February 2001

BY CHRIS SERUGA, CENTRINITY

The Internet has placed new challenges on businesses vying for a spot at the top of the digital economy. Among those challenges is the way people communicate nowadays. We all tend to view e-mail as an immediate form of communication. Unlike the letter that someone has posted, e-mail will not take several days to reach its destination. An inquiry sent via e-mail will find its way into a company's inbox within seconds -- along with the expectations of the sender that he or she will receive a prompt reply.

With electronic communications playing a larger role in providing customer support in a contact center environment, responding to e-mail has just recently become a necessity for contact centers. Although e-mail handling does not carry with it a legacy of embedded policies and procedures, now is the best time for contact centers to establish them.

There is much ongoing research about how contact centers are adapting their operations to assist online customers. Forrester Research reports that the percentage of the U.S. population that communicates through e-mail will grow from 15 percent in 1996 to an estimated 50 percent by the end of this year.

In 1999, the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) and Response Design Corporation (RDC) conducted a consortium study entitled Call Centers and the Internet. RDC and APQC compared the study's sponsoring group with five companies selected on the basis of their maturity in integrating Web-based activity into their call centers. The results of the study show that the companies that had incorporated online services with service over the phone had enhanced their processes to reflect customers' needs and empowered customers to determine the vehicles through which they reached these organizations.

The study also found that successful call center managers are redeploying their staffs to support online customers. Only 20 percent of the respondents to the study said they cross-train all agents to handle phone calls, e-mail messages and live text messages. Other respondents said that they dedicate a select group of agents to answering e-mail. In their view, the skills that agents need to successfully correspond with customers via e-mail - such as proper grammar, correct spelling, as well as the ability to interpret the gist of customers' e-mail messages and communicate effectively in writing - are specialized enough to require extensive training.

Clearly e-mail management for call centers, customer support and help desk operations has become mission-critical for companies worldwide. There is an increasing need for call center staff to obtain the sophisticated tools required to meet the rapidly changing demands of e-mail customer service.

There are many solutions available in the market that will help a contact center manage its e-mail load; however, before administrators start looking for solutions, they must recognize some of the barriers that must be first overcome in order to implement a successful e-mail management strategy.

Managing Knowledge
One of the hardest things to manage in a call center environment is knowledge. It can be exceptionally difficult to share information within a call center, specifically when the communication medium is electronic. Whether it is because customer service representatives are physically located too far from one another or just simply don't have the time to consult one another on every request received, sharing that knowledge is a difficult task.

Yet knowledge can be a call center's most valued asset, as employees, in this case customer service representatives, are the ones who hold the most knowledge in the company in terms of servicing the customer.

Implementing a unified communications system that enables the sharing of information -- or knowledge -- among all customer support representatives can significantly improve responsiveness within a call center environment.

Unified communications makes three widely differing message types easy to receive, reply to and manage. Most current solutions work by integrating all message types (voice mail and fax messages) into a single service such as e-mail, which provides anytime, anywhere message access via a private and secure Web interface, telephone or other communications devices to one location (the inbox). This inbox can contain e-mail messages (and the variety of attachments they transport), voice messages, faxes and pager messages, all behind a single user interface.

Although new in the call center environment, the concept of unified communications is not new to the industry. Since the dawn of e-mail and voice mail, unified communications (or unified messaging as most companies have chosen to call it), has been the subject of a great deal of debate and confusion.

It has followed a confusing course of new implementation strategies and definitions primarily because each camp of messaging technology -- voice versus e-mail -- has, until recently, pursued a vision influenced by its historical roots.

But despite the confusion, there are numerous trends that are driving the evolution of unified communications. In the case of the call center environment, the increasing tendency of customers to communicate via e-mail is contributing to wider acceptance of this new communication technology.

Distinguishing on what makes a "true" unified communications solution can make all the difference for call centers. "True" unified communications allows users, or customer service representatives in the call center scenario, to manage all information and message types, using any number and variety of access devices (PC, Web browser, phone, etc.) from anywhere regardless of connection path.

From a central, collaborative digital store, all of the message types are accessible via multiple devices and interfaces with a consistent set of features and capabilities. A single inbox serves all messages, offering unprecedented flexibility since all features and capabilities are shared across all media types. For instance, a call center administrator can track the status of any message - voice or e-mail - from any device, solving the common problem of accountability as to whether a recipient received a message.

Other matters to consider when selecting an e-mail management solution are ownership of e-mail or ensuring that the integrity of the e-mail is maintained, and guaranteeing that the "issue" can be passed from one customer service representative to another if required.

Consider having a flexible system that lets call centers administrators manage inbound and outbound customer support e-mail through features such as conferencing. Permissions on the conference allow everyone to share the workload of responding to the e-mail messages that are posted. It also ensures that everyone can see the thread of conversation between the sender and recipient.

By consolidating redundant messaging functions for data, voice and fax -- as well as reducing system management and administration overhead -- communication technology has reached new heights. Unified communications is proving to be the real key to lowering critical total cost of ownership, but more importantly, in providing the reliability and dependability that today's contact centers require.

In the age of relationship marketing, it's vital to make every customer contact as positive and productive as possible. The contact center offers unlimited opportunity to strengthen customer relationships, build brand loyalty and increase sales. Resorting to the latest advancements in communications technology, and adopting them to their systems, will prove a key competitive tool for contact centers as they attempt to succeed in a very competitive marketplace.

Chris Seruga is Centrinity Inc.'s director of client services. Based in Markham, Ontario, Centrinity develops and markets unified communications and collaborative groupware technologies.