Service Automation Systems
Email response management is one component in an organization-wide service automation system. A service automation system makes use of a variety of technologies to support service managers, customer service representatives, help desk professionals and mobile service staff. Customer service automation offers business and their clients heightened service effectiveness and efficiency, improved service automation, improved customer service representative work experience, engagement, and maintenance. The functionality of an organization-wide service automation system also offers unlimited functionality to service managers and field engineers. Some functions include call assignment, call scheduling, case management, contract administration, email response management, call escalation, invoicing, mapping, and directions, call scripting, inventory management, report analytics, and more.
E-mail is the Most Common Form of Communication
Of the various components of an organization wide service automation system, Email Response Systems are growing in importance. This is because of the increased growth of e-mail for both interpersonal and intercompany communications. Today, e-mail is the most common form of communication among business professionals. While consumer use of e-mail is strong, the trend seems to be slowing. Part of this slowdown among consumers might involve the increased usage of social networking, sms texting and free or reduced costs VoIP calling. However, 90-percent of websites allow visitors to contact customer support, order support and technical support by e-mail. Customer also expect quick responses to their messages.
Advanced E-Mail Response Systems
To facilitate the growing expectations of customers with regards to e-mail response, corporations are investing in systems that can handle large volumes of messages using queuing, routing, intelligent auto-responders, personalization and knowledge-base integration. More advanced systems offer translation services for e-mails written in languages other than English. A translation module can forward a message to a translation service provider or use a machine translation tool to translate the text to English. English languages responses can be forwarded to a translator and then forwarded to the customer. Reporting tools are also commonly included in e-mail automation systems.
Most e-mail response management systems use webforms to handle e-mail securely and effectively and for routing to the appropriate department. Based on a number of questions with dropdown menus, checkboxes and radio buttons a customer’s message gets routed from the website to the correct department. Sometimes, the message are prioritized based on customer value and purchase history. For example, a customer with a long history may receive a personal e-mail, while a new customer may only receive an automated response. Some e-mail messages are also scanned for word patterns and clustered into predefined customer response categories.