David Strom Special to The Daily Yomiuri 8/4/98
As more of our world becomes conversant with e-mail, it makes sense to build mechanisms to answer customer inquiries and track e-commerce using this technology. Unfortunately, there are more questions than answers here.
Who answers e-mail that is sent to these addresses? Is it a human, a program, or some combination of the two? Do you send an immediate reply that is obviously machine-generated to confirm that you got the question and then follow up with something more thoughtful, or just route the message to the right carbon-based life form to begin with? This could create an entire cottage industry, with Web sites and books devoted to sample e-mail responses, just as there are books devoted to sample business letters for various situations.
Do you have a single address for all inquiries, or separate addresses for different kinds of communication and departments? Do you publish the actual e-mail addresses of key employees, say, the vice president of sales and the head of investor relations? What about publishing the address of the chief executive officer?
What constitutes "timely" responses to this kind of e-mail, especially if you need to have staff available around the clock to answer questions from around the world? Most of us expect to see a reply within a business day of sending a message, and get annoyed when it takes longer. Finally, how do you keep track of your company's performance here?
This amounts to a lot of questions in an area that did not even exist a few years ago. And that shows exactly how important e-mail has become as a tool for dealing with inbound customer support.
Before geting too deep into this area, consider your corporate policies for dealing with incoming e-mail. In the United States, General Mills' Ask Betty (Crocker) e-mail box for cooking inquires gets e-mail from about 100 consumers daily. All the customer service representatives who answer these queries are trained by a single supervisor to ensure consistency and a similar style and wit. And General Electric, which pioneered the concept of the 24-hour-a-day telephone customer response center, receives more than 1,000 e-mail messages a month. The same staff members who man the phones work shifts to answer the e-mail.
Does your corporation have any e-mail guidelines in terms of usage, behavior and appropriate conduct? It should have. And it helps to have the motivation to produce the guidelines because of looming customer support issues.
Is everyone in the corporation required to have at least one e-mail identity? If not, what happens to those who do not? If you are going to support your customers, you first have to make sure that you will be able to contact the appropriate person inside your organization.
A corporate e-mail policy comes in very handy when more than one person shares a single e-mail box, or if a program rather than an actual person answers the mail. Your corporate e-mail policy should extend beyond just mere usage of e-mail. It should also specify how e-mail addresses are published both internally and externally. I recommend that e-mail addresses should be included on everyone's business cards and on corporate letterheads. And there should be various e-mail addresses on a corporate Web site.
Specifically, you should match e-mail addresses on your Web pages with the responsible person or department dealing with that content. If you are ordering something, then put the e-mail address of the person who would normally handle inquiries about orders on that Web page. If you are designing a page that has press releases and investor information on your company, it should contain the e-mail address of someone in your public relations department. This is not difficult, just time consuming, since you will have to update these addresses as your staff changes.
One way around this updating effort is to create a series of e-mail aliases and link them to particular people who will be responsible for receiving the messages. For example, you could have info@example.com for general inquiries, corporate@example.com for corporate inquiries, support@example.com for customer support issues, and so forth. Again, this should be spelled out in your e-mail guidelines document.
Once you have your policies in place, it is then time to tackle the support issue. You can either build your own, using a series of scripts and programs, or buy something off the shelf. If you decide to buy a product, you will have two different types from which to choose:
* One that offers a turnkey solution, using packaged software that you need to install on your own network and work in conjunction with your existing e-mail servers. These come in various shapes and sizes and prices, ranging from 100 dollars to 100,000. dollars That is quite a range. You can see a list of such products at http://everythingemail.net/software.html#mgmt.
* Others are more of a service than an actual product: What you are buying here is some very expensive consulting time. Regardless of which route you take, I recommend that any customer support system have the following three features:
First, it should automatically generate an immediate reply, acknowledging receipt of the message and taking ownership of the problem. This is handy because it reassures the customer that his query is being handled, and it puts a personal identity behind a faceless e-mail box. We all like to know who we are dealing with, especially when we have a problem with a vendor's product.
Second, it should work with your existing e-mail system. Your users should not have to run anything special to answer messages.
Third, it should track the messages sent to the system and produce reports on how many inquiries there are, as well as the status of the corresponding responses. This is useful so that you can monitor the operations of your support system.
Above all, you need to realize that e-mail is a two-way street. Communicate with your customers and they will stick around. Alienate them (or don't send replies) and they will seek out your competitors.
(David Strom, publisher of Web Informant at www.strom.com, is president of his own consulting firm in Port Washington, N.Y., and author of a new Prentice Hall book called "Internet Messaging" with Marshall T. Rose.)