Customers are increasingly demanding that businesses are easily contactable, at all times of the day, and efficient in dealing with queries. Businesses, therefore, have poured serious investment into technologies like web-chat, digital service, AI and mobile apps. In fact, 61 per cent of UK companies are even planning to offer customer services via virtual assistants, such as Alexa and Siri, according to Maintel research.
Email, however, has become the black sheep of the modern contact centre – forgotten about and neglected.
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Derek Lewis[/caption]
The majority of organisations continue to manage email through shared mailboxes. Not only is this time consuming and resource intensive, it is needlessly expensive and leads to poor customer service any way.
If businesses continue to neglect email, they could ultimately lose customers and subsequently income. This is because ignoring one channel will undermine the efforts and investment in others, as any lack of consistency in communication will damage customers’ trust and confidence.
Despite not being the most ‘trendy’ of technologies, the issues created by poor email practice is likely to become a board issue soon.
This is because companies can create a whole host of opportunities for themselves, but only if they get email management right. Email communications today often contain a wealth of information that can support a businesses’ digital transformation process. This includes insights into the reason for customer contact and common queries that could be made available on self-service channels. It can also offer valuable insight into the language used by customers, which could then inform how FAQs are written online or how responses are created for web chat.
Businesses may have shied away from investing into the email process in the past because it was expected that the growth of self-service applications and customer portals would reduce the need for free-format email communications, but there are still many occasions where email enquiries remain a vital cog in the customer experience.
Many customers are still comfortable with emails because they can be sent at their own pleasure, without the need to make phone calls or sit on web chats. Emails also enable them to communicate their issues in more detail or ask multiple questions, which other mediums like social media don’t allow.
If companies want to continue to improve the customer experience they must invest in improving their email function now. If businesses also introduce automation, they can improve the customer experience further and turn email into a vital part of the modern contact centre once again.