ICMI's Customer Management Insight - September 2007 - (Page 8) TECHNOLOGY top of its email game, and I’ll show you a center that has harnessed the power of its email management system (EMS). These centers make sure that each customer contact is efficiently routed to the right agent, and that each agent is armed with the information and tools needed to dazzle customers. Today’s EMS apps enable centers to create critical Web forms — electronic boxes that guide the customer through his or her email composition, thus ensuring that all emails are clear, concise and follow a consistent format, making them app. “This ensures that conversations with customers are always in context,’’ says Mark Richards, Internet product manager for EMS provider Deerfield.com. “Customers won’t need to start from scratch each time they contact your organization. ” Using today’s EMS apps, call centers can also build and grow a centralized email knowledge base — a powerful data-warehouse that can save agents a lot of time in composing accurate and consistent email responses, and also greatly enhance the center’s Web self-ser- extent, centers still have to take an active role in analyzing transactions and creating cogent responses to be stored in the knowledgebase — continually updating it to ensure it evolves and grows with the center itself. And, finally, there is the reporting capability of today’s EMS apps. Thanks to robust reporting systems, productivity can be carefully evaluated, key trends spotted, and potential problems red-flagged before they significantly impact customers. They are proficient in the art (and science) of email workforce management. Just as easier for agents to understand and respond to. The most aggressive centers utilize the skills-based routing function of their EMS — using the system to categorize emails by type or topic and route each contact to an agent with the appropriate skills or knowledge and availability to effectively handle the inquiry within the center’s response-time parameters. To further enhance agent’s ability to provide quality, personalized service quickly, centers are able to provide staff with access to complete customer account and/or transaction histories via the EMS vice initiatives. The former can be accomplished by setting up the EMS to search the knowledge base and then auto-suggest appropriate responses to common inquiries (which agents can customize to avoid the “canned answer” effect). The latter can be achieved by using the most effective responses to common inquiries to create dynamic and evolving FAQs, which, in turn, can be posted online to help eliminate the need for customers to contact an agent regarding routine issues. Of course, EMS knowledge bases do not build themselves. While most are self-learning to an they do with phone contacts, leading e-support centers have learned how to accurately forecast incoming customer email volumes and schedule the appropriate number of agents needed to meet the center's response time objectives. “The process of staffing for incoming email is very similar to the one you use for scheduling agents for inbound calls, says ” George Nichols, an independent call center consultant who, prior to retiring recently, helped hundreds of call centers master email management. “First, track and estimate email volume over a given period of time, and forecast to the half-hour. Next, based on the average [email] handle time, determine the number of agents you need. And finally, roster staff and schedule the agents accordingly. ” The best e-support centers not only pay close attention to historic trends regarding email volume, but also keep close tabs on any special events (i.e., new online marketing campaigns, etc.) that are likely to impact volumes and, consequently, icmi’s insight www.icmi.com | SEPTEMBER 2007 8 http://Deerfield.com http://www.icmi.com
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