E-commerce sites have been so successful that the infrastructure
supporting them has not kept pace with the growing demand
The arrival of electronic commerce
In the last five years there has been phenomenal growth in the
number of people that use the World Wide Web. These users spend
many hours each day browsing the Web. They converse with one
another via chat applications and email, browse the Web for work
and play, and increasingly, they purchase goods and services over
the Web. By some estimates, one in every four web users shops
online and market research firm @plan says that over two million
users have purchased books online. Companies have hastened to put
up electronic "storefronts" to attract these web users and turn
them into customers. Many companies have, at least, some presence
on the Web and some are doing a significant amount of their total
business through these storefronts. Indeed, a small, but rapidly
increasing, number of companies conduct business exclusively over
the Web. International Data Corporation estimates that total
purchases over the Web amounted to $10bn in 1997, but will explode
to over $220bn in the year 2001. E-commerce is here! The nature of
the Web is such that more and more consumers have direct access to
the company because of the company's web presence. Every contact a
customer has with a company influences the customer's perception of
that company and so presents the company with an opportunity to
create and nurture a relationship with that customer. After all,
many companies in all areas of commerce have realised that the key
to a successful and profitable business is having satisfied and
loyal customers. This is especially important in the e-commerce
arena where competitors lurk only a click away. For this reason,
leading companies realise that they must treat their customers as
the source of current and future profits and not just as a series
of individual transactions. They must develop and nurture
relationships with their customers. It is imperative therefore to
manage all the communications a company has with its customers.
Electronic communicationsA significant portion of
non-electronic commerce in the US today is conducted over the
telephone. Prospects and customers are routed to call centres where
banks of customer service representatives (agents) handle customer
transactions. Using the telephone for commerce and associated
customer service functions is widely accepted by the public.
E-commerce today is conducted in essentially one of two ways: A
customer can get information on products and services over the Web,
but must use a telephone to call a customer service representative
in a call centre to complete a transactionA customer transaction is
handled entirely through the commerce website Customer service is
an essential ingredient of commerce transactions. Customers may
want to place an order, get more information, resolve billing
issues, track down shipments or ask installation and product
support questions. Many commerce websites give the reader
information on how to contact the company by telephone and usually
by email or some kind of web form as well. As users get more
sophisticated, and as wait times at call centres go up, users are
becoming more inclined to send electronic messages to companies.
After all, who wants to wait on hold to get some information or
place an order when you can just fill out a form or send an email
and read the reply at leisure? These email communications form an
increasing amount of the customer service work done by companies.
Forrester Research estimates that about one or two per cent of
consumer communication with US businesses today is via email, but
predicts this will grow to about five per cent by the end of the
decade. That may not sound like much in percentage terms, but in
terms of sheer volume, that is a very large number, and by some
estimates in the region of 50 million messages a day. Some
e-commerce companies that are entirely web-based report they are
currently receiving email in the order of 500 or even 5,000
messages a day.The problem is that e-commerce sites have been so
successful that the infrastructure supporting the site has not kept
pace with the growing demand. Emails are flooding websites beyond
their capability to handle all the messages. Computerworld
conducted an unscientific study of the responsiveness of companies
to messages sent to them from their websites and found that only
five out of 23 companies contacted responded within the same
business day. In fact, three did not respond at all.The consequence
of this inattention to customer-generated messages is evident.
Instead of spending minutes or hours on hold waiting for a call
centre agent, customers are now waiting for days or weeks to get a
simple query answered. This kind of poor customer service leads to
a loss of customers, a loss of revenue and a lost opportunity to
increase market share. Should people who communicate with a company
via electronic means be treated worse than those that use
telephones? Remember, these are self-selected individuals that have
made the effort to contact you. Furthermore, demographic studies
indicate that people who browse the Web are usually more affluent
than the general public and are generally inclined to try new
things. These are the very customers a company wants to attract and
keep. What's more, servicing customers online can prove to be a
very cost-effective solution.
Email Management SystemsThe way
to handle large volumes of email is to give them the same
importance as telephone communications and to put in place
infrastructure and processes to provide the same quality of service
to all customer interactions no matter where and how they
originate. Experience with telephonic communications has led to
Call Management techniques. What we need now are Email Management
Systems (EMS) with processes, methodologies and an infrastructure
for handling online customer service issues in a manner comparable
to, and as good or better than, what is available through call
centres. The value of a good EMS can be significant, for both
customers and the e-commerce company. Clearly, one of the benefits
of having an online presence is that customers can often conduct
their own research on products and services, at their own pace. A
well-designed commerce site makes it easy for customers to find
what they want and helps them get the answers to most of the
questions they may have. Motivated customers will navigate their
way through the website and often be able to make a purchase
decision or resolve a service issue on their own. This kind of
self-service system offers tremendous leverage to the commerce
company because it reduces the need for agents. However, such
self-service has its limits. No matter how well designed the
website, not all customers may be able to navigate their way to the
correct information. Other customers may not have the time or
inclination to sit through an extended browsing session. What these
customers would like to do is to contact the company and get
answers. One way is obviously to pick up the telephone and call a
customer service representative in a call centre. This kind of
immediate service model can be extremely valuable to a commerce
company, because a customer or a prospect on the telephone may
represent a revenue opportunity. To work effectively, however,
immediate service models require a high degree of responsiveness
that can be achieved only by a high level of staffing. That can be
very expensive, especially if many of the calls are about routine
issues that do not take very long to resolve and require minimal
interaction between the caller and the customer service
representative. For example, fielding a query from a customer
inquiring about a product feature can be done via email for much
less cost using automation and email than a live operator. Software
Support Professionals Association reports that call centre service
requests average $53 per call while email support averages $3 per
message. Many customers do not want to take the time to call a
company, either because they are in no hurry to get the answers
they want or because they do not want to spend the time on the
telephone. They want to contact the company electronically and get
the answers they want. To do this, a customer may fill out a form
on the website or send an email to one of the addresses listed on
the website. The advantage of communicating electronically is that
the transaction can be conducted in an asynchronous manner. Unlike
a telephone call, the parties involved in the transaction do not
have to be in the transaction at the same time. This is especially
valuable to both parties when the interaction needed is minimal and
the need to complete the transaction is not immediate. For example,
a customer may want to get the tracking number of an order so that
she can check the status at a later time. This desire by customers
to communicate electronically represents a great opportunity for
those companies that offer high quality EMSs.
Requirements for a
high-performing EMSThe goal of all email management systems is
to provide customers with the right answers, using the right type
and the right amount of resources to do that. This means that the
EMS should be able to recognise the kind of transaction initiated
by the customer, determine what kind of resource it will take to
process that transaction and then apply the right amount of that
resource to get the answer to the customer. Let us examine each of
these requirements in turn. An incoming message must first be
recognised by the EMS for what it is. The system must determine if
it falls into a predetermined category of communications, such as a
product question, an information request, a billing query, a
complaint or a follow-up to an earlier communication. With call
management systems this is often accomplished by having the
customer select one of a number of options presented by an
automated attendant: "Press 1 for product questions, 2 for
information" and so on. Email tends to be free form in nature, so
the EMS must have the ability to parse the communication and
determine the category from the message itself. This would be the
function provided by a call dispatcher who handles calls from
customers that select the "press 0 to speak to an agent" option.
Having parsed the customer's message, the EMS must determine if it
can be handled in an automated manner. As a practical matter, a
large majority of customer contacts tend to fall into a few
categories and many of these contacts tend to be about the same
kinds of things. For example, a company that sells printers may
receive a large number of installation questions, but the questions
themselves may fall into a few categories (e.g. voltage settings,
cabling requirements and operating system compatibility) and the
answers to most questions are already known to the company.
Companies often develop Knowledge Bases of answers to frequently
asked questions (FAQs) and the customer service representative
usually matches a customer's request to the appropriate answer in
the Knowledge Base. Some call management systems provide an
Interactive Voice Response (IVR) capability that guides callers to
answers by selecting from a succession of menus; the selections
available in each menu are determined by the customer's previous
selections. A good EMS should be able to deliver the same
functionality, but without requiring a series of customer inputs.
In other words, a good system will utilise an Automated Response
Manager which takes the information available in the customer's
communication and matches the customer's request with a known
answer, to the extent one exists. Not all customer messages can be
processed automatically. Some messages may require customisation
and personalisation of answers selected from the Knowledge Base.
For example, some preferred customers may warrant special personal
attention from an agent. In call centres, this class of customer
often receives a different telephone number to call or they are
given a special code that always connects them to a live agent when
they call, rather than guiding them to a series of IVR menus. In a
similar manner, a good EMS will recognise these special customers
and offer customer service representatives the opportunity to
customise and personalise a response to that customer. Other
customer messages may not fit into a known category. These messages
need to be identified and presented to an online customer service
representative for processing. In a call centre, customers that
select the "press 0 for an operator" option or run through the
gauntlet of IVR menus are placed in a telephone queue where they
are put on hold until the next available agent picks up the call.
An EMS must provide the capability to identify these kinds of
messages and route them into an appropriate queue of similar
messages. Large call centres often use their Automatic Call
Distributor to place calls into queues and then assign calls from
the queues to agents that become available. In a similar manner, an
EMS should allow users to employ any one of a number of routing
strategies. For example, online customer service representatives
should be able to view these queues and pick off the next message
for processing. But if management so decides, the EMS should also
support other distribution strategies such as round-robin, first
available agent, load-based, skills-based, manual, or combinations
of the above strategies. An agent may be able to process a message
or may need additional help from another agent or a supervisor. To
process a message and give the customer an appropriate answer, the
agent must first "own" the message while it is being processed, so
that another agent does not also reply to the message. The agent
can then craft a response by making use of the Knowledge Base, one
or more phrase banks that contain standard language that reflects
the company's style and personal knowledge and experience. The EMS
should therefore provide for message ownership, the ability for the
agent to use corporate or personal phrase banks and a spell check
function to enhance quality. If the response is sufficient, it can
be sent back to the customer and the EMS should give the
opportunity to the agent to annotate notes to either the customer's
message or to the customer's profile. Other agents can then use
these notes to ensure superior customer service. For example, an
agent may use the annotation capability to record why the customer
was sent a replacement part at no charge if the company policy is
to charge a handling fee. An agent may not be able to completely
handle all customer communications presented. For example, the
agent may be able to prepare a response but want to escalate or
forward it to a co-worker or supervisor for review before sending
it. Another customer message may require a response from someone
with more functional knowledge. To facilitate this, the EMS must
provide a workflow capability that allows an agent to hand off a
message to another agent, message queue or a supervisor. This is
similar to what may happen in a call centre today, but the
advantages the EMS has over telephone interactions are that
complete context is maintained and a transaction log of transfers
can be kept to ensure communications are always acted upon and
never lost. A supervisor must be able to monitor, in real time, the
state of all messages currently open. Just as a call centre manager
can look at the state of all telephone calls being handled by the
call management system. This allows supervisors to manage
workloads, personnel and training needs. Supervisors can also use
this information to quickly identify any potential problem areas
and prepare the centre to handle those areas. For example, a
favourable product review in a webzine may, at first, cause a
trickle then a torrent of information requests. Just like in a call
centre, an alert supervisor can observe the initial change in the
incoming workload and make adjustments to assure the best quality
service. The EMS should also provide a reporting capability that
helps supervisors measure and manage the performance of their
agents. Supervisors should be able to compare throughputs by agent,
assess time to handle all types of customer communications, sample
agent responses and identify areas that need to be improved. A good
EMS will further provide the capability to survey customers on the
quality of service received and manage the results of the survey.
The database used by the EMS should be easily accessible so that
custom reports can be developed as necessary. One of the biggest
benefits of electronic communications are that they are, by
definition, recorded on a form of media and therefore all the
details of every customer interaction are available for use in the
future. This is often not true of telephone calls. This means that
email received from customers that have interacted with the company
in the past can be presented to the agent every time a new message
arrives from those customers. This provides a complete context for
the agent, unlike in a telephone system where the agent, at best,
has access to the notes taken by agents that handled the previous
interactions. A good EMS should provide not only the ability to
preserve and present context but also it should give the company a
valuable database of interactions that can be mined for marketing
purposes in the future. For example, the database of all customer
interactions may reveal that customers that ask questions about one
product often start to ask about particular product features. This
may indicate a need to change the product in some way or it may
even present a revenue opportunity for a complementary product.
Will Garside(c) eGain Communications Corp 1998