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Leveraging e-mail best practices for BPO

Adopting best practices for customer service via e-mail will help Indian BPOs tap a huge market says Vivek Rastogi

Gartner estimates that the volume of e-mail for customer service in North America alone was 11 billion in 2001 and that’s expected to touch 36 billion by end 2005. If one were to add the UK market for customer service through the e-mail channel, that number goes up by another 35 percent. Less than 5 percent of this email management business has been outsourced to India.

The primary reason for this minuscule share is the inability of Indian BPOs to provide clients with multi-channel solutions (e-mail, chat and fax). With increasing price pressure in the voice segment, from larger local and international competitors (think Philippines and Eastern Europe), Indian BPOs are attempting to diversify into new areas and offer services that result in creating greater business value for their customers.

E-mail management has been outsourced in North America for many years, and many proven best practices have been documented. Indian BPOs can leverage these, rather than spend precious time learning from their own mistakes.

One: Set, manage, and track customer expectations

E-mail, as a customer service channel, has an inherent drawback - interaction is not in real time. Customers are usually willing to accept delays as long as they know that their request is being processed. An email system that sends automatic acknowledgements for all e-mail and Web form inquiries must be set up. The acknowledgement should include expected response time and track evolving customer expectations and customer-specific service level agreements to determine the optimal response time.

Two: Monitor, monitor, monitor

After determining the optimal response time, enforce it with alarms that trigger if an inquiry is not handled within a specified period, and monitoring and reporting to track inquiries and measure agent performance.

Three: Automate service processes with intelligent routing

Response times depend largely upon how soon an inquiry gets to the agent who is best suited to handle it. You might suggest to your clients that they create Web forms for their customers to use to submit issues - they are useful for gathering information that agents need to resolve problems, and make it easier to classify inquiries or to route them appropriately. Or set up automated workflows to route e-mail messages based upon the skill and workload of available agents, the nature of the inquiry, and the lifetime value of the customer. Also, make sure that your workflows let agents collaborate easily with the subject matter experts of your client. Agents should be able to forward e-mail, draft responses and share internal notes. Supervisors should be able to track and monitor the inquiry at each stage.

Four. Make complete customer information available to agents

Agents need to be able to access the complete information about customers through a simple user interface so that they can create rapid and satisfactory responses. Providing agents with easy access to account and billing information, and customer interaction history. It is important to set up quick access to external data sources that agents frequently refer to while responding to inquiries. For instance, a retail business that gets several shipment-related queries could provide its agents with a quick link to UPS tracking systems. Integrate this with the multi-channel service environment of the client, to create an enterprise-wide view of the customer for your agents. A common customer information base lets customers switch channels without having to start all over again.

Five: Start small and grow a knowledge base

You will discover that a comprehensive, up-to-date knowledge base is the answer to most service problems. Gartner estimates that through 2006, more than two-thirds of enterprises that successfully implement real-time enterprise capabilities will also have successful knowledge management programs in place. Create a knowledge base that is easy to use and make it available across all communication channels to ensure consistent customer service across channels, agents, and geographies. Analyse customer queries to identify simple, frequently asked questions (FAQs). Create high-quality responses to these questions. FAQs can take care of almost 80 percent of customer queries - your agents can now focus on complex, high-value inquiries. Set up your email management system to auto-suggest responses from the knowledge base to speed up problem resolution. Your knowledge base content should be automatically personalized when an e-mail message is sent out. This is useful when agents reply to multiple e-mails with a common response.

Six: Preempt customer inquiries through proactive communication

Use the reporting capability of your e-mail management system to spot trends and topical issues that are generating similar customer inquires. For example, shipping delays due to logistic problems can and should be communicated proactively to all affected customers—this would avoid a slew of emails from your customers and improve customer satisfaction. Regularly communicate product and service news to the relevant customers using the group e-mail capability of your system (with the customer’s permission).

Seven: Understand and respond to customer feedback and preferences

Agents need to be able to understand issues raised by customers, categorize them, and track trends using reporting and analysis capabilities. Make information regularly available through automated online reporting to your client decision-makers so that they can adjust service capabilities or product offerings accordingly. Marketing and up-sell messages need to be integrated into service responses based upon the category of the issue and type of customer. For instance, let your clients include a hyperlink to a related promotional offer in the footer of e-mail responses.

Eight: Use a proven solution

While evaluating e-mail management systems, start with solutions that have been proven in a similar business environment. Look for a solution that facilitates location independent deployment, categorization and intelligent routing of e-mail, auto-responses, and suggestions. Workflow for outgoing emails to ensure regulatory compliance and quality control, secure messaging, access to complete customer interaction history and out-of-the box integration with call centre infrastructure and business systems are other desirable features. A searchable, self-learning knowledge base and comprehensive monitoring, reporting, and archiving tools as well as a scalable architecture are needed.

Selecting the right e-mail management system

Any enterprise looking for a proven e-mail management system must carefully evaluate the features and functionality and look for features such as a browser-based system, ability to operate on basic desktop configurations, availability on multiple OSs and database configurations, open architecture that can integrate with existing systems etc. The IT investment in a proven e-mail management system can be minimized by opting for a hosted option. A monthly subscription for the product and services will suffice here. In either option make sure you look for a vendor with proven track record!