Email Auto Reply

[Aden]

Has anyone implemented an auto reply option to emails in a call centre? I'm looking into assessing this opportunity and looking at potential risks as well. Can anyone share their experiences or what are some of the considerations we would have to make? What are the expected success rates of correctly answering a customer's question using auto reply? Any comments would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[jeremyg]

Some of the issues surrounding automated email responses in my experience is the obvious relevance to the subject matter. Not knowing what to ask for is difficult for the clients let alone the programmer who is to organise the responses based on the key words.

As all automated response mechanisms are relational to the key words I would suggest a very simplistic approach. There are many vendors of such software but nearly all basically rely on the number of times words are used and the weighting of words by you for responses. All too often I have seen responses to technical questions being answered with sales brochures.

In my experience with call centres I have seen the email issue grow into something that still has to be managed with human manual intervention.

The only provider that does something different is Autonomy. The ODOL system allow for concepts of the data to drawn up from the email. Basicaly it understands that a Pit Bull is a dog and from that you would get a response on dogs rather than Brad Pitt or Bull Fighting.

In addition to this any emails that cant be answered automatically, on either system you will need a teir 2 support structure. All the systems you look at should have a parameter based answer probability stat which if not met should be redirected. Not knowing your industry or questions/answers emails you are expecting makes it difficult to explain which is best. I would suggest you look around and take up any references from vendors.

Automating emails is the way forward as the industry average for manually answering the is $2.50. Be aware that once you take on this technology your bosses will expect the email to be answered without a team there - set expectations - if a traditional automated system is used there will still be human interaction to monitor and answer the more complex multi question emails constantly. I think the Autonomy system self learns so you would only have to manually answer once and then it would use that answer for the future.

I hope this helps!