensure that their replies are in line with corporate brand messages
   
4. Understand your real email volume levels – once your contact centre starts getting more than a hundred emails a day, you need to have procedures and the infrastructure in place to ensure that enquiries are handled to the right service and quality levels
   
5. Support your email operations with the right people, processes and technology – many contact centres have already invested significantly in contact centre workforce optimisation approaches such as agent scheduling, quality monitoring and CRM integration. It’s important that this investment is also applied to ensure that the email channel delivers the same quality approach as existing voice interactions

According to Adam Faulkner: “questions that organisations need to address include establishing just what sort of staff you need to employ to handle emails, identifying the requirement for specialist agents where appropriate, and ensuring that any email contacts you have are fully integrated with your existing voice contact operations. Often the emails are part of an ongoing series of customer interactions that a customer may be having across multiple channels, so it’s important to treat it with the same discipline. For larger businesses that may typically receive thousands of emails a day, there are enterprise-class software systems that can be deployed, but for the great majority of UK companies, there often aren’t any easy answers to these questions. That’s why we’ve produced our list of guidelines to help make sense of email in the contact centre.”

To find out more about Sabio’s approach to handling emails in the contact centre, contact Sabio’s Customer Interaction Management team at info@sabio.co.uk.