Combatting Email Overload

by Penny Lunt

In a December 2001 survey of 250 companies with Web sites, New York-based Jupiter Media Metrix found that one third of these firms took three or more days to respond to emails from the Web or never replied at all.

"The typical customer expects a response in two hours," notes John Ragsdale, research director in the CRM practice of Giga Information Group, Cambridge, MA. "When a customer has a question, he doesn't differentiate between email, phone or Web chat, he expects an answer equally quickly regardless of where he sends it."

One antidote to email overload is automation software that reads incoming emails and helps draft responses, dramatically reducing the time and labor of answering email.

The main drawback of such software is that it can make mistakes.

"Everybody has heard horror stories about early email systems that would do a full-text search against a database using the emailed text and throw back junk that was of little use to the customer," says Ragsdale.

The danger of auto response without human intervention has led many companies to use email response software to draft only suggested responses that agents can reject or modify.

Two of the newest email response tools are Reply, from San Francisco-based Banter (www.banter.com), and iMail from SERSolutions (www.sersolutions.com), Herndon, VA. Reply and iMail both start at $50,000 and are full-featured email packages that can act as a desktop for customer service agents who exclusively answer emails. Both packages read and analyze incoming emails and suggest responses using searching and modeling techniques. They both use natural language processing and learning techniques to spot the key concepts and draft appropriate responses.

Bank Does More With Less

By early 2001, Chicago-based bank ABN Amro was receiving 3,000 emails a month, and that number was rising. "As our email volume grew, we didn't want to have to add email agents," says Maribeth Holback, senior vice president. The bank also wanted to give more consistent answers in emails and chat sessions with customers. "It's difficult for agents to be experts on every product," Holback explains.

Even with similar levels of knowledge, three people will answer emails three different ways. The bank also wanted to ensure that email responses would provide customers with options. In a bank branch, you can see when a customer has another question or problem, and over the phone you can gauge a customer's reaction from the inflection in his or her voice. Email offers no such emotional feedback.

ABN Amro implemented Banter's Reply software in February 2001. The software analyzes incoming emails, finds the key concepts and matches those concepts against answers in a database. The software displays the answers with the highest confidence ratings on the agent's desktop. It suggests options such as phone numbers or Web pages to refer to for more information. Customer service agents review every suggested response to make sure each one is on target. Agents may customize the answer, but if they make major changes the email must go through another level of review before it can be sent to the customer.

Without adding any new personnel to its original pool of 15 customer service agents, ABN Amro now handles 5,000 emails a month as well as 1,000 Web chats a month. Between the increased efficiency and the low cost of Banter's software, Holback says the bank anticipates a return on its investment within about 18 months.

Holback says the Reply software accurately selects the appropriate response to email at least 70 percent of the time. In addition to its accuracy, the software's ease of administration also appealed to ABN Amro. Holback says that while administration appeared burdensome in other systems, one employee is able to manage Reply on a part-time basis.

ABN Amro's next step with Banter will be Web self-service. Customers on the Web will type in a question, and Banter Reply will find and display the answer.

Banter Reply has several things going for it, notes Esteban Kolsky, senior research analyst at Gartner: "Number one is [its] OEM relationships, which are part of an intelligent partnership strategy," he says, referring to Banter's deals with Siebel, Avaya, Remedy, Peregrine, Apropos and other CRM companies that resell Reply within their solutions. "Other companies in the email response management market have failed because they ... don't have much to show after email. Banter created an engine that can be leveraged across many channels including email, Web self-service, Web chat and eventually phone conversations" (as soon as relationships are ironed out with speech recognition vendors).

Lender Speeds Response

When Southwest Student Services, a student loan processing center based in Phoenix, introduced a way for students to send in questions through the company Web site, managers were unprepared for the volume of emails that started flowing in — about 400 a month. Customer service reps would get to the emails when they could, but steady phone traffic kept them from answering emails promptly and led to 14-day response times. Something had to be done.

While receiving training for an SER autodialer, Daniel Beck, Southwest's assistant vice president of voice and data, caught a glimpse of SER's iMail product. What he liked most was iMail's workflow management and reports.

"Before we implemented iMail, we would know that 400 emails had come in and that would be that," Beck says. "Using iMail, we know 150 people requested a loan consolidation, 200 people made address changes, and so on."

Such trend reports are critical in call center environments. "If you get a spike in activity you're not ready for, you have big trouble," Beck says. Seeing that there was a jump in consolidation questions at a certain time last month would help determine staffing for the current month. The reports also reflect how well marketing campaigns are working.

IMail has been in place at Southwest since August 2001, and all emails are now answered within 48 hours with only one rep. Southwest's next step in its use of iMail will be to add the ability to attach documents to emails. If a customer asks what forms are needed to consolidate loans, the customer service rep can simply attach the proper forms. Another plan for iMail is to create an internal help desk application.

IMail employs neural network technology that can be trained and modified. It learns to delete entries that have been rejected several times. It includes a knowledge base and email routing capabilities. Version 2.0 of the software, which is set for release in late February, will provide a component object model structure that should make it easier to integrate with other systems.

SER is looking for OEM relationships for iMail, and the company also plans to deploy its technology into Web chat and voice applications. SER already offers complementary call processing software. With roots in the document management industry, SER also plans to apply its software to general business correspondence.

According to Esteban Kolsky, a research analyst with Gartner, the best way to evaluate an email response engine is to test it and make sure it can handle the nuances of speech required for your business. For example, "What is the balance of my portfolio?" and "How can I balance my portfolio?" use many of the same words but are very different questions.

"If an engine can answer those two questions right, then it's worth looking at," Kolsky concludes.