Electronic interaction: Solution to organize e-mail could improve carrier/customer relations

Service providers have invested millions of dollars and years of effort in creating call centers to cope with service requests, new orders and billing questions.

While the investment has helped create an important structure for quickly responding to customer needs, a better medium may exist for providing a channel of communication between customer and carrier: e-mail.

E-mail has become a way of life for most businesses, but carriers have yet to fully embrace the technology for customer service purposes. Yet in the case of detailed and complex customer requests, e-mail could provide carriers with a simple tool for assessing what customers want, what technology hurdles may stand in the way of customer satisfaction and what business processes are used to process service requests.

"Today service providers are afraid of e-mail," said Derek Scruggs, founder and CEO of Distributed Bits, a Chicago-based software developer. "Often, addresses are buried so deeply on Web sites and take so much effort to find that the customers who do e-mail are ones who are strongly motivated and very angry."

Carriers also lack the infrastructure to deal with large volumes of e-mail in their service centers, Scruggs said. "Interacting with service providers helps build loyalty with customers, yet interaction through e-mail isn't yet seen as manageable or practical," he said.

To counter that, Distributed Bits has unveiled a solution that organizes, manages and tracks customer e-mail.

ResponseNow, which the com-pany introduced last month, downloads e-mail from multiple accounts. Using rules-based routing, it then categorizes the messages and forwards them automatically to the appropriate customer representative based on the content of the request, matching the content of the message with the skills of the representative.

Run-of-the-mill mail can be dealt with much more easily than in the call center environment, Scruggs said. "Most e-mails, around 85% of the total, are about the same few questions," he said. "With e-mail, you can put together some automated responses for those questions, freeing your representatives to spend more time on really difficult questions."

For those hard questions, the ResponseNow solution charts and records e-mail messages as they are downloaded, opened and transferred. The system logs the progress of service requests and allows managers to log in and check the status of messages, gauge average response time and check how long messages have been in the queue awaiting attention.

"Management can very quickly understand the impact of the system," said Scruggs.

ResponseNow's distributed architecture provides automatic load balancing and can scale to support more seats by adding new servers. The system uses standard object database platforms, allowing it to integrate easily with legacy applications and processes, including call centers. Users can write custom reports using off-the-shelf reporting programs.

This integration also enables providers to tie the solution into marketing efforts, making it possible to turn routine calls into selling opportunities.

"This will help companies transform passive informational Web sites into dynamic customer support and sales generation centers," said Mark Peabody, an analyst at Boston-based market research firm The Aberdeen Group.

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