What does this mean for the Business? Today, we have 60 agents dedicated to handling on average 15,000 emails per week. This channel represents a cost of at least £1,260,000 per annum. At peak times, the email volumes rise to 24,000 per week twice per annum for about a 4 week period (typically Easter and Christmas times).

These volumes are expected to rise by at least 30% in the coming year, representing an additional cost to the Business of around £380,000.

This peak loading is addressed by the recruitment of additional, temporary staff. This process is cumbersome because attracting the necessary skill levels is difficult and involves the Business in an extensive induction process. New equipment and space has to be provided. We estimate these peak costs are around £240,000 pa to staff up for and as we all know, the management distraction is enormous.

The current environment has grown from a simple in house implementation of Microsoft Exchange into an unseen corporate application. No management reporting systems exist for this application and we are unable to address the requirements of the regulatory bodies. Worse, we are unable to deliver a complete audit trail from the inbound email to the closed transaction. This lack of traceability has serious commercial considerations from the Board’s perspective because it raises several serious corporate conformance issues.

The public exposure of this issue could cause embarrassment and undoubted loss of sales.

We believe the business has four important factors to consider:

• There is a corporate mandate to improve Customer Service
  • ignoring the problem is not an option
• This communications channel is expensive to run from both a resourcing and cost perspective
• There are both legal and compliance responsibilities
• The problem will only grow.

Our Customer Relationship Management systems handle telephony contacts only and do not address this channel. Since the email systems and CRM systems are not integrated it means we have no holistic view of the Business / Client interaction. This lack of integration has serious business implications because our Customer Recovery program is key to our trading strategy and expensive to operate. We need to reduce these customer recovery costs by addressing the problem as early as possible (not at the end when the Customer is more difficult to convince).

Can the situation be deferred? We are expecting email volumes to rise markedly and this style of contact is becoming increasingly prevalent. Our poor responsiveness is not consistent with our corporate mandate to enhance our service levels. Our competitors appear to use this channel effectively and continue to drive business through their web systems (and seeing 100% growth pa and 5% uplift of sales).

Can this problem be handled manually? Yes, but what about the existing issues in the Contact Centre:

• Staff retention / churn: we are currently experiencing 22% per annum
• Staff recruitment:
  • we can not recruit enough telephony staff
  • we can not recruit skilled staff who can handle written correspondence
• Staff morale: no one enjoys handling emails: difficult.

Furthermore, if some of these “standard business processes” could be automated then we could ALSO reduce the number of calls in the contact centre and re deploy the resource to more important “value adding” telephony contacts - for example -  to INCREASE sales.