A company’s first challenge in launching e-mail support is to ensure customers get the same quality responses via e-mail that they expect on a live phone call. Quality is built on collecting all the necessary information from the customer up front; providing agents with comprehensive knowledge bases; training them to write clear, complete answers; and monitoring their output to ensure consistent quality standards.

All of these elements come together in the response sent to the customer. In addition to providing the factual information customers need, responses express a company’s values and the tone in which it wants to speak to its customers.

After recruiting and training the right agents, the company’s next task is to arm them with as much information as possible about the customer and their problem. Information gathering is the first step in the e-mail support process. By asking the customers the right questions on a form, script, or template, information gathering allows the company to answer the customer’s question up front so they don’t have to repeat themselves. Having information available to the agents will always increase support quality and increase first incident closure rates, which is a key metric for evaluating how well electronic support is working.

Effective information gathering leads into the next step of the process, which is searching knowledge bases for relevant information. Information the customer provides guides knowledge base searches.Deep, accurate knowledge bases enable agents to service more customers faster.

With the information already available in written form, the agent can paste the relevant information into an e-mail, customize it to a specific customer’s situation, and then send it out. Good writing skills come into play again here. The information in the knowledge base must be ready to send directly to customers, so service agents who add information have to write it in clear, precise language.

The final component of e-mail support is monitoring and management. E- mail management is very different from phone support management, and requires specialized training. Phone support managers need technical and customer service skills. E-mail support managers need those also, but like e-mail support agents they also require good writing and editing skills. E-mail support managers must be able to evaluate a response’s spelling, punctuation, and grammatical accuracy, in addition to its technical precision.

Management’s primary responsibility is to hold the quality line by constantly and randomly monitoring responses. Managers can review response quality either through automatic copies sent directly to them, or by selecting them at random from a database. With the growing dependence on and importance of email- based support, occasional monitoring is no longer acceptable. Only constant monitoring can uphold a company’s quality standard.

Companies can track first incident closure rates for e-mail support by analyzing e-mail replying to the company’s responses. The company calls back repeat mailers to determine why they wrote in a second time. Most of the time their reply falls into one of four categories:

• The customer had another question and just replied directly back to the response.
• The customer wanted to thank the company for helping them resolve their issue.
• Agents needed more information than the information gathering phase provided in order to resolve the issue.
• The company misinterpreted the question, the company didn’t answer the question correctly, or the customer asked several different questions and only some were responded to.

• SQL or equivalent backend database to house all incoming e-mail requests along with the response presented to the customer.

• Connection to the Internet or a mail hub for sending and receiving e-mail messages.
• An automated e-mail support program with reporting capabilities.

Companies should apply a healthy dose of caution when they’re considering how heavily to automate their e-mail response system. Too much automation can destroy quality investments and customer satisfaction because automation lacks human intuition. A fully automated system can misinterpret a customer’s request and send out the wrong response. In a service paradigm that relies so heavily on getting it right the first time, inaccurate responses can lower first incident closure rates. Only human interpretive skills can ensure that a response satisfies not just the letter, but the spirit of a customer’s request. Automated systems can help with the rote, repetitive work, but the best e-mail support systems show the human touch on every response.

CTI solutions go a long way towards boosting productivity in the help desk. In today’s competitive marketplace, ensuring efficient customer service can be achieved by monitoring agent performance and providing a mechanism for verifying transactions or retracing previous steps. Integrating CTI logging and monitoring products with help desk software completes the picture.

Getting correct information to the customer quickly is the primary objective of the help desk agent — but in the real world, we know it’s not always easy to accomplish. Consider a scenario customers could encounter when dealing with a software support desk. After dialing a toll-free number and selecting the appropriate options in the IVR system, the customer reaches an agent who offers a solution to the customers’ problem. When the customer hangs up and tries the solution, it doesn’t work. The frustrated customer calls back. The IVR asks for the customer’s profile number, which they don’t know. The customer presses "0" to get an operator, and asks for the agent with whom they have previously spoken. That agent has left for the day, however, so the customer is transferred to another agent (Agent 2) who asks the customer to repeat all the information they have previously given. Finally, a record appears with some notes from the first agent outlining the solution offered. Agent 2 repeats the problem along with Agent 1’s suggested solution to ensure the customer understands it. "That’s not what Agent 1 said at all," the customer insists. Agent 2 suggests they start from square one.

With CTI, this scenario can be avoided altogether. CTI capabilities enable us to link a variety of events to one common place. Working with your ACD, the CTI server provides "smart" links to an enterprise’s data-bases and integrates the database with a host of applications. These applications include intelligent call routing, customer interaction software, predictive dialers, screen pops, and more. By using caller ID (ANI), the CTI server recognizes the customer’s phone number and — through intelligent call routing — immediately transfers the call to the appropriate agent. Then, via a CTI screen pop, the customer’s profile is popped on the agent’s screen before they retrieve the call.

Many help desk software databases contain information gathered by help desk personnel, which constitutes an interpretation of the interaction with the customer. CTI logging and monitoring products can now be integrated with help desk software and complement the database with the storage of the original transaction (voice, fax, or e-mail). CTI logging is being used today in many organizations and call centers to document the voice transactions. Using CTI, our software help desk agent described above could have retrieved the original voice transactions between Agent 1 and the customer, and quickly clarified any misunderstandings.

Similarly, CTI fax archiving stores fax transactions, regardless of how faxes are sent or received. Faxes can be tagged with CTI or account information and associated with specific customers. With fax archiving, an enterprise can be absolutely certain that faxes were sent, received, or viewed. By entering a customer’s account number, the agent can locate all of the original voice recordings, faxed documents, and associated data that creates a complete history of the customer interaction with the enterprise.

Another very important aspect of the help desk is the quality of service. CTI quality assurance is a special logging application that enables the help desk to record a sample of voice and screen sessions (agent/client) and later analyze them. For quality measurement, calls are typically recorded based on a pre-determined schedule (for example, each agent is recorded three times per month). CTI capabilities allow even more criteria for initiating call recordings, such as recording specific campaigns, regions, or agent groups. Supervisors can later use the same CTI criteria for quickly retrieving the calls for evaluation. Effective quality assurance applications also include online grading templates that are integrated with statistical reports and provide voice and other annotation capabilities for the reviewer.