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When it comes to contact center media channels, e-mail has traditionally been the one that receives the least attention. It’s conventional wisdom among customers that if you send an e-mail to a company, your chances of getting an answer are slim. Many studies back this up: e-mail is the least monitored and handled form of customer communications.

But it’s important that contact centers don’t ignore e-mail. While it may not be as immediate as a phone call – and therefore it’s easier to ignore – customers DO expect answers, and they notice when they don’t get them…or if they get a canned auto-response that simply doesn’t answer their questions.

While many call center software solutions include e-mail integration, plenty of contact centers don’t bother using them. "We have Outlook," they say. "That’s good enough…right?" No, it’s not, according to a recent blog post from 8x8’s (News - Alert) senior product manager Rob Townsend.

“Outlook—as well as other e-mail packages—is a great tool for normal individual business email,” writes Townsend. “But to provide world-class customer support, it just isn't enough for most companies, even small and medium-sized businesses. The reason? Sharing an e-mail account for customer service invites staff confusion, unimpressed customers and poor accountability.”

Townsend says that single, shared e-mail accounts don’t work, nor does distributing e-mails to multiple individual email accounts. These methods mean there isn’t any ownership of e-mails, and for busy agents, they tend to become “someone else’s problem.”

E-mails need to be routed and queued to the best possible agent to handle them in the same way telephone calls are. Solutions such as 8x8 Virtual Contact Center create ownership and responsibility when it comes to customer e-mail, allowing managers to see who has answered e-mails and how problems are getting resolved. E-mails distributed by an interaction management service are offered only to available agents, who must each acknowledge the receipt of each email. Emails are organized by originator with information on who, what, when and why, including scheduled follow-up workflows.

Creating a workflow for e-mails helps route them to the right agent better, prompts agents to handle e-mail with the same care they would any other media channel, and ensures that customer e-mails are being answered in a timely way. It also allows contact centers to track e-mail metrics and better understand how and why customers are contacting them via that channel. It may even allow them to fix self-service channels in such a way that it reduces customers’ need to send e-mail, lowering the volume in the long run.