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  Kate Leggett 10:52:27 pm on October 27, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: customer service, email, erms

  Email Done Right

  Customers don’t trust email as a reliable communication channel with a service organization. How many times have you sent in an email to a company, and received no response? Or received only a partial answer after waiting for days?

  Poor performance of email tools can usually be traced to their implementation history – email systems were typically deployed years ago with little tuning to maximize their productivity.

  Even with history working against you, here are some basic steps to follow in setting up your customer service email.

  • Make email part of your multichannel strategy – Don’t think of email as a siloed channel. Provide seamless escalation between your web self-service offering and email, and be sure to have a single source of knowledge that is used across all your communication channels.
  • Keep your customers in the loop from the time they send an email into you, to the time that they get an answer to their questions. Always send them an auto-acknowledgement letting them know you got their email. Tell them how long it will take to answer their email. And provide them with alternate contact channels if the SLA you have communicated to them sounds too long to them.
  • Manage your email flow so that you can meet your SLAs. Set up your rules and queues to ensure that emails get sent to the right skillset of agents. And staffing each email queue with the appropriate number of email agents to ensure that your SLAs are met
  • Use automation tools – like auto-responses, auto-suggestions to take the load off your agents. Use text matching algorithms to read the intent of incoming emails in order to route them to the right email queue.
  • Teach your agents to properly answer email – like answering all the questions that are contained in an incoming email, and answering all questions that are asked, and ones that are implied.
  • Monitor, measure and optimize your email performance. And be flexible enough to change if you find yourself falling behind in your SLAs or quality of customer care.
   

• Kate Leggett 04:56:44 pm on August 21, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer service, email, enteprise feedback management, Knowledge Management, Self-Service

  Its going to be a recovery that only a statistician can love”. Mark Vitner, Wells Fargo Senior Economist cautions us against upbeat economic news. Most of us are still living the realities of the recession –being out of work, basic household budgets, and trying to save.

  Malls are empty. Discount same-store sales are down  about 7% from a year ago. Teen clothing sales have given way to hand-me-downs (Abercrombie reports a 28% drop in sales!!). Macy and JCPenny’s sales are down over 10% from last year, even with their big sales.

   E-tailers are asking us how to do more with less and still preserve the customer experience that shoppers are used to. Here is my nuts-and-bolts top 10 list of to-dos:

  1. Design a successful shopping experience:  
     1. Structure your website with consistent navigation, theme, and use breadcrumbs to orient the shopper
     2. Go beyond search – give shoppers alternate ways to find information (ex:browse, guided discovery)
     3. Extend these principles to your self-help offering ( both to help with the shopping experience, and for customer service)
     4. Place chat links strategic points in the shopping experience
  2. Focus on converting browsers into buyers
     1. Use proactive chat to help browsers buy (this channel has a real ROI!)
     2. Use co-browse to help shoppers  with checking-out
  3. Use website monitoring to keep track of activities of your high value customers
  4. Target campaigns based on customer profiling and past purchase history – and send them from a customer service email address as they are more likely to get opened
  5. Make it easy for a shopper to ask a question- and get a useful answer  
     1. Consistently publish the communication channels that are offered to your customer base
     2. De-escalate inquiries by tying chat, email and knowledge channels together
     3. Guide customers to use the right communication channel for their inquiry
  6. Maximize agent productivity using automation capabilities built into eService tools (example: auto-responses, auto-suggestions, auto-classification)
  7. Make sure that  agents have all the knowledge that they need to answer a customer’s question
  8. Boost the effectiveness of temporary agents – give them the collaboration tools to reach out to subject matter experts and get the answers they need
  9. Keep a pulse on your business and your customer’s satisfaction (by using real time statistics, reports and enterprise feedback)
  10. If you are not doing as well as you should, be flexible enough to change.

  Any other additions to this list? Thoughts?
   

• Kate Leggett 01:38:59 am on March 10, 2009 | 3 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer service, email, erms, Self-Service

  Email? Again? What’s the Deal?

  Like chat, its time again to revive a tool that has gotten a bad rap over the years. I’m talking about email. Email 2.0, not email 1.0.

  Back in the Web 1.0 days, email was all the rage. It was new. It was fast. It was cheaper than a phone call. And many companies home-built an email system, or bought one from the handful of original ERMS vendors.

  Customers loved email. They sent in thousands of emails. Jupiter Research (now Forrester) reported year-over -year volumes doubled from 1999 to 2004. But these  volumes overwhelmed companies who couldn’t keep up with the demand.  Email users started to get mad at what was going on. They didn’t get answers to the emails that were being sent in. Or they had to wait a week to get an answer. (Jupiter says that number of companies that took over 3 days to respond or never do so at all (!!!) increased to 36%  in 2004)

  And when customers finally got something back, they found out that they had only gotten half their question answered, and the English used was not particularly correct.

  What was happening with most early adopters of email, is that they had been romanced by new technology, but had not paid attention to the people and processes that were needed to keep this communication channel humming.

  There was no thought to content management – How canned answers would be periodically reviewed to ensure that they were still accurate? How would new content get added and obsolete content removed? What reports would be run to see what content was the most used?

  There was no thought to queue, rules, workflow management. Very few times did companies tweak the initial setups to make them more in-line with the businesses real need.

  They had not thought of automation – autosuggestions and autoresponses to make an agent’s life easier.

  And, there was no thought to a vision of multichannel service. For example, few companies had thought through what channels customers needed, and what channels they could effectively provide. As well, few thought through the interplay of channels. For example, if a particular question was coming in frequently over email, did a business have a process to make sure that there was a customer-facing FAQ, or knowledgebase content for this question?

  And, the nail in the coffin was that many of the system administrators who had originally purchased email systems left. Do a survey at your company.- How many of you are still using an email system that is over 5 years old?

  Email is now seeing a second coming. Why? Because there are real quantifiable gains that can be realized using this channel. And many companies have implemented it successfully. However, to do it right, and to have your customers learn to trust this channel, you must properly care for it. You need to know what email best practices are, and you need to implement them.

  How many of you know what these are? Or are actually using them?

   

• Kate Leggett 11:59:21 pm on February 4, 2009 | 0 | # |
  Tags: CRM, customer service, email, erms

  We don’t really trust email as a reliable communication channel with a service organization. How many times have you sent in an email to a company, and gotten no answer? Or gotten only a partial answer after waiting for days?

  Here are the hard facts: SSPA reports that customers expect an email response in under 2 hours. But email response times fall short of our expectations – only 42% of companies answered their email within 24 hours in 2007. And it’s only gotten worse.

  Poorly performing ERMS tools can often be traced back to their implementation history.  In many cases, email systems were deployed years ago, and have had little attention paid to them in recent years to make sure that agents maximized their inherent value.

  Even with these statistics and history working against you, there are basic steps to take to ensure that your customers know when their questions will be answered.
  • You got to keep your customers in the loop from the time they send an email to you, to the time they get an answer to their questions. How many of you are using system-generated auto-acknowledgement to let them know that you have received their email?
  • Manage your email flow– Do you publish your SLAs? Do you meet them? How many of you tune your queues and routing rules to make sure that you are meeting your SLAs?
  • Streamline your response process– How many of you are using prebuilt content to help agents answer common questions? How many of you have autosuggestions or autoresponses turned on? How often does your content get tuned?
  • Answer your email properly– Forrester says that 6 in 10 customer service emails don’t answer the customer’s question. Teach your agents to answer all questions – direct and implied – to reduce follow-on questions. For example, a customer asking whether shuttle service is available should receive an answer answering this question, as well as the cost and schedule of the shuttle service.
  • Make email part of your multichannel strategy – Its not a standalone channel. It must be holistically integrated into your entire multichannel service strategy.

  I’ll be blogging more about the do’s and don’t of email. Let me know your feedback, and what is working for you.

   
• 

  Esteban Kolsky 06:41:01 am on November 5, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: best practices, CRM, customer service, email, erms, LinkedIn

  Using Email for Customer Service? Here’s How to do it Well

  I must confess, I created most of the content for this post for a presentation I did at the last SSPA conference in Vegas.

  It was a very interesting conference to be honest.  I was afraid no one was going to be at my presentation, but I ended up with standing-room only, and lots of questions.  My fear came from the fact that John Ragsdale, the VP of Research and SSPA and a great analyst, keynoted with a presentation talking about the end of email for customer service.  My presentation was called “The Second Coming of Email in Customer Service”.  Yeah, just like that.  He did a great job on his.

  So, what is there to say about the second coming of email in customer service? lots and lots.  Please remember that I was with Gartner for seven years, sometimes it is hard to let old habits die.  So, I am going to talk in the same way I did at the conference – the Gartner Hype Cycle.  In case you are not familiar with it, the short version is that all technologies have lots of hype and few implementations initially.  The hype grows faster than the knowledge of what to do with it.  Eventually, the hype brings more adopters – yet we still don’t know much about what to do with it.  With time, and now that we have lots of people using it, we learn how to take better advantage of it and eventually get to use the technology productively, and that causes the second wave of adoption: knowing how to use it.

  So, my contention is that email for customer service (or ERMS – email response management systems) is now climbing the slope and becoming more productive.  We are learning how to use it better, and how to make it work for us while generating revenue or saving us money.  This is the good part, because now we can not only tell new adopters how to use it better – we can go back to existing users and show them how to optimize it.  That is my passion, taking something that is not performing as well as it should, use best practices and lessons learned, and make it work better.  And, that is where we are today with the use of email for customer service.

  We are, finally some would say, learning how to make it work as expected, how to save money using it for customer service, and how to do it well.  That is what my presentation dealt with – using best practices to improve the use of email in customer service.

  I don’t have lots of time to explain in detail how this works, so I am going to summarize here the six best practices I highlighted in the presentation and prompt you to watch it onlne to see the rest.

  1) Choose the best transactions to use with email

  2) Automate the low-level interactions

  3) Create and Maintain SLAs that are appropriate for the channel and interaction

  4) Change your tracking metrics to effectiveness, not efficiency

  5) Implement and use feedback on the value to customers

  6) Hire, Train, and Maintain the proper skills for email interactions

  I welcome comments, questions, and concerns. Please reply in the comments below, or email me directly (ekolsky [at] evergance (dot) com).  BTW, SSPA, KANA, and eVergance are planning a really cool webcast together to discuss the topic of Email in Customer Service.  We don’t have the final details yet, but is going to be on December 4th.  Send me an email, or leave me a comment, and we will add your name to he distribution list for it.

  Thoughts? Comments? Complaints? Please let me know…

   

• Esteban Kolsky 03:08:50 pm on June 10, 2008 | 2 | # |
  Tags: contact center, CRM, customer satisfaction, customer service, email, erms, satisfaction

  I would like to add some wood to the “email use in customer service” fire. If you have been following the blogs last week, we have a little of a controversy going on about whether email should be used for support – or sent to sleep with the fishes. Personally, I believe that email is an essential support tool in certain situations, and when done properly. For medium-complexity scenarios, with lots of data necessary to exchange hands, and where accuracy is paramount (like something you can cut and paste from a screen or log), email cannot be beat. The process of reading an error message via telephone is usually cumbersome at best. I know that organizations that implement email for support situations such as the above, when they answer promptly (read before 2 hours for 80% of emails, 4 hours for 100%) and they get good results.

  Of course, these “good results” don’t usually translate into easily quantifiable cost savings, or return-on-investment models. That would be too easy, now wouldn’t it? I have been working lately with some clients that are trying to come up with Justification models for their ERMS (email response management system) deployments, and we are struggling. I will be very honest, each case is different and we can only use tested-and-proven ROI models as a basis to start the discussion, then we deviate into the different variables that affect each business. At the end, we can always justify implementing an ERMS on financial terms — as long as we are willing to make certain assumptions about growth and support, very often the largest unknown components. Worse, when we create TCO models, over three years, it is hard to find cost savings over using the telephone, and little over a chat implementation. Most of the benefits come from two areas:

  Experience Management and Customer Loyalty

  Reduction in manual process when automation is implemented

  So – what should you use to justify your ERMS implementation? Glad you asked…

  This is where your Customer Experience Management, or a similar initiative, comes into place. Use your customer’s demands to justify your ERMS initiative. Yep, use them to service them… corny, huh? Let me explain.

  1) Prepare a survey for the purpose of understanding your customer’s needs and demands, if you have not already done it (even if you did it already, read on… chances are it was not the best survey you ever done). The survey should have just 3-4 questions related to your planning of customer service for the next 2-3 years, and what customers would like to see in it. Don’t sneak questions on satisfaction, loyalty, or anything like that in there. Simply planning questions.

  2) Ask the following : “We are considering implementing one more technology for service and support. Please rank from 1 through 5 your choice of the following technologies to submit service and support requests”. Then, it would feature three, four, or five technologies like chat, SMS, email, etc. Pick the ones you would seriously consider implementing.

  3) Your customers will then tell you, if they want email, that you should implement email for support. Depending on the ranking and your plans, you can justify your ERMS on Customer Experience Management reasons: customers want it, we will give it to them. You will find that the costs of implementing ERMS, or virtually any other technology you can imagine, will not drastically reduce the existing costs… but, customers want to have it.

  Would you willing to take the chance to have your customers say “no, please don’t implement that”? What would you do then? Let me know…

   

• Esteban Kolsky 05:58:22 pm on June 3, 2008 | 6 | # |
  Tags: best practices, CRM, customer satisfaction, customer service, email

  Little did I know when I started writing my last post and some other people also had strong opinions about email. Since I published that blog, I found entries related to using Email in support organizations in two other places.

  As you probably figured out, mine is a positive blog entry. I do believe that Email has its place in the customer service organization, that is quite powerful when done properly, and that it does not take much more than a commitment to do it right. However, others are not so convinced.

  Glenn Ross writes in his latest blog about diversifying your communication with your customers, including really taking a survey on what email does and whether and how to continue. While he does emphasize he is a believer in email, he also says he believes more in new communication tools and technologies, social networks, and Web 2.0 methods. While I don’t disagree, I don’t see the value that it brings to customer service – yet.

  On the other end of the spectrum, my good friend John Ragsdale over at SSPA wrote an entry about the death of support email. Well written article, and he does make some valid points. I responded to him that the problem is not in the tool, but rather the implementation of the tool. That most companies don’t take the time to do it right.

  Alas, I truly believe this. I find that any technology or tool could be useful, in certain circumstances, when properly implemented. I truly, honestly believe that if more people were to advance their email implementations (auto-responses, structured web-forms, specific transactions, knowledge repositories integration among other things) we would not be having this discussion.

  Now, consider this before you respond to my question… in a recent survey we discovered that email’s growth rate is 28% year-over-year, just a smidget below web self-service (29%) and Chat at 35% (these are CAGR 2007-2009). Now, with that in mind…

  What do you think? Is Email dead? In life support? Thriving? please, let me know what you think… either comment below, or email me (ekolsky at evergance . com).

   

• Esteban Kolsky 09:07:49 pm on June 2, 2008 | 4 | # |
  Tags: best practices, CRM, customer service, email, erms, eService, Knowledge Management

  Back in the old days of the internet revolution (circa 1990s) email was the solution for communicating with customers. It was to replace the phone, and virtually any other channel, for support. It was going to be automated and processed within minutes. It was going to allow anyone close to a messaging device to get world-class customer service.
  

  The magic of SPAM, viruses, and malware, hindered that vision, and the coming of other text-based communication channels with more prompt responses put the, supposedly, final nail in ERMS (email response management systems). Email support became a four-letter word – but several companies saw email as an opportunity and succeeded at it. Their stories provide us with some very valuable lessons learned that we can use to optimize the second coming of email.

  When properly done email can significantly improve and optimize your support organization. Of course, “properly done” is not usually the case. There are three things you can do make sure your ERMS implementation is actually well done:

  Extend customer experience – for the most part, email support has been neglected, not loved, sent to the corner. Usually when a customer sends an email for support the answers are incomplete, incoherent with other answers and policies, or (in close to 50% of emails) non-existent. Make sure you can complete the transactions your customers want in a timely manner, and that you have access to necessary resources, data, and applications to complete the transactions.

  Identify the proper transactions – organizations tried to use email for every single transaction, regardless of the viability of doing a good job with that channel. Not all transactions were meant for email, some of them will be almost impossible to do cheaper or better than through other channels. Make sure your ERMS tackles the transactions that make more sense – not just any transaction.

  Speed up resolution – This is the killer application for ERMS, if there ever was one. If you use automation (included free with the best ERMS packages), and tie it to the proper knowledge repositories, you can increase response times to almost negligible. Better yet, route users to either use a web-form for sending emails, or automate the initial interactions to get the information you need (think conversational agents) then you are sure to answer those emails so quickly… it may just work.

  Email can be your most powerful weapon for decreasing the costs of customer support and for improving your customers’ perception of your willingness to help them. Don’t cast it aside for a bad experience, turn it into a positive one.

  What do you think? Are you ready to turn your customer service email into your friend?

   

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