Over the last decade, email has not only evolved into an entrenched medium for personal and business communications, it has also been widely adopted as a channel for customer service and support-with 92% of the Websites offering email for customer support as of the third quarter of 2005. Apart from Websites, organizations also provide email contact addresses on their brochures, annual reports, products, packaging, and other forms of corporate communications.

With firmly entrenched customer expectations when it comes to having an email option for customer service, the onus is on the organization to leverage the cost-effectiveness of email and yet exceed customer expectations. Successful email management should result in increased customer satisfaction, improved agent efficiency, and reduced operational costs.

The best practices, strategies, and techniques for effective email management can be classified into four areas-basic principles, receiving strategies, routing practices and responding techniques.

#1 Basic Principles
An organization has to understand the need for an appropriate email management system to manage customer emails, be aware of the overall multi-channel nature of customer service, set internal objectives and SLAs, and acquire executive sponsorship and funding.

Always respond: The ground rule is to always respond to every customer email that requires a response. It is important to clearly identify an email that may not require a response as well as an email that may just require a single automatic acknowledgement. Document this basic principle as part of the internal service objectives, and use functionality available in email management systems to configure alarms as well as notifications when emails remain unanswered for more than a specified period of time.

Invest in an email response management system: According to JupiterResearch, "Companies that deploy email automation solutions are able to handle at least 54% more email inquiries per hour than those with custom-built applications, and 63% more inquiries per hour than companies using business applications."

Some critical features are required to effectively manage customer queries, including the concepts of departments and queues, intelligent routing, agent productivity tools such as preconfigured responses and shortcuts, personalization tools, knowledgebase integrations, customer service metrics, and many more. Unless these features are leveraged, the chances are it will be a constant struggle and a losing battle when it comes to meeting response expectations and ensuring customer satisfaction.

Keep an overall multi-channel strategy in mind: Any customer service strategy should consider the various traditional and the more recent communication channels. An integrated offering across all channels will ensure the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO) by providing out-of-the-box features, such as unified customer history across channels, single integrated knowledge base, multi-channel routing and cohesive analytics.

View email differently from phone: Responding to emails requires a different set of agent skills and system features, compared to answering phone calls. Email agents should be good at reading comprehension and written communication. Multi-tasking is also an additional skill set requirement. In many cases, agents will handle multiple channels, such as phone or chat. From a system standpoint, immediate and real-time access to customer data is useful for improved email agent productivity.

Ensure executive commitment and sponsorship: Acquire ongoing executive commitment and sponsorship early in the process of implementing an email management system. Work with the email management vendor to present case studies and success stories to the executive team. Secure adequate funding for at least the first phase of the implementation, with guaranteed continuous funds.

Establish objectives and Service Level Agreements (SLAs): Consider current email response processes and historic data to establish internal goals, as well as clear service level agreements. Establish realistic SLAs and set expectations upfront. If possible, communicate these to customers on the Web site.

#2 Receiving Strategies
Significant productivity gains can be achieved, response times decreased, and even email quantities reduced by utilizing strategies to determine how exactly to receive customer emails.

Have an "Always Open" policy for receiving emails: Regardless of agent availability or working hours, customers should be able to write at any time, all the time. Organizations may choose to modify SLAs and set different expectations during peak holiday seasons or new product launches, but consider "closing" the email option only in extreme scenarios like a system failure or a natural disaster.

Originate via Web pages instead of direct email: Consider changing email addresses to Web page links (www.acme.com/info, support.acme.com, www.acme.com/feedback). Many companies benefit from a Web form as opposed to a direct email, as they can control the email address to where responses should be sent, and a Web form will speed up responses. However, note that all email addresses should be removed only if the nature of the business is completely online or if other channel choices are provided.

Design smart email Web forms and utilize "preview before submit" features: Create simple and effective email Web forms by using appropriate category and subcategory dropdown options, check-boxes, radio-buttons, and space for the customer to type free-text. Provide self-service options around the email Web form. Personalize self-service options based on customer value, recent purchases, and past history. If not, capture parameters such as customer email address or order number to identify the customer at a later stage.

Present a preview to the customer with options to cancel, modify, and submit on a preview page. Use tools such as Natural Language Processing (NLP) engine to present further self-service options on the preview page. Presenting a preview page also provides an avenue to set modified expectations if the problem is particularly critical or complex, and include links to other channel options, such as online chat, a Web call-back request or phone.

Manage SPAM and other unwanted emails: Use specialized SPAM filtering software or features available as part of commercial email servers to minimize the number of non-customer emails. Consider using techniques like CAPTCHAs, as the customer is requested to type the letters from a distorted image along with the Web form.

Also, use the required anti-virus tools to scan all incoming email, as well as attachments for potentially harmful viruses. Do not categorically block these emails, as they could be from legitimate customers. Instead, tag them separately and create rules to automatically inform the sender that their email had a virus and could not be opened.