The growth of multiple channels for customer interaction, while it can lead to greater choice and better service, may backfire if it means one channel is prioritized over others. Effectively managing email as well as chat, phone and other channels can be a tough challenge.
Key to managing inbound email is reducing the average total response time – in other words, how efficiently team members deal with inbound email. For organizations that handle a high volume of email, shaving seconds off the average total email response time can mean saving hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Below we’ve examined Total Email Response Time by breaking it down into its three component parts and explores ways to improve each of these three areas.
Total Email Response Time Formula
The formula for calculating total email response time is:
Routing Time
+ Agent Pending Time
+ Agent Effort Time
= Total Email Response Time
By acknowledging the relationships between these three base metrics we can examine the challenges of optimizing each, and explore strategies for dramatically improving the overall efficiency of email management.
Routing Time
Routing Time Routing time is the time it takes for an email to be received into a group mailbox and be assigned to the agent that will be responsible for replying to it. Since not all emails are created equal, and not all agents are as adept at handling every type of customer inquiry, optimizing this metric presents a number of challenges. Challenges Ambiguous Message Assignment Responsibility Corporate email messages often sit in public folders or group mailboxes waiting for someone to deal with them. The typical public folder system has no facility for assigning messages to agents; instead, it relies on an individual assigning messages to particular agents, or leaves it to agents to know what to work on and when. There is often no ability to track or manage how long messages sit in this “unassigned” pool.
This manual approach to message management can also lead to agents cherry-picking the messages they want to work on, rather than dealing with them in an organized manner—such as by arrival time, or by priority according to a set of business rules.
Challenges
Ambiguous Message Assignment
Responsibility Corporate email messages often sit in public folders or group mailboxes waiting for someone to deal with them. The typical public folder system has no facility for assigning messages to agents; instead, it relies on an individual assigning messages to particular agents, or leaves it to agents to know what to work on and when. There is often no ability to track or manage how long messages sit in this “unassigned” pool.
This manual approach to message management can also lead to agents cherry-picking the messages they want to work on, rather than dealing with them in an organized manner—such as by arrival time, or by priority according to a set of business rules. Matching Message Assignment with Agent Skills Routing time can increase dramatically if a message is passed from one agent to another in an attempt to find a colleague capable of dealing with the subject matter of the email. Providing quality replies to customer inquiries starts with ensuring that agents get assigned messages they are capable of answering. In many companies, this assignment process is performed by a dedicated individual who “triages” each message and manually assigns it to the correct agent. This model is both labor intensive, and a process bottleneck that increases routing time. Solutions Auto Message Assignment For team inboxes being handled by multiple agents, setting up an automated distribution process to assign messages directly to agents will greatly reduce routing time. Various methods such as round robin or load balanced distribution can be employed to help balance the workload between agents. Limits can be established to ensure that emails are parceled out in manageable chunks. This measure prevents any one agent from receiving an overwhelming volume of email.
Matching Message Assignment with Agent Skills
Routing time can increase dramatically if a message is passed from one agent to another in an attempt to find a colleague capable of dealing with the subject matter of the email. Providing quality replies to customer inquiries starts with ensuring that agents get assigned messages they are capable of answering. In many companies, this assignment process is performed by a dedicated individual who “triages” each message and manually assigns it to the correct agent. This model is both labor intensive, and a process bottleneck that increases routing time. Skills-based Routing
Solutions
Auto Message Assignment
For team inboxes being handled by multiple agents, setting up an automated distribution process to assign messages directly to agents will greatly reduce routing time. Various methods such as round robin or load balanced distribution can be employed to help balance the workload between agents. Limits can be established to ensure that emails are parceled out in manageable chunks. This measure prevents any one agent from receiving an overwhelming volume of email.
Skills-based Routing
Where specialist knowledge is required to handle specific email inquiries, using rules to route these messages directly to the agents who have the skills to respond to them will shorten routing times. Skills-based routing helps eliminate the problem of messages bouncing from agent to agent in an attempt to find someone capable of responding.
Email management rules reflect agreed upon business processes and can be triggered by various elements of the message, such as subject or body content, standard message header information (e.g. From or To address), whether the message is a new message or a reply, whether or not the message has previously been assigned to an agent, or any combination of these.
Message Thread Continuity
While companies strive for first contact resolution across all customer communication channels, many email exchanges become full-fledged conversations requiring a number of email messages back and forth to deal with the issue.
Depending on the kind of issues that need resolving, and the nature of the company’s business, secondary replies might be best handled by the agent who provided the first message reply. Since that agent is already familiar with the customer’s problem he or she may be more effective at answering follow-up questions. By utilizing a system that automatically routes email replies to the previous owner, queues can be bypassed and email routing time further reduced.
Agent Pending Time
Agent pending time is the amount of time between an email’s assignment to an agent and that agent beginning to process the message. The average of an agent’s pending time is an effective measure of the message backlog that the agent is experiencing. Agent pending time is closely linked with agent effort time since both occur after ownership has been passed to a particular agent. Thus improvements in agent effort time (composing appropriate replies more quickly) will also work to reduce an agent’s email backlog, but this section focuses in on efforts that can be taken before the agent begins working on the message.
Challenges
End of Day Replying
Often, agents that are tasked with replying to emails also have to take phone calls, respond to online chats and perform other tasks throughout the day. Replying to emails can easily become a lower priority function in the face of multiple demands on an agent’s time. The result is that agents will often allow email to pile up all day, and then hurriedly work through the backlog at the end of their shift. Not only does this type of behavior increase agent pending time, but it often reduces the quality of email replies produced.
Scheduling Complications
An email assigned to an agent will only be processed if he or she is available to work on it. Meetings, outside appointments, sick days, vacations, etc., can present problems for an email customer service team if they are not properly accounted for. Messages assigned to agents who are out of the office will remain idle until they return, causing an increase in average agent pending time.
No Radar
One of the most significant impediments to effective email workflow management is simply a lack of tools to monitor, analyze and report on traffic flow into and out of group mailboxes. If there is no real-time visibility into the pending backlog for each agent, then even the best tools and techniques for streamlining mail flow are likely to be ineffective as they cannot be adequately targeted to the agents, mailboxes of mail categories where they will be most useful.
Prioritizing the Backlog
Every company will have customers that from time-to-time need some extra care. Being able to prioritize the emails received from these customers can be very important. Taking steps to ensure that these emails receive attention quickly will drive down the average agent pending time for this high priority group.
Solutions
Schedule Time for Emails
Management needs to create and enforce policies that ensure email responding is an activity valued as much as the other agent tasks. The two most common methods for doing this are:
a) Creating aggressive email reply time performance goals for agents that require constant effort throughout the day to achieve (thereby eliminating the end of day replying problem);
b) Scheduling a specific period of time each day for agents to exclusively work at replying to email inquiries.
Push Reports to Agents
To discourage agents from sitting on messages and replying at the end of the day, service level standards can be put in place that specify more aggressive reply time requirements for agents. Regular reporting can then show how each agent is performing relative to the service level goals. Ideally, your email management solution includes a number of user-oriented reports that can be made available to agents. Consider offering incentives to agents for maintaining certain service level standards. This type of motivation can dramatically reduce average agent pending time.
Auto Re-assign Old Messages
Since each agent will have their own pool of pending email messages to work on, it’s important that the email management system monitors each agent’s queue, and if a particular agent is falling behind, their messages can be automatically reassigned to other users so that no customer’s business is unduly delayed.
In addition to real-time reporting, automatic alerts can monitor important metrics to keep you apprised of potential service level problems. Set alerts to monitor the depth of the current email backlog and the age of unanswered emails. These are the key metrics to help you avoid being out of covenant with your service level policy. Create an action plan for staff to rapidly rectify any backlog or age issues should an alert occur.
Use Rules to Automatically Prioritize Some tasks, or customers, may require priority email queuing. Avoid having to manually triage each email that comes in by setting up incoming group mailbox rules that automatically move these priority message to specific agents or a special priority group mailbox. Agents can be coached to answer these emails first; ensuring current corporate priorities are being followed.
Agent Effort Time
Agent Effort Time is the total amount of time it takes for agents to craft the response to a customer email once they begin working on it. This includes the time spent looking up information about the customer, consulting with other staff members or internal systems, and composing the email response.
Challenges
Lack of Access to Information In order for agents to solve customer problems, they often need to have ready access to the customer’s email history. Being able to see how past issues have been handled is often key to delivering a quality response to the customer. Cumbersome search mechanisms can delay an agent’s access to the required information, increasing the average agent effort time.
Email Overload
Research has shown that people have a strong psychological aversion to being overwhelmed. In fact, the stress associated with facing what appears as an insurmountable task (such as a mountain of email) typically causes a marked decrease in motivation. This demotivation in turn reduces productivity, and therefore negatively affects average agent effort time.
Continual Message Re-invention
Most organizations receive customer inquiries that fall into a handful of recurring categories: What do you charge? How do I return an item? How much to I owe? How do I change my address?
The time taken to re-compose what is effectively the same message again and again will have dramatically higher average agent effort times; this should be avoided.
Solutions
Fast, Powerful Searching
Scrolling through thousands of messages within a folder in an attempt to find an old email is not efficient. Agents should use a message finding solution that offers multiple search criteria so that agents can quickly hone in on the exact historical messages they are looking for.
Throttle Message Distribution
Set a low maximum number of messages that agents can be working on at any given time. A low maximum setting, in combination with automatic email distribution, will keep the perceived workload for each agent to a manageable level. Controlling workload volumes will keep agent stress levels lower and motivation higher.
Standard Responses
Effective use of standard responses is the number one thing a company can do to significantly reduce average agent effort time, and average total email response time in general. Used properly, standard responses can reduce agent effort time to just a few seconds for a significant portion of the emails that agents handle.
There is upfront effort required to build a library of standard responses to frequently asked questions, but these responses can be used thousands of times by every agent, so the return on this investment is enormous. It also has the added benefit of improving the overall quality of responses to customers. You can create standard responses in Outlook using Quick Parts.
Final Thoughts
As email continues to play a major role in effective customer service communication, there are some formidable challenges for companies to manage the timeliness and quality of their responses without incurring disproportionate cost increases. While each of the solutions outlined will incrementally provide efficiency improvements, utilizing an email management solution that delivers all of these benefits will dramatically improve the email effectiveness of any organization.
Emailgistics delivers these types of email productivity improvements to team inboxes in Office 365 with advanced workflow routing, alerting, reporting and dashboards.
