Managed Email

Many customers and suppliers prefer to use email as a communications medium and while most companies use email they don’t necessarily have processes and systems in place to measure and monitor their performance in responding to email enquiries.

The old adage, “If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it” is apt for these companies. It’s relatively straightforward to have systems in place that keep track of messages, manage service levels and report on user productivity.

Benefits

A managed email system will enable users to treat emails in the same way that phone calls are handled in a call centre.  If messages are not responded to quickly, the sender will probably call so you then have to deal with both the email and the call. 

Systems today can “steal” a message from the queue if you get an inbound phone call from the same customer.   Using message rules and single click to insert standard paragraphs can reduce the work that a user needs to do. This increases productivity – sometime by as much as 50%.  Standardising responses also increases quality and customer service levels.

Managed Email NOT in Action

Companies of all sizes that are affected as a September 2007 report shows: Research has revealed that the majority of leading NASDAQ and almost half of FTSE 100 companies are neglecting their online capabilities with limited responses to investor relations email enquiries.

The alarming results reveal that on average only 38 out of 100 NASDAQ companies responded to staged emailed investor enquiry with the appropriate answers, while just 53 FTSE 100 companies responded within a three week period. Those companies that did respond had wildly varying results ranging from under three minutes to more than two weeks, according to Rainier PR, the UK technology public relations company which carried out the study.

Managed Email in Action

A Five star hotel reservation team receive 500+ emails a day and were having problems using Microsoft Outlook as they had difficulty in tracking service levels, it was hard to find sent messages and impossible to track user productivity. The Reservations Manager wanted to find new ways to increase customer service. The hotel decided to change their business process so that they blended telephone and email work and dinner and room reservations are now confirmed by SMS.

The result is that time taken to respond to customer emails has been reduced by 50%, the centralisation of messages has made it easier to handle customer complaints and user productivity has increased by 100%. Additionally management information has lead to better resource planning and confirmation by SMS message has increased customer satisfaction.