Often organisations wish to continue to improve and develop their service standards (measured in many different ways) to deepen their relations with their customers and to fend off the competitive threats. Although, this approach has been relatively easy to address with the telephony channel, in most cases the email channel has remained undeveloped.

We do accept that some organisations believe they have addressed this whole point by simply invoking a valid auto acknowledgement: “we have received your email and we will respond shortly”. A useful element of this approach is that it confirms to the sender that the email has been received. This attribute of the email channel - the preserved audit trail – is often an important reason why consumers like the channel so much. Of course, this very same attribute then creates the many business challenges to the organisation! Suddenly, the sender can use his document history to highlight poor business response from the supplier organisation and worse, the dreaded resend button can come into force!

A second attribute of the email service is the whole element of service expectation where often the consumer has often grown up in a corporate internal email world living in “a fire and forget” mentality. The assumption is that when the email is sent that it will be actioned. Worse, the expectation is that it will be actioned quickly! So by implication, the consumer expects a prompt service and when they do not receive the expected response, then the temptation is to invoke that well known approach: either forward the message with an urgency text or hit the resend button!  Whichever approach is deployed, the effect is to create the issue of duplicate emails from the sender. Now, how are these handled?

This whole mantra of service though has many connotations:

• confirmation of acknowledgement of the email receipt
• expectation setting of a timely response
• the actual time to respond
• the quality of the response:
• does the response address the initial email content?
• is the email well constructed?
• is the grammar correct?
• is the spelling correct?
• is the format professional looking?
• has the email  been personalised?
• the value added in the email – does the email introduce more useful information
• does the email introduce a relationship – the context of thank you and sorry…
• does the email address the issue first time?
• does the response invoke trust?

These attributes of the email channel raise a whole series of challenges for the organisation: the questions about the organisation’s contact strategy, the ability to respond to the email and the requirement to deliver an operational platform that can support these service levels. Quite naturally, the way the organisation goes about addressing these factors may introduce further requirements in the supporting email management solution. For example, how can you monitor these elements (e.g. quality, first time resolution, etc.), how do you monitor outstanding emails awaiting action, how do you record the agent / team performance and so on.