The Intelligence In E-Mail

BY DR. E-MAIL, V.A. SHIVA

WHAT IS E-MAIL?
Electronic Mail (E-Mail) is the fastest growing communications medium in the world today. Over five billion e-mail messages are transacted each day. Nearly all of us either know about e-mail or actively use e-mail in our daily personal and business communications.

But, what is e-mail? A quick story will help you to understand my definition of e-mail.

In 1977, as a sophomore at Livingston High School in New Jersey, I was somewhat of an anomaly, being one those computer and math whizzes who also played varsity baseball and soccer in one of the states most competitive divisions. At that time, I was planning to drop out of high school early to pursue college early. My math and science teacher, who also coached baseball, told me of the Westinghouse Science Scholarship and suggested that I find ways to use my talents by doing an award-winning science project to really challenge myself rather than leaving high school early. His suggestion led me to the local medical school, the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), in Newark, NJ.

At UMDNJ, I was introduced to a theoretical physicist named Dr. Leslie P. Michelson, Ph.D., who ran the Laboratory of Computer Science at the University. After sizing me up, he said that he wanted to give something very challenging. He asked me if I would like to build an Electronic Mail System for the University. I recall going home that evening and telling my mom that I was going to build a system for converting paper mail into electricity which could be transported over wires and then re-assembled. 

Thus, at that time my first definition of e-mail was electrified, transportable paper -- if that makes any sense. But, that is how new the phrase electronic mail was in 1977.

Over the next three-year period between 1977-1980, I designed, coded and implemented from scratch one of the world�s first user friendly, network-wide electronic mail systems (the title of my submission to the Westinghouse Talent Search) for the University across three nodes or campus sites. It was the first of its kind, for which I won recognition from the Westinghouse Science Awards and entry into M.I.T. I had become one of the early inventors of e-mail. The system had broadcast mail (or direct marketing), inbound e-mail management, mail servers, registered mail, user access levels, etc. Looking back, there were features that I developed for this system that many modern systems are just implementing.

Today, in 2002, nearly 25 years later, we all use e-mail; some of us spend our entire day glued to e-mail. US corporations now receive nearly 50 million inbound customer care e-mails per day. Fortune-1000 companies are budgeting two to five percent of their traditional advertising budgets toward e-mail marketing.

My definition of e-mail is this: An electronic medium for asynchronous conversation.

There are three key elements to this definition:

• Medium
• Asynchronous
• Conversation

A medium is said to be a substance through which something else is transmitted or carried on.  Asynchronous means that an event is not synchronous or not occurring or existing at the same time or having the same period or phase. Conversation in this definition means the exchange of thoughts, opinions and feelings. Thus, e-mail is a medium through which thoughts, opinions and feelings can be exchanged with another, without the need for either party to be present at the time of the exchange. How is this different from paper mail? Simple, the substance of the medium is electronic versus paper -- thus, electronic mail.

PROPERTIES OF E-MAIL
In 1993, the United States White House, at the time of President Bill Clinton, was receiving approximately 5,000 e-mails per day, pre-World Wide Web (WWW).  At that time, about 20 student interns would read these e-mails and categorize each e-mail into one of 147 different issues. The issues included such items as: Education, health, drugs, threats, Hilary, etc.

Each week, the Executive Office of the White House would receive tallies and analysis of volumes of e-mail by the different issues. These reports served to gain a pulse of the Clinton constituency from the Business Intelligence (BI) gleaned from this type of e-mail sorting into one of 147 different issues bins. The fact that Clinton was doing this, even though it was pre-WWW, was ahead of its time. He was leveraging e-mail to listen to the thoughts and opinions of his constituency through the manual sorting of e-mail.

In 1994, the White House decided to find ways to automate this manual process of e-mail intelligence gathering by sponsoring an industry-wide competition on technologies for e-mail analysis. At that time, I was a graduate student at M.I.T. focused on developing hybrid techniques for pattern analysis and recognition of complex ultrasonic signals. Fortuitously, I got involved in this competition from advice from a professor.

At that time, many search engine companies and text-mining companies were leaders in this field; however, most of them took a very natural language processing (NLP) approach. My approach was engineering and signals based, and used a variety of hybrid methods in feature extraction, clustering and learning. My more untraditional approach helped to win the contest with nearly 78.2 percent accuracy of categorization.

One of the reasons for success was that my mechanics and physics training had trained me to first approach a pattern recognition or business intelligence problem by defining the medium and its features or properties. Most people simply applied a technology or algorithm. After many sleepless nights of reviewing 100,000s of e-mails, I discovered some important properties of e-mail.

In physics, matter has properties like density, weight, Young�s modulus and Poisson�s ratio. The question is, does e-mail have properties? From my empirical research, e-mail is also matter -- digital matter -- and contains the following properties:

• Attitude
• Issues
• Requests
• Products
• Customer Type

By first recognizing these properties, then and only then, as in any engineering problem, do we create techniques or methodologies to extract elements to identify those properties. Why are these properties important? Simple -- when you or I write an e-mail to a company, for example, we will express an attitude, remark on issues of concern, potentially ask for resolution through requests and invariably in that same e-mail give an indication of what product is the source of concern; and finally, in most e-mails, individuals also share intimate details about themselves.

For example, a typical e-mail may read as follows:

�Dear Company X, I am very upset at the fact that the shoes I bought squeak and would like a refund or replacement. In addition, please send me the annual report. My son is also graduating college and wants to work in your marketing department. I love running and football and have been a great fan of your Company; however, the recent problem has me quite disappointed.  Help!�

Note, in the above e-mail, the individual is pouring out his thoughts, opinions and feelings. The writer is sharing his attitude (negative), his issue (squeaky shoe), his requests (job application, annual report, refund), his products (shoes) and finally he shares his personal interests or customer type (running and football fan).

Each e-mail may have one or all five of these properties. The important point is that e-mail is digital matter and by extracting these properties, we can gain customer insight into the person behind the e-mail

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE AND E-MAIL
The primary goal of business intelligence is to extract insight. If you agree with the properties of e-mail, discussed above, you can also agree that when someone writes an e-mail, particularly to a company, it is a great opportunity to extract additional customer insight.

Consider Firestone, why was no one listening to the e-mails from consumers? No doubt there were at least several customers complaining about tire problems in their e-mails long before the major crisis hit Firestone. The District Attorney of New York, however, did leverage e-mail well. His use of the medium helped to gather intelligence and evidence on how Henry Blodgett, lead analyst in the dotcom era, at Merrill Lynch, paid lip service to his own public BUY recommendations and defrauded investors.

So, if companies truly believe in the age-old adage: �The Customer knows best,� then it behooves organizations to apply business intelligence to e-mail. Such business intelligence can help to gather additional tacit information on customer needs, which can be combined with traditionally structured demographics and transactional data to build a holistic view of the customer�s needs in real time.

For many years, intelligence agencies of the government have been analyzing phone calls, trash, E-Mails, etc to avert calamities and gain insight on behavior. Given the explosive growth of e-mail, organizations have much to gain by aapplying Business Intelligence to their own massive volume of e-mail and asynchronous conversation to extract knowledge and wisdom of customer behavior.

THE CHALLENGE
Given the ubiquity of e-mail and the hype of CRM applications, the challenge for most organizations will be to honor e-mail as a medium independent of CRM applications. E-mail is a medium. CRM is a set of processes and strategies. E-mail management is a very deep and rich technology specialty that can be used to combine business intelligence to conduct powerful one-to-one dialog with customers. CRM contains many such sub-specialties including billing systems, salesforce automation, e-mail management, loyalty programs, etc.

The challenge will be not to be misled by vendors who have been claiming that CRM is a technology platform and they have the panacea. While e-mail is a channel for CRM, it is a new medium containing a richness of new issues such as compliance, privacy, best practices, spam management, queues, workflow, etc. and should be given its own honor and hallowed presence and attention if organizations are to make the most of the medium.

CONCLUSION
E-mail has removed the barriers to the written word. Millions of human beings are writing today -- we can argue on the quality of their writing, nonetheless, millions of people are writing every day. Such a phenomenon has never existed before. E-mail has equalized the playing field of knowledge transfer. Centuries ago, only the elite or scribes were allowed to write and disseminate their thoughts and ideas.  Today, there is ubiquitous access to such rights, and that will only grow.

E-mail is enabling dialogue and discourse among humans that is unparalleled. Friends who found it hard to stay in touch now can very easily.  Customers who had to wait on the phone all day for a customer service rep, can find the e-mail address of the CEO and send them an e-mail. Within these e-mails are the thoughts, opinions and feelings of these individuals. Business intelligence applied to e-mail provides customer insight that will lead to competitive advantages which too will be unparalleled.

V.A. Shiva is a Chairman and CEO of EchoMail, Inc. In 1979, while a sophomore in high school, Shiva created one of the world�s first E-Mail systems for which he was recognized with the prestigious Westinghouse Science Award. During 1981 to 1993, he completed his undergraduate, graduate and doctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology focused on the field of pattern recognition, earning degrees in Electrical Engineering, Mechanics and Media Arts and Sciences. Today, EchoMail, which was founded in 1994, provides advanced Business Intelligence technologies for E-Mail management. EchoMail focuses on helping Fortune 1000 companies devise strategies as well as deploy its E-Mail Management technology platform for inbound and outbound management of E-Mail. More information on EchoMail, Inc. can be found at www.echomail.com. Shiva can be reached at [email protected].