I am sorry it has taken this long to respond, the second time, but my first response has been lost somewhere in the world of bits and bytes.

I do come across many people who believe that they are doing a better job of managing emails using free-form emails, and they believe it better for customer service. However, as soon as we show them the different as part of a pilot of initial deployment, their qualms seems to disappear rather quickly.

It is interesting that I am not endorsing this method, since initially – many moons ago – I was a proponent of doing away with web form-based email. I had, through time, learned of a better way. Mind you, there are certain circumstances where non-form-based emails may be better, but then that is not (probably) the best situation to implement email for customer service.

Thanks for the comment, sorry for the long time to actually make sure it was published.

Esteban

You have made some very good points.

Surprisingly, we often still run into organizations that want to have consumers send them emails directly rather than using online forms to initiate an inquiry. Does KANA run into that mindset much?

When email addresses exist on marketing collateral and the like, we generally recommend that they set up auto replies on those email addresses that let the consumer know the email address is no longer supported and to click a link to go to a Web page for submitting their inquiries. What are your thoughts on this approach?

A few things that I would add as advantages for getting people to submit inquires through online forms include:

1. It gives you a chance to drive consumers into helping themselves by displaying highly relevant answers while still allowing them to easily submit their inquiry if none of the suggested responses meet their needs. Although the same thing can be done with email, it generally does not result in a positive customer experience when suggested answers don’t work.

2. By using capchas on the online forms you can significantly reduce the amount of SPAM that needs manual attention and you don’t ever end up with real inquiries being filtered as SPAM.

3. It allows consumers to submit their inquires securely online without requiring any messy email encryption add-ons.

4. It allows an organization to extend consumers with an ongoing business relationship a 2-way secure “Message Center”, if you will, where consumers can view responses in a secure page and email or SMS messaging to mobile devices is only used to notify the consumer of unread messages. In the end, I believe that email does not provide a reliable transport mechanism for customer care since email can be filtered for tons of reasons and Javascript and images are often suppressed by email clients. What are your thoughts on this?

Bests, Chuck

Thanks for your comment and thanks for sharing. More and more organizations are beginning to realize what you describe: structuring and making it easier to answer emails pays off in reduce time to process, and improved productivity. It is these examples that are driving the growth of email these days.

Thanks
Esteban

Before we created the template system in our email product, the sales team had a document that was several hundred pages long filled with their ‘frequently answered template emails’ and they would search on keywords then cut and paste. Such a waste of time and resources!

Now all they have to do is choose the right response from a drop down, customize it to fit the customers exact question and hit send.

This process has filtered into other departments now. I can quickly answer inquiry emails from vendors and people looking for typical information about our company. My morning email answering has gone from a couple hours to 45 min’s at the most.

As you can see, email is close to my heart these days. I’m passionate about things that work and give me more time to do the important stuff!

Thanks for your comment. I have had some of my clients get some amazing results just by using Forms for directing email, even without automation, that they could not believe that the vendors convinced them no to use them (which was the common knowledge early on).

The value of email cannot be underestimated, as there is a very large number of people who want to just use email to deal with their issues. Something to the effect of getting the ball rolling and waiting for results.

Thanks again for your comments
Esteban