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Contact Center
Understand, automate
and learn from customers’
email communications
Harness the flood of
email for exceptional
customer service
Manage the incoming
wave of email messages
Email continues to be on the rise
Customer expectations have reached
new heights. They are used to
communicating however it suits them,
by phone, email, Facebook, twitter or
text. The method doesn’t matter to
them, except when the company they
want to deal with can’t handle it.
Where does that leave contact centers?
Contact centers have made significant
investments to optimize call handling –
mostly focusing on efficiency. Email and
other text-based conversations lag.
The volume of email and other textbased service channels have grown 10
times faster in the last 9 years. Yet only
half of service centers have automated
their email conversations and the other
half mainly handle them ad-hoc using
their basic email systems. Today, when
a customer engages an agent on a
call and makes reference to an email
previously sent, the agent is usually
left hanging, without access to the
email exchange.
Growth of service questions since 2006i
14x
1.4x
Text based
service questions
Voice based
service questions
Inbound interactions by channel, 2006-2018ii
100.0%
90.0%
80.0%
Telephone
70.0%
Email
60.0%
Web chat
Social media
50.0%
Self-service
Letter
40.0%
Fax
30.0%
SMS
Other
20.0%
10.0%
0.0%
2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
2012
What customers expect.
The sobering facts
Text-based communications are on the
rise. Emails, web chat and social media
are steadily growing in use and by 2018
less than 70% of customer interactions
in the UK are expected to be on the
phone. As text-based channels continue
to gain popularity, it is important to
create a multi-channel experience.
Customers, already accustomed to
using multiple channels in personal
conversations, expect companies to
be able to do the same.
Although the expectation is there, a
mismatch has developed between usually
static contact center capabilities and
the always dynamic nature of customer
needs and preferences. This has resulted
in a decrease in the level of customer
experience for the last 4 years in a row.iii
Kodak Alaris | Harness the flood of email for exceptional customer service
2013
2014 2015
2016
2017
2018
In addition, inquiries are becoming more
complex. In the past literally all customer
issues were solved with a phone call.
Today simple inquiries can also be
answered through self-service or a short
email response. However emails also
have the ability to efficiently transfer
more complex and often technical
information, making it an important
channel for B2B support. Most contact
centers are not well geared up to conquer
these challenges.
30%
Only 30% of US customer emails are answered
in one hour or less.iiii
2
Create skill based customer
agent connections every time
Understanding the request is tedious
Customers expect a response to an email
inquiry within a couple of hours. Time
sensitive topics should be handled faster.
But how can contact centers identify
which inquiries demand immediate
attention? And how can they match
inquiries with the agents best able
to assist, ensuring efficiency. Is it
possible to completely automate
routine questions?
The unstructured nature of email
messages makes it difficult to route
or automate based purely on keywords
and rules. As email volume grows
every incorrectly routed message
wastes agent time. And as emails
get forwarded around to find the
right person, inquiries can get lost
substantially reducing first contact
resolution rate.
79%
79% of Contact Centers agree that first contact
resolution is one of the most important factors
in achieving customer satisfaction.ii
People often write emails quickly, and
don’t clearly articulate the requests.
Use of touch screen mobile devices
can result in misspellings, grammatical
errors, and unclear structure. In these
cases, agents may have to ask for
additional information, making what
may have been a simple request to
drag on and cause irritation.
50%
50% of customers said repeating information
would be frustrating.iv
Emails have an inherent ability to be
ignored too. They don’t generate a
sense of urgency in busy agents who
have calls lined up. As a result, emails
are answered more slowly, leaving
customers waiting, the cornerstone
of dissatisfaction.
33%
33% of respondents rate Efficiency as the most
important attribute of a successful customer
service professional.v
Agent motivation and efficiency
As the volume of email and other
text-based communications increases,
resource planning becomes exponentially
more difficult. Email peak times must be
forecasted and staffed correctly to avoid
having agents sitting idle.
Are agents cross-trained and ready
to acquire skills necessary to handle
other communication channels?
Customer service centers often use
different software applications and
workflows to process communication
that arrives through different channels.
This creates a new barrier, hindering
agents from responding to inquiries
quickly and effectively. Without
integration, information can get
trapped in one system or another,
forcing agents to manually look up
data, leave customers waiting or
transfer them to another agent.
29%
29% of respondents rate Agent Empowerment
i.e. their ability to handle requests without
transfers or escalations as most important.v
Kodak Alaris | Harness the flood of email for exceptional customer service
The Solution
Adapting to a multi-channel
environment is difficult for many
contact centers but critical to meeting
customer expectations and creating the
personalized experience that customers
expect. Email communication is on the
rise and can no longer be considered
a separate channel. An integrated
solution for managing text based
information is simply a must for the
future. And this future starts now.
• Text-based communications
received through email, fax, sms
and social media etc. can be
successfully managed using
contextual email management.
• Routing can be more effective than
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and
can be automated without input from
the customer. Emails can be routed
to the most effective agent based on
their individual skill set. Furthermore
by fully understanding the request
even less experienced agents can
answer inquiries correctly using
pre-populated suggestions.
• Agents are assigned inquiries that
are challenging but still allow them
to provide a customer a complete
response in the first contact.
• Routine inquiries can even be handled
completely automatically, removing
wait time and agent involvement
from the equation altogether.
3
Drive efficiency and pursue
unmatched customer experience
Online insurance company automates
web portal requests
German automotive dealer service gears
up for automated responses
Health insurance carrier significantly
cuts response times
Challenges:
Challenges:
Challenges:
• The existing correspondence
management solution offered limited
functionality and could not handle the
growing communication volumes.
• The dealer service team was faced
with hundreds of inquiry types across
automotive parts, repair processes
and warranties.
• Incoming emails needed to be grouped
into approximately 100 different
process categories.
• Decision rights were very complex
involving 117 potential decision makers
and varied by car model, nature of
damage or repair and location.
• The insurer’s system of manually
sorting inquiries, routing them to
available staff members, determining
premiums and adjusting benefits
through 3rd party systems could not
keep up with its growing client base.
• Email was manually processed and
required frequent switching between
different applications as there was no
interface to the legacy system.
40%
of all email is processed
without manual intervention
Results:
• 80% of all incoming customer
correspondence is automatically
assigned to the correct document
category – selecting from 100
existing categories.
• 1 out of 4 inquiries via the web portal
is automatically resolved using
suggested responses.
•The average processing time per case
has been significantly reduced.
• Inquiry handling was time consuming
and manual, often involving searches of
several third-party systems, lists
and databases.
850
combinations of inquiry topics
and go-to persons are now
handled automatically
Results:
• The contextual email management
solution allows the fast and reliable
processing of email, significant
reduction of response times and the
increase of response quality.
• Inquiries are now routed automatically
to the right decision makers using a
decision matrix.
• Service quality has improved by
providing decision makers with
topic-based proposed responses.
Kodak Alaris | Harness the flood of email for exceptional customer service
• Inquiries arrived in freeform,
completely unstructured emails, and
half of them included attachments.
• Manual processing was prone to error.
90%
improvement in inquiry
processing time
Results:
• The average time to process inquires
has dropped by a factor of ten, from
an average of ten minutes to only 62
seconds for all correspondence types.
• More than 95% of inquiries are
automatically assigned to the
correct process.
• For some transactions, 89% of the
manual task is automated.
• Increased workforce productivity
allows staff to focus on valuable
activities, especially handling of
special incidence cases.
4
What to look for in a contextual
email management solution
An enduring marriage
There are a multitude of solutions out
there but not all will be right for your
business. So it is important to analyze
each one for the best fit to your specific
situation. However as an investment in
the future it is important that a solution
has the attributes needed to live up to the
needs of the near to medium term future.
• As consumers further adapt to
the likes of social media and web
chat – decision makers must ensure
selected solutions have the ability to
easily expand and incorporate new
communication channels. This will
reduce the number of applications that
agents are using and of course reduce
the total cost of software for the
Contact Center.
• Last but not least, integration with
business processes and repositories
upon the receipt of certain emails or
attachment is essential. Integration
allows validation of customer
inputs and enrichment of data using
information in other silos, helping to
close the request. Solutions with this
built-in capability provide quicker
and more complete responses – thus
resulting in high customer satisfaction.
After implementing a Contextual Email
Management System, agents will be
presented with a guided discovery
of both questions and answers,
empowering with them with the
correct information to solve customer
inquiries quicker and more effectively.
• Emails are rarely structured, often
written poorly and can be phrased
countless different ways. They require
some deciphering and only the most
advanced AI technologies are able to
automatically understand the content
of the message.
Customers will feel valued and
appreciate having a positive customer
experience. This will make them more
loyal and more likely to ultimately
become advocates for the brand.
For Contact Centers the result is
reduced cost and cycle time that
enable them to free up staff and
pursue growth opportunities.
Gartner Predicts 2015
UK Contact Centres in 2015: The State of
the Industry & Technology Penetration,
Contact Babel, 2014
iii
2015 Global Contact Center Benchmarking
Summary Report, Merchants – A Data
Dimension Company, 2015
iiii
The US Contact Center Decision Makers‘ Guide
2014, Contact Babel, 2014
iv
Customer Service Experience Study (Wave II),
Interactive Intelligence, 2014
v
2014 Global Customer Service Barometer, study by
Ebiquity, sponsored by American Express, 2014
i
ii
• Many Email Management Systems
use keywords and rules to route emails
based on a set of criteria; programming
these systems takes valuable time and
expertise. With only these tools they
are unable to find multiple incidents
in one email or one incident across
several communications. Innovative
solution providers have developed
Artificial Intelligence-based solutions
that overcome the limitations of
rules-based systems. With semantic
language understanding, an inquiry
can be understood with increased
accuracy and deeper understanding.
Kodak Alaris | Harness the flood of email for exceptional customer service
5
Want to learn more?
Call: 1-800-944-6171
www.kodakalaris.com/go/InfoInsight
Kodak Alaris Inc.
2400 Mt. Read Blvd.
Rochester, NY 14615 USA
1-800-944-6171
Kodak Alaris Operations Canada Inc.
Mississauga, Ontario,
Canada L5R 1B9
1-800-944-6171
About Kodak Alaris’
Document Imaging Division
Kodak Alaris’ Document Imaging
solutions enable customers to capture
and consolidate data from digital and
paper sources, understand and extract
valuable insight from the contents, and
deliver the right information to the right
people at the right time. Our offerings
include award-winning scanners,
capture and information management
software, an expanding range of
professional services and industryleading service and support. With
customers ranging from small offices
to global operations, Kodak Alaris
delivers superior systems and solutions
to automate business processes,
enhance customer interactions and
enable better business decisions.
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