Over 100 incoming emails a day.
Four customer service representatives.
One inbox and one workstation set up to receive all the messages.

How does a company with that set up and that volume of email make sure that every customer gets responded to quickly? And that everyone is clear who ‘owns’ each conversation, from the initial contact through resolution? How do you make musical chairs an efficient part of your customer service workflow?

Those are questions Taran Lent, vice president and founder of CardSmith, had to address. A campus ID card payment solutions company, CardSmith serves educational institutions, campus service providers, as well as cardholders and closed loop communities nationwide. Card holders don’t need to have cash to get goods or services on campus, and campuses don’t have the hassle or expense of creating their own proprietary card systems. CardSmith is the market’s only software as a service provider.

“The biggest challenge for us,” says Lent about his email situation,  was “not having a multi-user system and keeping track of which agent ‘owned’ a particular message.”

The solution was Email Center Pro. Students are their primary demographic, says Lent, and they prefer contacting customer service through email. “Using Email Center Pro helps make us relevant and responsive to this need,” he says.

“Email Center Pro is great.  It was a snap to implement and to get up and running,” he says. “Now we can have multiple agents managing inbound service requests, and we have very clear tracking and reporting regarding our performance and resolution of cases.” Of all the features that make Email Center Pro so valuable to his organization, Lent says “the multi-user and assign features are our favorites.”

According to Lent, the benefits of Email Center are many. “It’s hosted, easy to use, and affordable. If you take your email care operations seriously, and need a single solution to support many mail boxes with multi-agent access and tracking, then Email Center Pro is what you need.”

Jay Snider
Palo Alto Software

Is email useful as a way of providing customer service? Pete Slease, a Customer Contact Council member advisor, apparently doesn’t think so. On the CCC blog in February, Pete wrote:

Call me the jaded contact center geek, but it seems that the usefulness of email as a service channel has expired.  I recognize some B2B interactions may be an exception to the rule – given more regular customer interactions – but for most service interactions, it’s a poor channel.

After receiving poor email customer service, Pete took to the blog, basically saying that offering email customer service isn’t worth the cost. It’s too time consuming, he wrote. Too hard to manage.

photo from the DailyMail.co.uk

On February 11, the day Pete posted his blog, (a Thursday, when things are typically rather slow around here at Palo Alto Software), our main 800 number received 104 phone calls. Of those calls, 11 came before business hours, 10 after business hours and 9 lasted less than one minute (suggesting they hung up before speaking with an agent). Either those 30 customers (or potential customers) called back another time, left a voicemail, or gave up. Or sent an email when they realized the office was closed. Regardless, they didn’t get the information they were seeking on their first try.

On the same day, our Customer Service mailboxes received 40 emails. Every one of them, regardless of the time it was sent, was answered without any additional effort on the sender’s part. A quick look at the Contact Us page on our website shows that our current adjusted average response time for those mailboxes is 9 minutes. Which means during business hours, that’s how long our customers waited to hear back from us. The customer who sent an email at 2:48 a.m. experienced the longest wait for a reply that day. Our response was timestamped 7:30 a.m., which means he heard back from us in less than five hours.

So the question was: is email a useful way of providing customer service? Based on the numbers, the answer is: How could you think otherwise??

Roughly a third of our communications on a randomly selected day took place via email. Our customers in different time zones were able to send their message on their time, without having to schedule their day (or night) around a phone call. And every single customer who sent an email got a reply.

The real issue isn’t whether email is useful as a customer service channel. That’s a given. It’s how do you maximize its usefulness?

The answer to that question is simple. You don’t just put an email address out there for the public and call it email customer service. You might as well hire a trained monkey. Instead, you put together a good team, prioritize email and build efficiencies into your workflow.

You incorporate a tool like Email Center Pro which is ideal for upping your email customer service game. It provides features that help users respond to emails quickly, consistently, and accurately. It lets customer service managers track response times, employee productivity, and overall traffic. The more efficient you are at responding to email, the more you can handle. Which improves your bottom line AND makes your customers happy.

(It also makes it easy to extract the information you need for your blog. With about three minutes of effort, I was able to see all the email sent and received by our customer service team on February 11.)

Back to Pete. He was the victim of poor customer service, which can (and does) happen sometimes no matter what channel the customer chooses. And interestingly, as he questions email’s usefulness and whether it’s cost effective, he writes:

I’m getting ready to send my third email to get a simple issue resolved.  What if that issue was really complex? Despite any e-mail management system the company has, there is an increasing labor cost for each additional e-mail. Plus, I’m almost ready to call, which adds on the handle time of a frustrated customer.

How useless could email be if, even after two unsuccessful contacts, he’s sticking with it and is only ‘almost ready’ to pick up the phone?

Sounds like he should be making a case for better customer service through email, rather than no email customer service at all.

Jay Snider
Editor, Palo Alto Software

My sister-in-law is due for some very specialized heart surgery. She has to travel from Hawaii to Los Angeles for the procedure.

For several weeks she was emailing the surgeon’s office, trying to confirm the day and time of her procedure, pre-op appointments, preparatory instructions and the like. Irritatingly, the surgeon’s office never replied.

Finally, out of desperation, my sister-in-law called the surgeon’s office and was transferred to the Patient Contact Coordinator. When she told the Coordinator that she’d been emailing for weeks but had received no answer, the coordinator replied, “Oh, your emails went to the SPAM folder and were deleted. If you’re not in my Contacts List, emails are automatically listed as SPAM and deleted.”

“So, can I confirm my appointments and get my pre-op information?” asked sister-in-law.

“Sure. Just send me an email,” replied Patient Contact Coordinator.

Pause. Wait. Wait for it.

“Soooooo, do you want my email address to add to your Contacts List?” finally inquired exasperated sister-in-law.

“Huh?” responded the quick-on-the-uptake Coordinator.

“So that the email you just asked me to send you doesn’t get automatically sent to SPAM and deleted ….. again?”

“Uh … Oh … Yeah, I guess.”

To quote a sage, contemporary American icon: “D’oh!”

How does this surgeon ever stay in business if they never get new patients because new patient emails are summarily deleted because they are not in the Coordinator’s current patient Contacts List?

This office, or at least this Patient Contact Coordinator, could benefit from the advanced email management features of Email Center Pro.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor (Ret.)
Palo Alto Software

If the health of our planet is of interest to you, then the next two weeks are as important as any in history, as told by Connie Hedegaard.

The incoming president of COP15, the United Nation’s conference on climate change, does not mince words about the crucial nature of this global gathering. In an article on the conference’s website, she said that if the world fails to deliver a political agreement at the conference, which runs from Dec. 7-18 in Copenhagen, Denmark, it will be “the whole global democratic system not being able to deliver results in one of the defining challenges of our century.”

Bringing human reform to such a tenuous facet of life may be the task with which the political officials in attendance are charged, but pushing that agenda down through the layers of everyday human life is quite another matter.

And this is a matter in which Email Center Pro is about to get intimately involved. Palo Alto Software’s collaborative email platform will take center stage at the conference, helping to eliminate the barriers that once existed between the people with deep knowledge about climate issues — the scientists — and those whose job it is to share that knowledge with the world — the journalists.

Working with the American Geophysical Union (AGU), the worldwide scientific organization advancing Earth and space research, Email Center Pro is provisioning its centralized, collaborative framework to accommodate the 700+ scientists from around the globe who will answer questions directly from journalists 24 hours/day for the duration of the conference. The scientists are scheduled to attend to email communication in two-hour stints.

For the AGU, this is a terrific opportunity to deliver the scientists’ wisdom — by providing journalists with unimpeded access — to those most in need of it: the planet’s inhabitants.

For Email Center Pro, which is hosted on the Internet, this represents an opportunity to prove much of its intrinsic value: the organization of communication and the chance to facilitate the mission critical development of a dynamic community. Conversations between scientists and journalists will take place around the clock and originate at points worldwide — and yet be virtually instantaneous. At the same time they are not so instantaneous that scientists aren’t allowed time to carefully consider replies to questions.

The conference will not only highlight the advantages of Email Center Pro, but also the continued viability of email as a communication vehicle. The benefits of instant messaging, screen sharing and video conferencing are well documented and true. But because it doesn’t demand the same kind of presence as those services, email still carries the load when it comes to flexibility.

COP15, and the subsequent AGU Fall Meeting being held Dec. 14-18 in San Francisco, are set to prove that.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager
Email Center Pro Guru

Lots of things can happen when a job is done well. Here are a few:

1. Personal satisfaction
2. Sales for your company (or yourself)
3. Preservation of the natural “buying-selling” ecosystem
4. Unsolicited praise from your client base

This particular post is about number four. Every once in a while, a user of your product or service might find themselves so overwhelmed by the quality you provide that they decide to take matters into their own hands.

It happened to Email Center Pro the other day. One of the service’s users ( Jennifer Haubein of Websites 2 Grow) decided that telling us how impressed she was no longer sufficed. She wanted to tell others in her circle of influence.

Here’s what she said:

And here’s why she said it (in other words, here are some simple rules for soliciting unsolicited praise. Please note that simple doesn’t mean easy.):

1. Customer Service: If this sounds cliche to you, then you’re not managing it correctly. It’s not a cliche, it’s the bottom line. Customer service can look very different depending on the situation at hand. At all times, however, keep the customer in mind. Zappos did; they just sold for nearly $1 billion. I’m just saying.

2. Customer Support: The customer is using your product/service, you’re meeting their service needs and then something goes wrong. Do you hide and distribute the blame? Or do you step up and meet their need at every turn? (Please note that this can blur quite appropriately with customer service.)

3. A High-Quality Service/Product: This speaks for itself — somewhat. You certainly can’t get away with a sub-par product or an inconsistent service, but just know that even good (rather than amazing) products/services can enjoy success if attention is paid to the other numbers in this list.

4. Did I Mention Customer Service?: This can’t be understated. Be remarkable. It works. The most uplifting emails and calls received at Palo Alto Software are by those who were even more impressed with our service and support than with our product.

Happy soliciting!

Jason Gallic
Product Manager for Email Center Pro

Today, Palo Alto Software got a taste of good business practice (and you just got a bad taste of pun).

The team at FormSpring not only integrated our customer email management service, Email Center Pro (a process we’ve been working on for a couple of months), but they sent us a cake from the best bakery in Eugene, OR, to announce it.

That makes this short post about three things:

1) Good business etiquette: Both companies have worked diligently to connect FormSpring and Email Center Pro. Now that the integration is complete, sending a gift — particularly a cake — makes an impressive statement.

2) Solid marketing approach: FormSpring sent a cake. Here’s the blog post to prove it. You can also find chatter about it on Twitter. And the buzz around the office is not due exclusively to the chocolate. Want to have an impact, be remarkable.

3) A very useful integration: FormSpring is an easy and efficient way to collect data online using customizable forms. It’s a terrific way to begin — or continue — a relationship with a customer. Email Center Pro is a customer email management tool, and serves as a tool for developing relationships. Together, they create a powerful solution. Learn more about it here.

All that said, I’m not 100 percent sure that free cake is good for productivity. I considered being more eloquent in this post. Then I realized that there’s cake here.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager
Email Center Pro

Email is one of those things that people talk A LOT about fixing. It makes a terrific virtual water cooler topic because it meets the following requirements:

1. It’s draining
2. It’s incessant
3. Almost everyone has a suggestion about how to manage it

I’m going to go out on a limb and postulate that you’ve faced a few email issues of your own. How do you manage it, both personally and professionally? How do you use it to provide the kind of customer service you’d like to be known for? How do you support your brand with email?

These are all big questions, some with intuitive answers and others that require a bit more thoughtful digging. If that’s not digging that you’re interested in doing, you’re in luck. We’re handling that for you at the Email Center Pro blog.

Of particular interest might be a recent series we completed, entitled “Stop the Madness: Manage Email to Grow Your Business”. The posts provide insight on things like brand identity and the value that you provide through email. If you’re trying to figure out how to make better use of the time you spend wrestling with this communication channel, the Email Center Pro blog is the place to do it.

If you just want some interesting insights and a bit of a light-hearted look at email, you’ll find that there, too. We’d like to think that we’re a full-service solution.

Jason Gallic,
Product Manager, Email Center Pro

It’s nice when Guy Kawasaki writes about/alludes to/makes cursory mention of the product or service into which you pour a significant portion of your waking hours.

It means more than enjoying an influx of traffic to your website (a handy side-effect, no doubt). It’s also an encouraging validation that you’re taking some steps in the right direction. This is especially true when the praise comes for the method of evangelism as well as for the actual product or service.

Guy has built an ecosystem of success based as much on evangelism methodology as on the services he creates. Truemors, for instance, is a cool concept. But the story of how it came to be might actually be better known. Kawasaki built, developed and registered the site for a few thousand dollars.

So it’s nice when he folds your technique into his own as he did in this article that features Email Center Pro.

It’s an added bonus when the topic at hand is something about which we’re so passionate: Telling the story of our service as quickly, succinctly and creatively as possible. This is something on which every small business should focus. The marketplace is more crowded than ever. It’s vital to explain in two minutes or less what you do and why that matters.

Jason Gallic
Product Manager
Palo Alto Software

Every so often (a rather ambiguous date range, don’t you think?) the demise of email is predicted.

It’s a pain.

It’s a spam-laden nightmare.

It’s archaic and clunky.

It’s possible that you, too, see email through this lens. But I’m going to hazard a guess and say that, regardless, email is still an essential part of your business and of your life.

In fact, I’ll go a step further: Without email, your overall communication plan (business or personal) would be irrevocably stunted. This is nothing to be ashamed of (though it seems many are). Without the keyless entry on my car, I’d drop a lot more groceries. I don’t think this makes me a bad person.

The latest fad in the “email is dead” game is to claim that social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace will replace traditional email. Status updates, it is said, will suffice for passing along the critical information that travels through email. Check out this BBC article to prove it.

If this appears to be a sleek, trendy, agile solution to the headaches associated with email, well, it’s a bit premature. There is a long list of interesting and useful business applications possible with social networks. Conveying developed pieces of information necessary both internally and externally as part of the business process is not one of them.

That’s still the job of email.

• Email is a place where you get more than 140 characters to decode your message (unlike Twitter, for instance).
• Traditional email (as opposed to Facebook messages, for instance) is a credible, go-to business communication channel. It’s still a vehicle for CEOs to reach out to one another and for customer service reps to personally engage your customers.
• With 210 billion messages sent every day (a large percentage spam, I know), email is a part of our communication fabric, tied undeniably to much of what we do.

Want to make email even more useful? Check out some tips and tricks by clicking here.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager

Start with this list of 15 Applications No Online Business Can Live Without on Freelance Folder this morning. Some are obvious–Google Analytics, for example, and Basecamp–and some I’ve never heard of, but want to.

Add four more:

16. Email Center Pro

As soon as you have a second person–let alone three, five or 10–working with you, your e-mail takes a nosedive toward chaos. Email Center Pro adds management, accountability and collaboration to your existing e-mail. Assign e-mails, coordinate responses, speak as a company with a single e-mail voice but manage with visibility in the back office. Email Center Pro doesn’t replace your e-mail server; it works with it. (Disclosure: published by my company, Palo Alto Software).

17. TypePad

The list of 15 starts with WordPress, which is appropriate. I like WordPress and use it a lot. But TypePad belongs on this list as well. It’s a reasonable alternative to WordPress for blogging. I use it for my Planning Startups Stories blog. Last time I looked, so did Seth Godin, Robert Sutton and many other major-league bloggers.

18. Windows Live Writer or MarsEdit

OK, neither of these is actually online. The real zing of blog post editing software is being able to work in the same interface for multiple blogs, and switching from one to another. I use both Mac and Windows at different times almost every day. The Windows Live Writer, a freebie by Microsoft, is the best I’ve tried. MarsEdit for the Mac is pretty good, too; it switches from blog to blog as does Live Writer; and if you’re on the Mac, Live Writer is irrelevant anyhow.

19. Instant Messenger

Instant communication. I use mostly Yahoo! Messenger because my team standardized on that one a couple of years ago. There are four or five main standards and several online apps that combine them. A lot of people like Meebo, which links to several of the major instant messengers. I’ve also used and liked Trillian. Here’s a link to a Lifehacker post from a year ago called the Five Best Instant Messengers.

—

And I’m stopping here, with 19. Sure, I could make this 20 by adding something obvious like Google Docs, but let it be 19.