Even so, some enterprises fail to take the e-mail channel as seriously as the telephone channel, and that could cost them. "If you're going to try to deflect customers to a cheaper channel," Hall warned, "you better make sure that the experience that customer has is good."

Removing the Human

The tools companies are buying most often to handle the influx of e-mail are those that automate important steps in the response process, Aberdeen Group's Chris Fletcher told CRMDaily. Applications that scan and parse the text content of an e-mail, perform an analysis, and send an appropriate canned response are proving popular. Kana and eGain are two of the companies known for their product offerings in this field.

Auto-responses must be based on very specific information from incoming e-mails to be effective, though. They must be sent within the timeframe that customers have come to expect from traditional service channels. "If a customer receives a response to a telephone message within three hours, why should that same person wait 48 hours for an e-mail response?" Hall asked.

Some firms are experimenting with outsourcing their e-mail support operations, just as they do with telephone support. "But that's a relatively painful way to handle a large volume of contacts," Fletcher noted.

Training the Human

Automated responses to handling e-mail are a good start, but they have obvious limitations. Eventually, many e-mail interactions will need a live person's intervention, and some of the skills required for the job differ substantially from those a telephone CSR (customer service representative) might have. To smooth the transition from phone calls to e-mail support, enterprises need to provide their contact-center personnel with specialized training, the Purdue Center for Customer Driven Quality's Mike Trotter told CRMDaily.

Contact-center managers tend to focus on making sure that employees under their supervision fill out timesheets correctly and comply with various personnel policies. Their time might be better spent training representatives to make more effective use of the tools -- like e-mail routing modules -- provided to them. Layering sophisticated analytic and reporting modules on top of e-mail handling software presents yet another challenge, Trotter noted. (continued...)

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