Advanced Email Management for Anytime, Anywhere Customer Support

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In an increasingly fast-paced world, with the Internet as part of everyday life, people have come to expect instantaneous communication and connectivity. The service desk has evolved to meet the demanding needs of customers who expect service to be equally as rapid. Now everyone wants to be able to receive service desk assistance any time and from anywhere. Key to this is the integration of email management into the service experience.

This integration is so integral that I wonder how we were ever able to manage without it. Prior to implementing a service desk solution that incorporated email management, many companies were using a homegrown request tracking system that lacked the ability to reply automatically to email requests. A customer would call or send an email to a service desk agent about a problem. Calls would then be entered into the service desk as tickets. Emails would be read in a round-robin or other shared method, entered as tickets and, perhaps, emailed back to the originator by hand. How do you manage all of the emails, tickets created from calls or emails, and the emails which are responded to by the originating customer? You simply cannot, because it’s a logistical nightmare. Bringing in the integrated Service Desk with email management built in can solve the problem. But How?

First, users want to be able to email a ticket into the Service Desk and be able to receive confirmation emails automatically from the Service Desk software – The calls, web portal and email must all be totally integrated. When an Agent or user works on a ticket, you want email confirmations going back and forth automatically. With advancements in email management, companies can correct the threading of a response and when there is a response to an email confirmation of a ticket, the reply will only appear in the ticket in which it was created. Furthermore, duplicate text can be cut out of updates to the ticket so that the same words do not appear over and over in the same email response. When there are edits made to either an existing ticket, or a new ticket is created, the fields can be updated to reflect the general description of the incident and the specific fields of the ticket that have been modified.

Email integration and management has even more to offer, including the ability to:
•Perform queries
•Customize email recipients
•Create different emails for different devices
•Allow file attachments to automatically attach to a ticket

Once someone starts using email as a primary access mechanism for the Service Desk, even more functionality is necessary. Especially as more people in the field need the full capabilities of the Service Desk via email, increasingly advanced Service Desk function is needed to make email a comprehensive and powerful channel. Thus, functions like self-help via knowledge base, escalation, change management, service level agreements (SLA), need to be triggered automatically by email services in the Service Desk.

Mark Krieger
Numara Software
Mark Krieger, vice president of Product Development for Numara's FootPrints product line, was previously president and cofounder of UniPress Software. Previously, he was the founder and vice president of Whitesmiths Ltd., where he managed technical operations and co-authored C compilers. He also held positions at IBM, Columbia University and CERN.

1 COMMENT

  1. With the internet being continuously integrated with newer solutions for customer care, live communication is the next front after the integration of web 2.0. The main concept with web 2.0 is that the front end user actually see’s changes being implemented and his words or ideas holding some value which is the main factor contributing towards the popularity of the web 2.0 application. Live is the main factor, real time effects are better absorbed in other words.

    Many companies have now begun to implement this live effect in customer care. Both sales and after sales are now being accomplished through Live Chat, a revolutionary tool that has begun to re-shape customer care in a better manner. Live Chat as a service is now employed by many companies like Live Chat, LiveAdmins etc. According to them live chat is a tool that does customer care in a more efficient manner. It increases sales and does real time customer care. According to a research at Forrester more teens are going to accept it when they grow up and become decision makers because they are more adapted to chat.

    Making a comparison on Email support vs Chat support, Email support edges in terms of cost whereas Chat Support is more real time. Being more real time implies more customer satisfaction which in the longer run implies customer retention. Both these support systems edge on call support that have long waits and have a 50% chance of not proving fruitful.

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