The latest worldwide developments regarding confinement and, in some countries, the obligation to work remotely from home, have caused organizations and consumers alike to more heavily rely on email. This has generated a tsunami of emails for organizations used to other means of connecting with customers, especially those employing call centers.
How is your organization coping with this new deluge of emails? How does it affect your customer relationships? Did you close your physical customer care centers? Are customer requests now sent via email versus phone calls? Are you able to process this increased volume of messages accurately and in a timely manner? Or do you fear your customers are getting dissatisfied because they have to wait too long for an answer?
Many industry sectors are confronted with an exponential increase of customer requests by email. In the financial services, for example, customer inquiries used to be handled via call centers which are now closed. Customers are asked to send their questions per email, which results in a huge increase in the number of written requests to be processed. Organizations without an automated process for handling incoming messages are at a disadvantage. First there is the hard dollar cost of having to pay staff to triage messages, and then the soft dollar cost of losing customers due to slow response time. Even those who have implemented some form of automation are concerned about the cost of improperly handling the messages due to natural language processing challenges.
Another example are public services, which were forced to close their offices. All administrative steps such as renewing your ID-card or obtaining an official document must now be done via email or online platforms. The Social Security Administration has also closed its offices throughout the US, asking people to file their benefit claims through their hotline or website. But Social Security was already receiving 75 million calls annually in pre-COVID times, resulting in long wait times. As a consequence, the agency is urging the public to process their requests whenever possible online. Are the systems capable to cope with the mass of online requests coming in? As a minimum, a simple classification and routing system would help speed up the response time by forwarding the requests to the correct department.
Some organizations already realized the cost savings and added value they can get from automating the processing of incoming messages. For example, an international transportation company implemented an intelligent, AI-based semantic classification and routing solution to optimize email processing in customer centers. The company was coping with hundreds of thousands of emails sent every day in 35 countries. Teams were wasting huge amounts of time sorting out manually the emails that required action – a mere 50% of the whole volume. The company decided to implement a semantic classification solution that ignores irrelevant emails and automatically routes business-relevant emails to the appropriate regional center, depending on the language used in the message. This intelligent solution is able to categorize the topic addressed in the emails and to forward them to the department that should take action. With this system, the company greatly improved its responsiveness, leading to higher customer satisfaction and retention, not to mention the increased motivation of its customer center agents, who could focus on more rewarding activities.
An intelligent message classification solution, ready to implement in an enterprise environment, quickly and with minimal effort, is available today. Why wait?
