InformationWeek

April 9, 2001

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Customer Service
Customers Get The Message

continued...page 2 of 2

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Companies risk alienating their customers by not providing personalized service. A good approach is to combine automation with enough inspection and intervention to ensure quality, consistency, and personalized response.

Additionally, for optimal customer service, time limits should be monitored. If an ongoing E-mail exchange lapses for a couple of days without coming to a resolution, call the customer. True, the phone may not be the customer's chosen communication channel, but it demonstrates that the merchant is committed to doing what it takes to resolve the customer's issue in a timely fashion.

Conversations between customers and customer-service representatives often result in follow-up E-mail between the parties. For example, a customer who's speaking with her bank's customer-service representative about her mortgage may ask the rep for his E-mail address so she can contact him again with additional questions. Thus, a link between a specific customer and a specific representative has been established, and the customer is likely to go directly to that representative the next time she needs service. This works great for companies that want to encourage relationship-building with their customers.

This approach also flies in the face of most customer-service models, which focus on pools of customer-service representatives handlinginquiries in a balanced workload fashion. As the volume of inbound E-mail to specific representatives increases, managers and supervisors will find workload balancing increasingly difficult.

Furthermore, as more tenured staff remain in contact with certain customers, their ability to hand these customers over to newer representatives will become more difficult.

Many companies are responding by using departmental or workgroup E-mail addresses rather than individual addresses. This allows a dedicated group of representatives to monitor inbound activity, balance its distribution, and quickly assess quality.

Some companies also use workflow software from vendors such as Action Technologies Inc. to monitor queues and automatically reallocate work to different individuals or groups based on utilization metrics or other variables.

While such approaches certainly increase efficiency, they're no substitute for the personal attention and consistency that a dedicated representative can provide.

E-mail-Based Customer-Service Applications

Brightware
San Rafael, Calif.
866-220-2339
http://www.brightware.com
E-mail Assistance: Provides E-mail management and automation, reads incoming mail messages, and composes personalized answers that are routed to customer-service agents for review, or automatically dispatched to customers

eGain Communications
Sunnyvale, Calif.
888-603-4246
http://www.egain.com
EGain Mail: E-mail management application that provides workflow, issue tracking, and intelligent response toolsto respond to high volumes of E-mail and Web-form inquiries

Kana Communications
Redwood City, Calif.
650-298-9282
http://www.kana.com
Kana Response: E-mail response-management application that handles inbound mail, Kana I-Mail instant messaging, and Web interactions by automating response process

Data: Vendors

Other businesses are appointing relationship managers who act as a funnel or broker for inbound E-mail and a proxy for outbound E-mail, acting much like interactive voice-response units. Of course, there are a number of software providers claiming to have the ability to automate much of this activity, but most of these products are rather simplistic.

These challenges highlight the vulnerabilities and sometimes conflicting approaches that companies must consider when refining their customer strategies. E-mail-based customer service is indicative of

the interrelationship of many different factors that multichannel customer service is bringing about.

The integration of the various technical infrastructures and supporting products needed to handle multiple channels of communication is a challenge for both the IT department and customer-service organization. But it's also important to understand the human factors and skills that come into play with multi-channel customer service.

Whatever your approach to E-mail-based customer service, realize that your strategy must be part of the larger customer-contact plan. To resonate with customers, the focus mustn't be on the message itself but on engaging the customer in a personalized fashion, no matter which channel of communication is used.

Effectively engaging customers through different channels requires integration of the various islands of information that contain relevant customer information. This includes not only transaction data and customer-account information, but also customer preferences and contact information gathered from interactions through multiple channels.

Consumer-focused dot-coms such as Amazon.com, CDNow.com, and 1-800-Flowers.com are examples of companies that leverage all of their customer data in their customer-service strategies. They automate many of their customer-service and inquiry-handling functions, and they capitalize on this data for marketing pur-poses as well.

Special offers and promotions are common fare for such companies; frequent E-mail contacts that cater to customers' preferences and buying histories are effective mechanisms for engaging them further and encouraging additional business.

Another great example is grocery retailer Wegmans Food Markets Inc. The company's Web site lets customers set up shopping lists and fill out detailed profiles with their preference and other relevant data. Wegmans uses this data in conjunction with customers' purchasing-history data in promotions such as weekly E-mail suggestions about recipes or family meal plans for the week.

Such personalized communication is an effective way to combine customer-service data with profile and transaction information in targeted marketing activities that are truly engaging for customers.

E-mail is a fact of life in businesses, and it's also becoming an increasingly comfortable means of communication for individual consumers. So it's inevitable that customer-service operations will harness E-mail as a key channel for communicating and building affinity with customers. The challenge will be to make this a tool that aids the customer first and foremost but ultimately benefits the business.

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James K. Watson Jr. is president, Frank Meister is a senior analyst, and Joe Fenner is a senior technical editor with Doculabs, an independent advisory firm that helps companies choose the right technologies and strategies for E-business. Contact them at info@doculabs.com.

Illustration by Claudia Newell
Analysis provided by DocuLabs

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