You Thought Call Centres Were Bad

E-mail is officially the UK’s worst channel for customer service - at least according to men in white coats at ‘eService’ provider Transversal. For e-business owners - and customers I suppose - this is bad news.

Transversal’s third annual ‘Multi-channel Customer Service Study’ has uncovered a growing crisis in e-mail response: e-mailing customer service staff is markedly less effective at yielding a satisfactory answer than using an automated online system or phoning a contact centre. OMG, we're all doomed!

Less than half (46%) of the routine customer service questions e-mailed to 100 leading organisations (in the banking, telecoms, insurance, travel, consumer electronics, grocery retail, fashion retail, CD/DVD retail, consumer electronics retail and utilities sectors) were answered adequately.

Additionally, the average time to respond to e-mail was nearly 2 days (46 hours), with 28% of organisations not even replying at all. What are these people being paid for? However, proving that fast, accurate responses by e-mail are possible, some companies responded with useful answers within 10 minutes. Overall these figures show a major deterioration since 2006, when e-mail successfully answered 60% of queries and kept customers waiting less time (on average 33 hours) for a reply.

The usefulness of e-mail replies has deteriorated year on year in 80% of sectors. Even though many have improved response times, this appears to be through sacrificing effectiveness of replies. For example, in 2006, utilities companies took an average of 102 hours to reply to e-mail with 70% of replies answering the question. While 2007 e-mail response times improved to 53 hours, only 15% of replies answered the question. The picture is even worse in telecoms. From 2005 to 2007, average reply time fell from 32 to 26 hours but successful answers fell from 70% to 20%. The pattern of improving response times at the expense of deteriorating answers is clearly evident.

Insurance companies came bottom of the survey: only one e-mail reply successfully answered the question and 50% of companies didn’t respond at all. The slowest response took 27 hours - and then asked the customer to call them! Utilities were nearly as bad, with only one answering the question successfully and one partially answering it. One utility even advised customers to visit third-party comparison sites to get information on current pricing. How funny is that!

Proving that fast, accurate responses are possible, in contrast 80% of CD/DVD retailers provided correct answers, with the quickest received within one hour. Fashion, grocery and electronics retailers as well as consumer electronics manufacturers also scored relatively highly - but still only around 50% of those surveyed responded satisfactorily. The fastest successful response was from a consumer electronics company which answered the question within 10 minutes. Showing the wide range of e-mail handling skills a rival company in the same sector took 13 days to respond to an identical query.

What lessons can we learn from this survey? First and foremost, don't sledgehammer your computer, it's obvious there are general failings in the customer service e-mail channel. Companies are playing ping pong with e-mail enquiries, pushing them back to the Web or forcing consumers to call contact centres. Tell me, what is the point in paying staff to respond to customers’ questions badly? With spend-thrifty consumers increasingly demanding personalised service, e-mail should be at the forefront of delivering tailored responses that help convert browsers into customers and bring in the reddies. Some organisations are doing this extremely well but the general picture is of lazy, generic replies - if companies even bother to respond ...

Too many companies simply use e-mail to push customers to other channels rather than even attempting to provide a useful answer. Inadequate replies direct customers to call a contact centre, while others push customers back to the Web site - where they started! Not only does this increase customer dissatisfaction but multiplies the number of contacts consumers need to make, with many having to telephone to resolve their enquiry.

If you run an e-business and are struggling to cope with e-mails, aim to reduce the sheer volume of e-mail you receive. A key way to accomplish this is to allow customers to first ask their questions through a customer service knowledgebase on your Web site. If customers then go on to e-mail from the knowledgebase, the agent will be able to see what they have searched for - there is then no excuse for sending customers back to the same Web site pages.

Also try to monitor the quality of responses, with a narrow focus on agents answering questions to hit service level targets rather than spending the time to properly resolve customer queries. With many contact centres outsourced this also has a financial aspect - companies that are paid a set amount for every e-mail answered have no incentive to ensure agents are providing detailed, useful responses. Equally, contact centre managers targeted purely on numbers don’t have a remit in their jobs to monitor content. Take a step back and overhaul your processes to ensure that the e-mail channel is providing what your customers want and need.