Can Spam. Reduce Case Volume with AI.

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Of all your barriers to productivity, spam is arguably the most meaningless. It takes time and energy to identify and separate spam from real critical issues. It adds an unnecessary burden to your queue. And, it is not only outside of your key line of business—already plenty of barriers there—but it is also entirely preventable.

Spam is universal. It wasn’t until 2015 that spam email rates fell below 50 percent—the first time in 12 years, according to a Symantec Intelligence Report. But hey, no big deal, right? (Click-click, spam deleted.) Well, not quite. As far back as 2008, spam management was costing companies $712 per year per employee when dealing with the average number of daily spam messages, according to PC World.

Spam, a catchall term, generally means unwanted emails. That comprises anything from outdated subscription emails to misleading content with malicious links. For the latter, it takes only a single click from one hapless employee for a data breach to occur, and the cost to recover is high. Spam itself is evolving, so that even with modern spam filters, your team members may be spending that $712 per year in the least productive way.

If You Want Something Done…

You need to mitigate these risks as much as possible and continue to do so in a seamless way. But even the most expensive software can be reactionary—too slow to evolve to spamming or malicious attacks until the problem becomes a threat. They won’t always solve problems unique to your company, either.

Salesforce.com (SFDC) provides some of the most popular and successful CRM and other business software in the world. Despite its success—and its great cost—its “Email to Case” functionality is reportedly bad at preventing spam emails from turning into support cases. This is true even if the “customer” information doesn’t exist inside of Salesforce.

Thrive CEO Vincent Jong describes the issue: “There is also one of the bigger issues I see in the current Salesforce system, where emails are still being saved as tasks, without email header information and with no relationship to each other. Every email is saved as a separate item…This naturally also makes it impossible to do an in-depth analysis on the performance of your email conversations.”

And, although security experts will continue their ceaseless battle to protect the public, we cannot rely on them, according to Dr. Panagiotis Andriotis, lecturer in Computer Forensics and Security. “There’s a constant cat and mouse battle with security experts. We’ve become clever at catching them, but eventually they always evade our systems.”

When it comes to your team, spam filtering, triage, and data security are in your hands. Fortunately, you don’t have to wait for massive software updates that might be too late. There are agile, more approachable ways to manage productivity and safety for your team.

Take Spam into Your Own Hands

Cutting the spam—today and indefinitely—will provide better, more productive experiences for your agents. It will deliver better response times for your customers. And, you don’t need to adjust your workload to accomplish these goals successfully, now and on an ongoing basis.

The right automated triage solution takes the reigns in handling and evolving spam content. Driven by machine learning, it segments critical tickets and reroutes less time-sensitive or even useless emails, preventing them from clogging agent bandwidth.

Triage picks up on the nuances of customer emails, including subjects, language, sentiment, and inflection, eliminating manual tasks associated with routing. This reduces customer wait times and agent processing while routing spammy or even malicious emails out of your workflow.

Best of all, it evolves alongside your company’s real customer issues with its ability to differentiate them from spam. That means consistent, safe separation as your service quality picks up.

If you’d like to find out more about AI for customer support and how you can empower your support team and free them from tedious tasks and unwanted spam (among other things), give me a shout!

Note to editor: the images in this post are created by AIQ or pulled from free image databases.

Pradeep Rathinam
Pradeep Rathinam (Paddy) is the Chief Customer Officer (CCO) at Freshworks. He leads a global team of customer experience employees that span customer success, professional services, and customer service. He founded AnsweriQ, an AI-based customer service automation company, which was acquired by Freshworks in 2020. Previously, he was the CEO of Aditi Technologies and spent over a decade at Microsoft as general manager of the Independent Software Vendors business. Pradeep holds a business management degree from Delhi University.

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