Huaca Lucía Descripción

We do not and will not use this channel Will decrease greatly

Will decrease slightly

No major change

Will increase slightly

151 EMAIL MANAGEMENT

Customer-to-business email interaction had a series of false dawns in the early and mid-2000s. The relatively low levels of email usage was sometimes a result of poorly-implemented email systems, a lack of understanding of the nature of the inbound email channel and the customers’ natural response to the above – they use email carefully, because they never know if they’ll get the same quality response as from a voice call (if they get any response at all). ‘Mystery shopper’ surveys of email response have historically shown a generally poor level of service from this channel, although individual organizations (especially some in the IT and retail sector) managed to make email a channel of choice for customers.

It is also the case that email does not fit the type of enquiries that people make in some cases, such as the need for quick, simple and confidential information (such as an account balance), and the increased requirements for identity checking places a cap on the usefulness of email as a channel for some types of business.

For businesses that do take substantial volumes of email, while it is not suggested that they should aim to answer an email in the same amount of time that it takes to complete a phone call, it is desirable to manage all

interactions closely to consistent business rules, and to act quickly if service levels slip. Too often it seemed, contact centers became so used to managing the telephony queue that they neglected multimedia interactions. The result was that multimedia response times (mostly email) were sacrificed to meet telephony service levels, although there have been steady improvements in the response rates in recent years.

Putting email on the back-burner may seem like a sensible way to manage things: after all, the emails will still be waiting for agents once a call spike has been dealt with, and no-one wants high levels of call abandonment. However, the email queue is not self-managing in the same way that a telephone queue is, when customers will drop the call if the wait is too long, and (hopefully) call back at a quieter time. Old emails stack up, and agents can spend all of their time answering requests which no longer apply because the customer or prospect has lost interest, gone elsewhere or, ironically, phoned the contact center to get a response denied them by email. In most cases, telephony agents won’t know that the customer has sent an email about the same thing, so the email will stay live and be dealt with unnecessarily and too late, meaning live emails sent later get ignored as a consequence. Figure 94: Inbound interactions that are email, by vertical market

Vertical market EL FS INS MAN MED OS PS RD SVCS TMT Average

Email 10% 9% 7% 5% 11% 6% 18% 25% 20% 14% 12.4%

As usual, it is the retailers and TMT (especially IT) respondents with the greatest proportion of inbound traffic as email, although the public sector also posts high figures this year. The former's email volume are often driven by sales via a website, with TMT/IT's more about technical support. The finance and insurance sectors do not deal with a large volume of email, mainly due to the restrictions on security, customer identification and customer data. Outsourcers are slowly increasing the amount of email they handle, and this is a good way to establish contact with new clients, and fulfills a definite need.

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As with previous years, emails are proportionally less important for large contact centers, although there has been a big jump in large contact centers this year, from 4.6% to 7.9%.

Figure 95: Inbound interactions that are email, by contact center size

Contact center size % of inbound interactions that are email

Small 17.9%

Medium 8.3%

Large 6.9%

Average 12.4%

The cost of alternative channels – email and web chat – seems quite reasonable, being generally on a par or even less than live telephony, but more expensive than a self-service session.

Figure 96: Estimated cost per email and web chat session

Email Web chat session

Mean $3.37 $3.52

1st quartile $5.00 $3.75

Median $3.20 $1.85

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Email response handling times are very similar to last year, with the proportion answered within one hour going from 24% to 26%, although there was a slight decrease in the proportion answering between 1 hour and 1 day. Taking longer than one day to answer an email runs the risk of the customer losing patience, and going elsewhere or phoning the contact center, placing a greater cost burden on the business than if they had just called in the first place. This figure has increased slightly from 18% to 20%.

Figure 97: What proportion of emails are answered successfully and completely within these timescales?

12% 20% 24% 26% 52% 53% 53% 48% 8% 16% 16% 19% 2% 4% 2% 1% 16% 6% 5% 5% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

end-2009 end-2010 end-2011 Q1 2013

What proportion of emails are answered successfully and completely