Email management is best practiced through automation

Automation is improving customer satisfaction through email management

Did you know that 95% of customers who’ve had a bad customer service experience indicated they would share that experience with someone else (“Bad Customer Service Interactions More Likely to be Shared Than Good Ones”)! And if they don’t share their bad experience, another study showed that 91% of customers who don’t complain will simply leave after a bad experience (“12 Call Center Best Practices”). This means you want to avoid an unhappy customer at all costs – your brand literally depends on it. 

So, what are some factors leading to bad customer experiences? Well for one, the number of times a caller is transferred to a different agent was correlated with the increased rate of customer dissatisfaction. This means it’s imperative to get the customer to the right agent the first time. Secondly,  having to wait too long to receive a response, we’ve all been there I’m sure, but this doesn’t have to be the case. Using the right tooling, companies can lessen these frustrating factors by speeding up the entire service cycle to get customers what they want and need, faster. Ultimately, the most successful companies are those that pride themselves on customer service and we want to be your partner on that journey.

Now, how can our Hero Platform_ help you? Using state of the art (AI) artificial intelligence, our platform can quickly produce workflow models, and understand the intent of emails as they arrive. Allowing you to assign the customer to the appropriate agent/center, or if necessary respond instantaneously to a time sensitive matter. With the Hero Platform_ you’re not just getting accuracy and speed, but the ability to ensure that the customer is heard! Avoiding altogether the IVR system many customers would rather avoid. Using state of the art AI, we can quickly produce models that can understand the intent of emails as they arrive so that you can not only get customers to the right person, but also possibly reply to the customer near instantaneously to let them know you hear them and avoid them an encounter with the IVR system (which many customers would rather avoid altogether). Have a look at the scenario below for some examples on how we do this.

Problem

A multinational company is inundated with inbound requests from their many customers who have recently moved. Currently, expected response times for the company are within the 24-48 hr range, but occasionally it can take up to 3 or more days! This leads to many people calling in and waiting on an automated call system that frustrates them as they just want to be done with the request and get on with their day. In the company’s current process, the agents are sorting through so many emails that it is hard to understand which inbound emails require a reply and which do not. 

Solution

Using the Hero Platform_ near real time monitoring of the inbox, emails are ingested, their intent are identified to understand if the email is related to an address change request. The actual content of the email is inspected and an entity extraction model attempts to pull out the new address. If the extraction process is successful, then a reply is sent to the customer indicating that the company has not only received their email, but furthermore has already begun the address change request process. Behind the scenes, the Hero Platofrm_ actually updates the individual’s address in the CRM system (in this case, Salesforce) so that there is one less item for an agent to process. If the extraction does not fully complete, then an email is still sent to the customer informing them their email was received, but additionally, a task is generated for an agent to check the given email. 
ROI: This automation reduces a process that would normally take 24 hrs to contact a lead to 10 minutes following the customer’s initial email. automation takes what might otherwise be a 24 hr lead time and engages the customer within 10 minutes of their original email. While this is a measurable improvement in response time, the customer satisfaction gains are priceless. Keep in mind that surveys indicate more than 80% of customers are willing to pay anywhere between a 10-20% a premium on  a product or service that has a better customer experience (Cook). So not only is there an increase in Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), but an increase in customer retention as well. From a more practical perspective there was an estimated 8,000 hours saved a year on this particular request (across all contact center agents). This leads to an approximate 50% ROI on just this one use case. The best part about Hero Platform_,however, is that the ROI continued to increase as other use cases were built out into flows.