Here are the hard facts: SSPA reports that customers expect response to their emails in a timeframe from 20 minutes to two hours. Yet, Jupiter Research reports that email response times fall far short of consumer expectation. Only 42 percent of companies responded to inquiries within 24 hours in 2006, down from 54 percent in 2002.

Poor performance of customer service ERMS tools can be typically traced to their implementation history. In many cases, email systems were deployed years ago, and have had little attention paid to them in recent years to ensure that agents maximize their inherent value.

Even with these statistics and history working against you, there are basic steps to take to ensure that your customers know when their questions will be answered.

Make Email Part of Your Multichannel Strategy
You should not consider email as a standalone channel. It must be holistically integrated into your entire multichannel service strategy.

Let’s look at how a customer typically interacts with a customer service site. He will usually first search a site for the answer to his question. He’ll look through the FAQs and the corporate knowledge base, if those are provided. If he can’t find what he is looking for, he will attempt to contact you using the channel of his choice--that could be email, a phone call, or a chat session.

When an agent is answering this customer’s question, you want to make sure that the agent is using the same source of knowledge as the customer. This ensures that answers are the same across all communication channels – those delivered over email, over the phone and over a web self service session.

Net, net, email should be presented as an escalation option from self service, as well as presenting an email link on the customer service home page. Email agents should be using the same source of knowledge as other agents to ensure consistency of answers.

Keep Your Customers in the Loop
You need to keep your customers in the loop from the time they email you to the time that they get an answer to their questions. Yet, Jupiter Research tells us that only 39% of companies actually do so.

You want to send your customers a system-generated auto-acknowledgement to let them know that you have received their email. You want to tell them when to expect an answer, as well as give them alternate ways to contact you such as a phone number or a link to chat if they need an immediate answer.

Manage Your Email Flow
You must make your response times, or SLAs, transparent. And, you need to do your best to ensure that you meet your SLAs.

To ensure that your customers are receiving optimal response times, you should actively manage your email flow. First, you should define a queue and routing rule structure that is in line with agent staffing, then you must actively monitor in real time your SLAs. If you find that your response times are exceeding your published SLAs, you must reshuffle your agents and perhaps your queue structure to ensure that your SLAs are upheld.

Streamline Your Response Process
All email systems come with productivity tools which help reduce handle times. These include:
• Prebuilt answers to help agents answer common questions.
• Auto-suggestions, which are likely responses to customer questions that are suggested to agents
• Auto-responses, which are answers sent out by your ERMS that need no agent intervention.

Most companies do not take maximum advantage of these productivity tools, all which have quantifiable ROIs.

Answer Your Email Properly
According to Forrester research, 6 in 10 customer service emails do not answer the customer’s question. Teach your agents to answer all questions, direct and implied, to reduce follow-up questions. For example, a customer asking whether shuttle service is available should receive an answer answering this question as well as the cost and schedule of the shuttle service.

Follow up by asking if the customer’s question was answered. And, allow customers to give you unsolicited feedback. As most of this feedback tends to be negative, strong focus should be given to addressing this feedback. Such interactions can be used as triggers to target consumers for proactive outreach.

These pointers put you on the path in rebuilding trust in the email channel. You will realize quantifiable gains in savings and customer satisfaction with a well-implemented email strategy.