Crate & Barrel’s web success results in a flood of inbound e-mails
Faced with a growing volume of inbound e-mail as more of its customers shop the web, Crate and Barrel has added technology solutions from software provider eGain Communications Corp. to manage the traffic and link its customer service operation with information on order status.
EGain Mail software will route, manage and track e-mail inquiries, while eGain’s Commerce Bridge product will provide a direct link to the internal database that contains order status, which frequently is required for e-mail mail responses. The two solutions will assign priorities to e-mail inquires, which has become increasingly important as e-mail volume has increased.
“When we first set up the site, we had all the e-mail coming to a single mailbox, and we responded on a first-come, first-serve basis,” says Crate and Barrel CIO Ed Rennemann. “There was no way for us to tell whether someone was worried about a gift for a wedding that was happening tomorrow or just curious about a product. We had a manual system – and manual systems don’t scale well.”
The eGain technology will now automatically classify most inquiries into categories and generate responses that center agents can accept, reject, or modify as appropriate. The system also will provide load balancing, pulling in other server resources as needed to prevent server crashes during heavy traffic.
According to ComScore Networks, Crate and Barrel’s web traffic has increased significantly over the past year, rising to 438,898 unique worldwide visitors (95% of whom are in the U.S.) in January of this year from 299,734 a year earlier.
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