You've Got Lots of Mail

Can automated e-mail-response software lighten the load? The Internet, like a modern Pandora, opened an electronic gateway and released elements previously unknown. Out flew the corporate Web site and the concepts of selling products in an invisible dimension known as cyberspace and offering online self-help tools for customers' use.

Unlike Pandora, the Internet also released hope. Companies could look forward to savings as they pushed some customers away from the phone and online to find their own answers or to contact the organization at a generic e-mail address. The whole setup seemed too good to be true, until the e-mails started rolling in.

"Back in 1998, as I traveled the country, I saw articles talking about how bad organizations were at responding to e-mail," recalls Donna Floss, Gartner Group CRM group vice president and research director. "By the end of 1999, I started to see the e-mail-response-management software starting to sell."

E-mail-response software addressed the immediate need brought by a steady e-mail stream. But the software came with its own set of problems. For one thing, e-mail-response systems typically operate independently of other customer-contact mechanisms.

The typical response time of the automated systems presents another problem.

"In our culture, we're used to getting a response over the telephone," Floss said. "So having to wait two hours, in the best cases, is still a very poor form of service."

Service has moved to the foreground on wireless-service providers' priority screen. With competition rising and airtime charges dropping, customer service is the great differentiator in the minds of many.

"Organizations have learned that you can't sell without service," Floss said. But there's another potential lesson here. Apparently, customer service on the Internet is trickier than companies originally anticipated. A recent Gartner Group survey of the functionality of 50 top consumer e-tailers' online customer service showed no sites rated excellent or good. Seventy-three percent of the sites were rated fair and 4% poor.

Annoyed & Angry "E-tailers are annoying Web customers at a time when brand loyalty is the Holy Grail," said Carol Ferrara, Gartner Group research analyst, commenting on the survey results. "Marketers are not integrating the Web site with the call center. Customers who are disappointed at the Web site pick up the phone only to inform again all of their basic information to a representative who is blind to their Web activities and transactions."

Because standalone e-mail-response systems create this kind of knowledge gap, Floss does not recommend them.

There are several kinds of e-mail-response-management systems. The choices include systems with basic routing and queuing, auto acknowledgement, assisted answering and automated-answering capabilities. Some of these systems are rules-based, which means they must be programmed to recognize key words and phrases and to respond in a manner predetermined by the user. Others are driven by artificial intelligence engines that have the ability to put queries into a context.

Organizations usually start with basic routing and queuing and auto acknowledgement, said Brian Tuller, Brightware's senior vice president of worldwide marketing and business development.

"Typically, they will grow from there and start to automate the interactions themselves," he said.

According to Tuller, companies experimenting with the automation process often let the software generate responses to e-mail, then a CSR reviews and, if necessary, edits the response and transmits it to the customer.

"The final switch is beginning to fully automate some of those pieces," he said. "Some questions, like billing, payment and address questions, can account for a very large percentage of the incoming inquiries. An automated solution can off-load these requests from the contact center operations."

E-Mail Response Just a Start Tuller views e-mail-response systems as just one part of the customer-service equation. In addition to routing and answering systems, Brightware markets a suite of customer-assistance software.

"E-mail assistance is a critical need because of the issue of customer retention," Tuller said.

Like Floss, Tuller said that e-mail-response-management systems would not meet the need that the Internet has created. So Brightware is moving away from purely e-mail-focused solutions and toward Web-based solutions.

"I don't mean chat," he clarified. "Chat is a very, very expensive alternative, and wireless carriers need to watch their costs quite closely. I mean leveraging automation to a greater degree, so that instead of submitting questions via e-mail and, after some period of time, getting a response, you'll be able to submit questions online and receive a response immediately."

Wireless providers could base the types of Web-based service alternatives they offer on customer value, Tuller explained. For instance, if a request couldn't be handled immediately, a high-value customer might be identified and forwarded to a more interactive technology, such as chat; a low-value customer might be relegated to e-mail.

Another automated e-mail-response vendor, HNC Software, plans to take its software to another level. The company is researching methods of enabling end-users to access Web self-help applications on wireless devices.

Right now, HNC sells an e-mail-response product and a Web self-help product. An artificial-intelligence engine, which uses the same technology as the Web site known as Ask Jeeves, powers both, said Roger Ahern, HNC Telecommunications Solutions Group executive director of marketing and predictive CRM.

Jeeves' engine allows users to ask a question in their own words, then rephrases the question into terms it can process. For example, when asked, "What is Blue-tooth?" Jeeves rewords the question to: "What does the computing term Bluetooth mean?"

HNC primarily markets its products to Internet merchants. But Ahern said that wireless providers can reduce the number of calls to their customer-service centers by using response systems to intelligently process e-mail or Web-generated queries.

However, Ahern admits that integrating e-mail-response products with other enterprise systems is difficult. The ideal situation would be to integrate the records from inbound calls, outbound telemarketing, inbound telesales and Web self-help, he said. He predicts the systems will evolve within the next three years to allow this kind of integration.

"You need a 360-degree view of your customer," said Gunjan Sinha, eGain president.

That philosophy, he said, has driven eGain to develop and market an e-CRM platform, rather than a standalone e-mail-management-response system.

Customers can interact with a business through many channels, including e-mail, mobile devices, the call center and the corporate Web site. A true CRM platform should integrate the information received from all of these channels, Sinha said.

EGain is developing software that would enable CSRs to use PDAs to gain remote access to customer accounts.

Sinha anticipates the product will be available in 2001.

Gartner Group's Floss predicts component suites will be prevalent by 2003.

"There's a huge amount of organizations that have yet to implement e-mail-response-management systems," she said. "But there's one catch in all this. Anything that's bought today will be outdated within 18 to 24 months."

So in the interim, Floss recommends that service providers consider renting software from ASPs.