Email & Fax Management
Datapoint offers solutions for email and fax management that are integral components of an interaction hub solution. This means they are not point solutions and have not been designed to function outside that environment. However some solutions are compatible with a wide range of third party email servers if these are preferred and can act as email gateways into the integrated solution.
The strength of this approach is that both email and fax benefit from the intelligent routing, unified queuing and integrated reporting that are native to such solutions. Moreover agents can belong to email, chat, inbound and outbound voice and workflow services concurrently which means these solutions are able to manage multi media distribution to blended agents for greater performance optimisation.
Sophisticated Routing Options For instance, emails can be routed through a business process that identifies the content of the message, evaluates the business requirement and determines the best resources or service activity to handle that interaction.
Depending on the business process defined and the sequence of the processing activities, an interaction can be responded to by an agent, queued for additional processing, delivered to an external system or auto-replied. The entire lifecycle of the interaction can be further analysed to ensure that;the call centre is adhering to service level agreements.
The intelligent routing component of the interaction hub treats email and fax as just another type of communication which means they are automatically queued, prioritised and routed to agents which removes the need for manual intervention in email distribution.
In these solutions, fax management is provided by converting the fax into an image which is inserted into an email. This has the cost benefit of using email licenses for both fax as well as email
In much the same way that voice routing works, the first task in email routing is to identify the nature of the customer enquiry and their identify. The former is achieved by querying the subject matter of the email either by reading the subject header or the text itself. Some solutions use sophisticated natural language parsing to interpret the content and meaning of the email, in a way similar to ‘say anything’ solutions that are used for voice call steering.
The identity of the customer is picked up from the email address and then CTI references this against any existing customer record which can be screen popped to the agent. How each customer is then treated depends on how you have designed your contact strategy using the following range of routing options.
Email & Fax Queuing At the simplest level, emails can be segmented between those that receive an auto response and those that are placed in an email queue. Multiple emails from the same address can be grouped together so that a customer sending in multiple queries will interact with the same agent on all of the emails. This removes the potential for duplicate or inconsistent responses and creates a one to one service for the customer.
Once queued, emails can are handled in a First-In/First-Out basis. Their distribution is then based on the way agents are organised as either dedicated or blended teams, either of which can be based on skills based routing, a simple agent ranking or idle time allocations. The email themselves are prioritised in relation to queue time with further escalation for those in danger of missing service goals.
Exceptions to this can be made for unmanned positions, peak traffic times or holidays in which alternative routing plans can be formed.
Options for Customer Responses Once the email reaches an agent, natural language processing will have already read and analysed the subject and body of the email and identified matching responses from the knowledge base together with a confidence level. This enables simple requests to receive an auto response while more complex requests are forwarded to agents with a framework response(s) which can be altered by the agent and checked by a supervisor before dispatch.
Inter agent/supervisor collaboration is possible to solve issues when needed. Moreover emails can be shared and tracked with enterprise subject matter experts outside the call centre.
Before dispatch, a variety of acknowledgments can be sent to the customer which allows them to verify that their email is received and by when it will be dealt with. This can be customised to acknowledge email handling service levels during holiday periods or explain if an email has been re-routed for specialist attention.
The visual impact and personalisation of dispatched emails can be altered in a number of ways.
- Email templates, custom responses and pre selected range of attachments
- Pre-defined custom headers, footers and signatures for each agent, service or group
- From standard salutations/closings and signatures to completely personalised responses
- Customised reply addresses for multi tenancy requirements
Outbound Campaigns Outbound email campaigns have similar well developed functionality. Managers have the capability to define multiple campaigns. They can build distribution lists from inbound requests or import/export lists and manage ‘do not email’ customers. Distribution lists and email campaigns can be integrates seamlessly with existing POP-3 and IMAP-4 e-mail solutions.
Reporting In terms of reporting, managers can provision the types of expected email outcomes (dispositions) that they want to track. Disposition classes can be created, as well as disposition codes, which describe the outcome of an email session as the basis for their reporting requirements.
Emails can be received either from dedicated email clients or web based message services that are offered on corporate web sites including secure communications based on HTTPS standards.
Finally some solutions provide advanced content analysis which delivers on-demand feedback on the effectiveness of the email responses. With the knowledge base providing the basis for call centre replies, it can analyse the accuracy of automated and agent based replies based on knowledge of the call centre’s email response history.
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