The requirement to increase agent productivity is usually seen in one of the two phases of the development of this communication channel; these phases are typified by the organisation having:

• embarked on its email channel development and is typically using a Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes type system
• implemented a first generation email management solution; volumes have increased and the solution needs replacing.

Each for these scenarios will be discussed in more detail.

Embarked on its development of the email channel

The existing internal business personal email solution (Microsoft or Lotus Notes) has been used as the underlying technology platform with the organisation perceiving that this personal productivity package can address the wholesale issues of responding to mass inbound consumer emails. As the email volumes and agent population grows, then their requirements will force IT or the sevice department to develop new solutions to extend the capabilities of these personal desktop tools (often through bespoke macros). However, it will soon become obvious that this approach runs out of steam and can no longer handle the email volumes effectively as they grow beyond say 50 – 60 emails per day per agent. Often the agents will be processing perhaps up to 8 emails an hour but can no longer cope with the volumes and need support from the business application.

But just what is the problem with the office email system? Microsoft and IBM construct quality applications and so what are the shortcomings? The simple answer is that these applications were designed as personal productivity applications and NOT as a collaborative work group application designed to address the whole lifecycle of responding and tracking consumer emails. Issuing an email to a work colleague is NOT the same business challenge as responding to a change of address request from a customer in a financial services organisation! This simple example needs the email response to be handled as part of a compliant process within the overall business systems transaction lifecycle such that the whole organisation has visibility of the originating email and its subsequent history.

The typical issues faced by these corporations as they rise to the email challenge will be:

• the business will have to recruit more staff to cope
• the application is local and personal to the agent
  • how does the organisation monitor the output?
  • how does the organisation ensure of the quality, compliance, and accuracy of the response?
    ….and of course, the email response will reside on the local pc; as a consequence the email is unlikely to be visible to the rest of the organisation and so retrieving the email later (when the agent is on holiday or if they have left the business…) will be problematical (as will monitoring progress….)
• the supervisor will be spends hours logging, categorising and distributing the emails each morning to the agents
• the customer calls in or sends a letter; how does the organisation identify the link back to the email when it sits in a personal agent mail box and can not be seen by the rest of the organisation………?
• the customer is upset because the organisation has not replied promptly and hits the resend button!  Result? The supervisor has no visibility of the earlier email and distributes the email to an agent to responds to the same email! We refer to this effect as “duplicates”.
• the agents spends large amounts of time constructing the response; this element of the email process is the largest single component of the email management task; usually to prepare a response the agent will need to access the back office system(s); often this will be achieved by hot keying across the various operational applications and cutting and pasting to create the response
• the organisation struggles with the peak loads during the high business demands e.g. Easter or Christmas trading, Summer sales, sudden demand changes on the release of new products, etc.
• the organisation wishes to be able to demonstrate compliance, conformance or regulatory control over its business processes to its stakeholders, regulatory bodies, auditors or government bodies
• and so on.

Implemented one of the early first generation email management solutions

Again, the shortcomings will have become immediately apparent as the email volumes have risen during the email channel development. Organisations who have implemented these early technologies will understand the issues immediately. In particular, they will understand the need for back office integration:

• to enrich and personalise the email response
• to understand the customer before a response is prepared
  • sending a response to a “Platinum Customer” may not be the same as responding to an occasional customer
• to reduce the agent effort in preparing a response
• to manage the consequences of a multi branded contact centre
• to generate the real productivity gains
• to update these applications with the response action and transaction detail.

In the usage of first generation technologies, we would expect the agent productivity to be around 10 to 12 emails per hour and with serious email traffic volumes above 5,000 emails per week - the challenge mentioned above will be highly visible above populations of say, 10 agents.