Customers expect a same day response to email

"We face a growing volume of email and sadly, customer service operations that haven't upgraded their email systems to cope with this growth, believing that Outlook or a traditional email management solution plus some extra contact centre agents will handle the problem, are now buckling under the strain, said Tim Easton, Director, Numero.

"Consumers are increasingly choosing to contact customer service departments via email, but businesses are slow to recognise the need to deliver the same level of service a customer would get face to face or even on the phone - via email."

A recent survey* showed that 69% of internet users in a survey of nearly 6000 respondents expect to receive a same-day response to their emails, with the final 31% expecting response next day or within 48 hours maximum.

"Many current customer service teams just aren't geared up to manage this by virtue of being poorly resourced with inappropriate support tools, said Easton. "With the right approach and support solutions, you can achieve a situation where you can deal with consumer queries with the contact centre agent taking on a supervisory role and being supported by an intelligent customer interaction management solution.

"Such systems allow the type of service the new consumer is seeking by intelligently interpreting the content of email correspondence, categorising it accurately and then extracting necessary information from the organisation before constructing a response that can be sent either automatically or after an agent has approved the content -all done in a way that is personal and relevant to the customer."