More e-mail sparks a problem; a new management system solves it
At what volume does a retailer’s customer service center need to look beyond Microsoft Outlook as a way to handle incoming e-mail for something more robust? For multi-channel retailer Sierra Trading Post, the tipping point came when customer e-mails jumped from 8,000 to 12,000 per month in one year, as the result of increased traffic and its increased use of online promotions. E-mail management technology from provider Cintech LLC has reduced phone response times from a peak of 2-3 days during last year’s heaviest holiday traffic to an average of minutes, the company says.
“Prior to the Christmas season of 2003, our volume was good but not quite what we wanted to see, so we started doing promotions and using the Internet to do them,” says Bob Koehler, customer service director at Sierra Trading Post. “We could put an e-mail offer out there, get immediate response and drive immediate sales and income off that. We got addicted to it, and we offered sales through the entire fourth quarter.”
SierraTadingPost.com offers customers two ways to reach the company by e-mail directly off the site -- a contact section that pushes e-mail comments to its customer service address and a comment section in the online order form. The increased traffic and order volume meant considerably more customers were using the e-mail contact channel.
“We had been managing the inbox with Microsoft Outlook and moving e-mails through multiple folders. We got pretty good at it,” says Koehler. But when e-mail volume jumped, that system didn’t hold up. Depending on the priority as determined from the content of an e-mail message, it was taking the company 2-3 days to respond to an e-mail during peak traffic times. “We really recognized we needed to go out and find e-mail management software,” Koehler says.
After looking at comprehensive CRM solutions that included phone switching functionality as part of the package, Sierra Trading Post instead implemented cMail, an e-mail management system, from Cintech, in part because it could integrate with the phone functionality the retailer already had.
“There is contact center software that can integrate phones, chat and e-mail altogether through one switching process. But it is very expensive,” says Koehler. “We already had automatic call distribution here and good phone switching software that was already paid for, and we’d have had to scarp some of that.” Sierra Trading Post also got software to manage chat, called cChat, as part of its cMail purchase. Koehler says the combined e-mail and chat package came in about “one-third” the cost of fully-integrated enterprise systems including phone capacity and a self-adjusting knowledge base, which he’d priced at $250,000 to $300,000.
With the new system, e-mail response times are lower than ever, he adds. “Our goal with e-mail used to be to respond within four hours. Now we are responding to comments that come in by e-mail within minutes, because we are handling them in queues, similar to the way we handle our phone traffic.”
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