A Million Moments of Truth
(Originally published in Messaging Magazine, January/February 1999)

By Aditya Jha, Aditi Corp.
  

Executive Summary

The electronic marketplace has resulted in interactive growth between companies and their web site visitors. E-mail is the preferred form of this interaction.

The flow of incoming e-mail is reaching critical limits, as corporate websites are deluged with electronic queries seeking product support, inquiring about service, and filing web documents, such as product registration or subscription forms. Organizations require a process to handle this and to exploit the inherent advantages of e-mail based customer interaction. This has resulted in the evolution of a new field: e-service (electronic customer service).

E-mail based e-service offers a unique opportunity to provide personalized responses and create a strong customer loyalty in a way that telephone can never match. We wish to share our experience in having handled over a million corporate e-mail and outline the steps your company can take to turn your customer e-mail crisis into an opportunity.

A Million Moments of Truth

Each e-mail contact with a customer is a moment of truth for your organization. Your reputation depends on how well and how fast you respond to the customer query.

E-mail remains, according to all studies, the most widely used activity on the Internet. A recent Business Week article¹ reports the Forrester Research prediction that annual e-mail message volume will balloon to 12 billion incidents in 2001—six times today’s e-mail traffic. On the customer-service front, companies polled by Forrester estimate that the 500 e-mail inquiries they currently receive daily will grow to 2,000 a day within the next two years. Its penetration has reached the "consumer" segment. The demographics of the e-mail users now closely resemble the demographics of the market.

As a result, customer service is moving from phone to e-mail. According to IDC, the worldwide software support market totaled $16 billion in 1995. Telephone support accounted for nearly $10 billion with a 12.6% Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) projected through the year 2000. Worldwide spending in the electronic support services market in 1995 was $48 million and will grow at a CAGR of 43% to $290 million in the year 2000. This tremendous growth is based on electronic support’s potential to lower support cost and reduce turnaround time.

However, companies haven’t yet nurtured a customer centric mindset in the e-service world. Matterhorn Consulting, a leading customer management consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco, visited over 3,500 consumer and business websites asking for information through the vehicle provided by the site. Matterhorn measured the speed, appropriateness, and completeness of the response. "The average company surveyed responded in 15 days," said Barry Goldberg, president of Matterhorn Consulting. "There were only four same day responses and only two of those within an hour of the request. This kind of instant response should be the standard for companies who see themselves as customer-centric."

Aditi handled more than a million customer e-mail queries and electronic customer support on behalf of companies like Real Networks, Microsoft and InstallShield. Anyone who is involved with handling customer e-mail can benefit from our experience. Specifically, those associated with corporate addresses like customer service@company.com, info@company.com or support@company.com will find this very relevant to their needs. Following are the lessons we learned and wish to share.

Have a Customer Owner for Every Customer

The possibility of personalized service is greatly enhanced if each customer has an "owner."  This relationship maintains continuity, builds up trust, enriches customer data and reduces the need to repeat things.

The relationship can go to strange levels. Ajay Chakrapani, a technical support agent in India, was invited to the wedding of Deborrah, a resident of South Africa. Ajay was Deborah’s "owner."

Telephone support can never have this luxury since it depends on the "next available agent" concept in a synchronous medium.

Profile Each Customer’s History

How often has a particular customer contacted the organization? What were the reasons for him contacting the organization? How was his experience? How long did it take for the organization to solve his problem? These are some of the questions the answers to which an electronic support agent should have at his mouse click.

Such information allows you to personalize your response ("...and how’s the ol’ refrigerator doing?"), prioritize your customers ("I goofed up and took longer than usual to solve his problem; so he’ll be marked a high priority customer from now on so that he gets a special treatment every time.") and convey to the customer that you care about him to remember him.

Such a customer history can be generated if you track every single case concerning the customer across every single alias of your organization.

In telephone support, time is at a premium. Every extra minute means extra costs. Hence, the past records of customer contact are rarely studied.

Handle a Case, not a Message

There are many occasions when a message from a customer is not resolved through one reply. Sometimes the customer comes back with some clarifications, or the issue needs to be escalated to a specialist, or needs to be reassigned.

So the issue is no longer confined to a message; it becomes a case. The case consists of all the messages exchanged, as well as, all the events that happen (assignment, escalation, responses, resolution, etc.). The case model allows you to track the issue over its lifetime.

The concept of threading, to hold each item and each event associated with a case together, works far more effectively with e-mail than with telephone support.

Track Each Case Like a Bloodhound

It’s vital that you keep track of the status of each customer query is an understatement. If you don’t, customers will fall through the cracks. Messages remain unanswered for a long time because the service rep loses sight of them. Messages escalated to specialists cannot be tracked since they go out of the system and you have no idea if the customer got a satisfactory reply.

For the rep who has been handling a customer on a regular basis, having everything related to the case in one easily accessible place is important for easy reference. For the user who has just come in on the case, it’s equally important to know the entire history of the case: whom was it assigned to? When? Did it get passed on to anyone else? Did anyone have a comment to make? Was there any phone call from the customer on the same issue?

It’s best to have "states" associated with each case: assigned, open, escalated, resolved, reply in progress, etc. These allow you to be aware of the status of the reply. The state of a message is best coupled with priority and notification. You must set your own conditions for priority ("unanswered for more than 12 hours becomes high priority") and use notifications to inform the agent of any change in state or priority.

The way to do this is to build an "audit trail" for every case in a chronological manner. This details all action taken on the case and the change of states. Ideally, this should be available to the agent the moment he opens up an e-mail.

As a result, you are aware of the status of the customer query at a glance by its current "state" and know if it has been successfully closed or not; what work remains to be done. Identification of important or overdue messages through its priority can be made and prompt action taken. You are aware of any change in state or priority through notifications and can keep the queries in neat buckets for easy referral through multiple categorization. Now you are in complete control and no customer will slip through the cracks and each case will be followed through to its logical completion within a prescribed time frame.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel, and Don’t Ask the Customer to Do It

Share, Share, Share. Make sure that all your agents have access to all the case and customer histories. This means that if a customer owner is not available, the substitute has the case history (and the customer history) at his fingertips. This is a very welcome thing for the customer, who is pleasantly surprised that he doesn’t have to explain everything from scratch in a new e-mail to the substitute agent.

Also, remember that just because you don’t remember answering a similar question before doesn’t mean that the question hasn’t been asked before. Chances are high that someone on your team has answered it sometime in the past. Don’t reinvent the wheel; find the answer. Have an archive where all the answers go. Better still; build yourself a knowledge bank. Have the flexibility to search it on as many parameters as possible: such as key words in the subject line/body text, time frame when it was sent, team member who may have sent it, and priority of the customer or the category of the query.

Integrate Phone Calls with E-Mail, If You Can

It may take some tweaking, but it’s worth it. Very often, a customer sends an mail and then calls up. Or, he starts a case by calling up, talks to an agent A, then sends an e-mail which gets assigned to agent B, and all hell breaks loose because the customer has to explain everything afresh to agent B.

The trick is to allow yourself the flexibility of initiating a case manually, be it because of a phone or a fax. Simulate a trouble ticket and thread it as an event in a case. This will ensure that irrespective of the medium chosen by the customer, all agents are aware of the details of every case.

Type Only When You Absolutely Have to

If you do have an archive, pull out the most frequently asked questions and have ready made templates as answers. This will mean that instead of typing and retyping the same answers, leading to unnecessary duplication of work leading to long response times, you’ll be inserting them by the click of a mouse.

We also went a step further and customized our tool in such a way that an agent could select multiple questions of similar nature and reply to them at one shot. We added the functionality of MS Word like auto text (hot keys for commonly used phrases), spell check, and signature inserts.

The net result is that the agent cuts down on the most time consuming activity: typing. His productivity goes up amazingly.

In telephone support, by contrast, the agent still has to spend time and energy in explaining the solution to the customer, even if he has access to a knowledge bank. In an e-mail support situation, the agent has to spend a miniscule effort in reusing the solution for a customer.

Generate Reports from the Data

The greatest thing about electronic customer interaction is the amount of data that gets captured. These can be monitored and analyzed to give you an indication of your performance.

What is your group efficiency? What is the individual agent’s productivity? What is the team’s productivity? What has been the trend line in the incoming customer e-mail? Which category of questions is most frequently asked? Can the web site be strengthened in that area? What is the average response time for a customer query? How has it changed over time? How many sales leads are hidden in those e-mail? The answer to each one of these question lies in your mailbox!

Reports are like field trips. They help you in keeping your fingers on the pulse of our customers.

Measure the Satisfaction

Having done everything, it’s still best to hear it from the horse’s mouth. Periodic surveys have no substitute. If you have built a relationship, the customers are only too eager to tell you. If you haven’t, they are only too eager to complain. In either case, you do get to hear what they have to say. And it’s up to you to incorporate the feedback into your e-mail handling process.

Having a constant measure of the customer satisfaction also helps you benchmark any new initiative or tool that you may employ in e-mail based customer service.

E-mail is a great tool to do a survey with. Customers can respond to it in their own time. If you attempt a survey with telephone for telephone support, you’ll realize the problems your customers face when they try to call you up.

Conclusion

Customer loyalty can be greatly enhanced by providing them with personalized service. Internet technologies in general and e-mail in particular are important elements in providing such personalized service. Compared to the telephone, they are cheaper, can provide 24x7 facilities and are independent of location. It’s possible to have a process in place that tracks every case and has a customer-centric focus. Productivity tools can be incorporated to reduce the typing load. In this context, the deluge of customer e-mail at web addresses like info@company.com should be seen as an opportunity and not as a crisis.

Footnote

1 Business Week Online, July 13, 1998. Report by Patrick Lambert—staff reporter