As e-mail into its customer service department has mushroomed to 65,000 in 2004, The Timberland Co.’s Timberland.com has implemented an e-mail management system to cut operating costs while expediting the handling of more customer inquiries, Bill Bragger, global consumer service manager, tells InternetRetailer.com.
“With the volumes of e-mail we’re facing, and the need for quick response, we had to find a better way to respond to customers,” he says. “Any kind of error would be waved in our face, and people would ask how could we respond in that way.”
Timberland uses the eGain Mail e-mail management application from eGain Communications Corp., a provider of software for customer service and contact centers. Since deploying the application in 2001, Timberland has been able to reduce its customer service personnel costs while improving average response time to customer e-mails to 6 from 24 hours, Bragger says.
Before it deployed eGain Mail, Timberland’s customer service reps too frequently replied to customer e-mails with poorly written messages that left customers unsatisfied, Bragger says. In addition, Timberland’s method of saving e-mail correspondence by cutting and pasting e-mail messages into a Lotus Notes application had left it with incomplete records that were difficult to research.
To improve e-mail correspondence before deploying eGain Mail, Timberland increased spending on compensation for several customer service reps with strong writing skills. It also had to arrange for a separate, quieter work area for its skilled e-mail reps and deal with morale issues among lower-paid reps not qualified to handle e-mail responses, Bragger adds.
With the eGain application, Timberland has been able to return to a single crew of reps, saving on the cost of paying for additional skills and improving overall morale, Bragger says. The application is designed with pre-written e-mail responses for common issues. It enables a customer service rep to view the customer e-mail on one side of a computer screen and multiple standard responses on the other side. The rep chooses the most appropriate response and clicks it to send it to a customer.
The eGain system also lets reps modify the pre-written responses if necessary, but a built-in grammar- and spell-checking tool assures that e-mail responses meet quality standards, Bragger says. “About 80% of the time, the pre-written responses are an exact match, so the rep doesn’t have to do any editing,” Bragger says.
The increased efficiency in handling customer e-mail led to a payback on the eGain system within eight months, Bragger says.
In addition, the eGain system automatically identifies and stores each e-mail correspondence in a database, where reps and managers can instantly retrieve them through a search tool.
The eGain application also includes a built-in language translator that can be used to reply to foreign market customers in their local languages.
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