Customers are increasingly demanding that businesses are easily contactable, at all times of the day, and efficient in dealing with queries. Businesses, therefore, have poured serious investment into technologies like web-chat, digital service, AI and mobile apps. In fact, 61 per cent of UK companies are even planning to offer customer services via virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, according to Maintel research.
Email, however, has become the black sheep of the modern contact centre – forgotten about and neglected.
The majority of organisations continue to manage email through shared mailboxes. Not only is this time consuming and resource intensive, it is needlessly expensive and leads to poor customer service any way.
If businesses continue to neglect email, they could ultimately lose customers and subsequently income. This is because ignoring one channel will undermine the efforts and investment in others, as any lack of consistency in communication will damage customers’ trust and confidence.
Despite not being the most ‘trendy’ of technologies, the issues created by poor email practice is likely to become a board issue soon.
This is because companies can create a whole host of opportunities for themselves, but only if they get email management right. Email communications today often contain a wealth of information that can support a businesses’ digital transformation process. This includes insights into the reason for customer contact and common queries that could be made available on self-service channels. It can also offer valuable insight into the language used by customers, which could then inform how FAQs are written online or how responses are created for web chat.
Businesses may have shied away from investing into the email process in the past because it was expected that the growth of self-service applications and customer portals would reduce the need for free-format email communications, but there are still many occasions where email enquiries remain a vital cog in the customer experience.
Many customers are still comfortable with emails because they can be sent at their own pleasure, without the need to make phone calls or sit on web chats. Emails also enable them to communicate their issues in more detail or ask multiple questions, which other mediums like social media don’t allow.
If companies want to continue to improve the customer experience they must invest in improving their email function now. If businesses also introduce automation, they can improve the customer experience further and turn email into a vital part of the modern contact centre once again.
Just a few years ago, considering automation for processing emails would have required businesses to consider adopting one of the specialist solutions, such as eGain or Eptica, probably resulting in a considerable on-premises investment with the siloed solution being used by specialist team(s) outside the contact centre, alongside other workloads in the back office.
At that time, many businesses would’ve considered the volume of emails, their complexity, and the widely anticipated reduction in email contact, and decided the investment in automation wasn’t justified or affordable. Instead, the majority of organisations across all industries continue to manage the emails within one or more inboxes, with manual manipulation of shared inboxes. This practice remains prevalent today, resulting in poor customer service, processing inefficiencies, unwanted repeat contacts, and inconsistent, unhelpful responses. It also offers little or no reporting or statistics to guide continuous improvement initiatives.
However, solutions to automate functions such as email and web chat are now much more affordable and accessible to businesses of all sizes. Furthermore, many specialist providers have transformed their propositions to be consumed through cloud services, shifting to usage-based charging models supported by managed services, making them more cost-effective than previous CapEX-based on-premises solutions.
Alongside continued efforts to remove and deflect the need for email communications into the business, the ability to consistently and efficiently process the remaining emails, plus voice and other digital back-office interactions, is crucial to a successful customer experience strategy these days.
There’s no doubt that continued advances in robotic process automation (RPA), natural language processing, and voice-enabled devices will continue to increase the volume of complex enquiries that can be triaged or fully serviced without the need for someone to write an email or fill out a contact form.
However, in the mean-time, there’s plenty of opportunity to make quick improvements that could release operational costs to fund projects which explore those new technologies. Now is the perfect time for contact centres to revisit the prospect of automating email processing, to free up budget and resources as an integral part of the digital transformation and further improve customer experience. There’s no need for email to remain the black sheep of the modern contact centre.
Guest Blog by Derek Lewis, Head of Customer Experience, Maintel
