InformationWeek

November 16, 1998

E-Mail Management

Products from Brightware, Aptex help customer-service reps by routing queries

By Mary E. Thyfault

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he latest call-center technology has more to do with E-mail than call-routing management. Two vendors recently rolled out products that manage E-mail customer queries similar to the way telephone queries are managed.

Brightware Inc. last week shipped its Contact Center management application that routes E-mail to customer-service representatives, suggests possible responses, and, using an earlier Brightware product, can be set up to provide automatic replies. Aptex Software Inc. upgraded its SelectResponse software to automate responses for call centers with high volumes of inquiries from telephone- and Internet-based customers.

With an increasing number of companies expanding their call centers to include the Internet, these applications make sense. For instance, Brightware creates a workflow to manage customer E-mail contact at Countrywide Home Loans Inc. The system will route E-mails and prioritize them, placing an E-mail from a customer with a contract on a house ahead of someone making an initial inquiry, says Cameron King, executive VP of Countrywide, a Calabasas, Calif., lender that generates $90 million in loans from the Web each month.

Customer-service representatives using Brightware work from Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook interfaces. Call-center administrators set rules for classifying messages according to their importance and they track the flow of E-mail queries and responses with the Brightware Contact Center. The system can send alerts when E-mail messages pile up. The Brightware Server queues messages and sends them to customer-service representatives. Other systems require reps to go into a server to retrieve E-mail, an inefficient process that doesn't scale well, King says.

Brightware Contact Center has text-pattern matching that looks for key words in an E-mail and determines the potential issue that the customer is inquiring about. For example, if a message includes the word "buy," Contact Center can pull up a suggested template for the agent to fill in for a sales transaction. The system's Answer Agent uses key words to provide automatic replies to incoming messages by tracking the top questions asked and letting companies set up automatic responses for common questions and communications. For example, when an order arrives in E-mail, the system could respond: "This is to confirm your purchase of a $299 blue sleeping bag."

Using Answer Agent, Countrywide generates automatic answers for about three-quarters of its incoming E-mail. Countrywide customer-service representatives are handling 25% more E-mail and closing 100% more loans.

Brightware starts at $1,700 a month or $75,000 for a 10-user package that includes a software license, services, and one-year maintenance.

Aptex's SelectResponse 3.0 incorporates new functions that serve as a virtual support team to improve the quality, speed, and personalization of responses to real-time customer inquiries via E-mail, call centers, Web pages, and chat rooms.