To whom it may concern most...: E-mail manager puts Web customers in touch with those in the know

True: the White House's National Partnership for Reinventing Government plans to debut a federal government portal, WhiteHouseWeb.gov, in mid-November-a master Internet portal that fields e-mail questions on all things federal and routes them to the proper government Webmasters. Now imagine you've been given the task of running this "Web site of Web sites" for the electronic electorate.

Of course, your first question is, who's going to read all that mail?

The people most qualified to provide the answers, if GTE's new inResponse e-mail management system performs as it has in beta tests. inResponse is GTE's branded entry to the e-mail management market. It is the first such product to combine a high degree of customization and scalability with a flat fee for unlimited licenses and a full menu of consulting services. "We're selling the GTE name," said Janine Carey, director of GTE's Web solutions group. "We're confident the brand will mean a lot to people who know telecommunications."

The product inserts an e-mail response button on specific Web pages. When users click through, they get a page asking them to refine their question: Is it a complaint? A suggestion? A request for product information? A question about a product they've already bought? With that header filled in, they type their e-mail into a text box and send it.

inResponse assigns the message a tracking number and bounces an acknowledgement back to the sender. It simultaneously routes the message to one of a set of folders that GTE consultants will help customize for each Web site. Each folder is read by a different group of subject matter experts, who must respond to the customer in a timely fashion. To help them, inResponse can supply standardized answers to the most frequently asked questions, if the client wishes. But these are never automatic; the expert must push them to the questioner.

On the company side, inResponse time-stamps incoming mail so a client can tell when a message arrived and when it was answered, and it can run real-time response reports. Brett Knobloch, manager of Internet marketing for Whirlpool, said his company has begun beta testing inResponse across the company's brand sites. He expects the tracking capability will be its most valuable feature. "We get about 3000 e-mails a month, most of them answered by six people in our call center," Knobloch said. "My sense is that we're doing OK at responding to e-mail right now. But six months from now, 'OK' is not going to cut it."

inResponse can scale up to manage several thousand e-mail messages daily, said Product Line Manager Steve Doskey, though he acknowledged the client organization must still have the call center work force to turn the responses around. Generally, though, the product is aimed at companies that don't get enough e-mail to require an artificial intelligence solution and don't need a high-end integrated computer telephony solution-companies for which simply routing e-mail to the proper addresses is enough.

The price and the architecture reflect that "keep it simple" approach. List price for the basic inResponse system is $59.95 for an unlimited number of licenses. The system is Java-based, runs on either Unix or NT servers and comes with installation, initial configuration and training. "Customers want something that's easy to set up and to learn," said Doskey. "They don't want to call GTE to add a user or a folder."

David Cooperstein, an analyst at Forrester Research, is surprised to find a software product coming from a telco.

"There are tons of other software products that sit on the shelf at telco labs because they can't figure out how to sell something built in-house through their retail channel," he said. "GTE is probably the only [major interexchange carrier] that can pull this off in the short term. It's not typical, but it just might work."

GTE's inResponse e-mail management system boasts the NCAA as one of its clients.