Email – the channel that time forgot

“I have always used e-mail to the greatest extent possible.” – Ray Tomlinson (creator of email)

Meet Greg

Greg works in a busy contact centre managing all customer emails. Once the pioneer of electronic communication, nobody talks about email anymore. It’s not as exciting as Twitter, Facebook or WhatsApp and it’s not personal like a phone call. But it gets things done.

In fact, Contact Babel listed email as the second most used channel by customers, behind voice, which together accounted for over 85% of inbound interactions in 2017.

For Greg, having moved from the phones to work in service support on policies and procedures, it was a natural step for him to manage the shared inbox for email. He works his way through the daily inbox and allocates emails across the team to be resolved.

In recent months, Greg’s workload has increased as customers have abandoned long call queues and turned to emails. The problem for Greg is that he has no way of measuring the outcomes of emails, whether they have been resolved or if they have, how long it has taken. So he can’t report to his management team how his team is performing, whether they are managing to meet Customer SLAs, or worse, whether they might be in breach of agreements with potential financial penalties.

Bringing Email To The Forefront Of The Contact Centre

Email is a key part of a contact centre’s workload. Yet Greg doesn’t have the tools at his disposal to do his job and really excel at customer service. What he needs is to be able to:

• Report on email volumes and manage email distribution
• See at a glance the trends and patterns on email traffic
• Track who and where emails have been sent to and their status
• Send emails to agents with the best skillset and to manage workload
• Cross check customer emails with other communication channels to ensure no duplication
• Ensure continuity and holiday cover

How Can Cirrus Help Greg?
Cirrus can help Greg by taking the pain out of managing emails with our Cirrus omni email module. Cirrus’ solution has:

• Intelligent Routing – connect your existing or new mailboxes to control all your email messages. You can assign conversations automatically/manually by agent skills, channels, SLA, load balancing and more.
• Integration –  integrate easily with your existing CRM and other communication channels in our super inbox, allowing your agents to have a single historical view of the customer journey.
• Insights– provide reports on email volumes, response times and resolution to meet the business KPIs and service agreements.

As a strategic part of the communications mix in the contact centre, you need to ensure you’ve got email covered.

To find out how Cirrus could help with your email makeover request demo.