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By Don Hoyt
Email Management Benefits
Email management software, especially web-based solutions, can provide a litany of tools and features designed to allow managers to intelligently and proactively direct the flow of email through their organization.
Email Routing – Email management software can effectively route email correspondence sent to an organization into individual queues. This allows groups of individuals to process messages sent to sales@, info@, support@, and other generic email inboxes, or the results of web form submissions. Specialized routing rules can be applied to inbound email messages, allowing for intelligent direction and pre-processing of email.
Centralized Knowledge Base – Email management tools can be used to build up a centralized repository of effective answers to common email inquiries. These can then be re-used by employees, providing productivity gains and quality control, as well as facilitating training efforts.
Email Policy and Standards – Enforce your organization’s business rules with email processing features that allow for the application of headers and footers to outbound emails. These can be used to add notices and disclaimers to emails, decreasing liability and increasing standards conformity.
Incident Tracking – All email messages (inbound and outbound) relating to a specific incident are tracked automatically and viewed as a single unit of correspondence. This greatly facilitates customer interaction and personalization potential. It also ensures that email messages are never lost, overlooked, or forgotten.
Reporting and Analysis – Email management reporting systems can provide important insights into an organization’s communications trends and efficiency. Reports can be used to identify problems early on, before they affect customers.
Communications History – Employees working with email management software have the ability to view the entire history of communications with any customer. This ensures that conversations with customers are always “in context”; the customer won’t need to start from scratch each time they contact your organization.
Web Access – Some email management solutions are accessed by nothing more than a standard web browser, allowing employees to provide superior email customer service from any location that has an Internet connection.
Email management systems can provide an open, shared, and collaborative environment that obviates the need for “big brother” style email monitoring solutions. By providing access to the communications history of employees (based upon security rights), these systems allow management to increase accountability and head off problems early.
Conclusions
• Most organizations are losing business because their email customer service does not meet their customers’ standards.
• Isolated email clients, such as Outlook, do not provide the necessary functionality to disperse, manage and oversee organizational email.
• While customer email service expectations are low, there is a definite opportunity to exceed customers’ expectations and create a significant differentiator between yourself and competitors.
• Akin to the progression from individual phone lines to a phone distribution tree, Email Management Software automatically routes email to appropriate groups and individuals and ensures quality, timely responses, resulting in vastly improved customer satisfaction and immediate, recognizable ROI.
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