Venerable old email is a positively ancient form of communication when compared with the multitude of social media and chat offerings that have sprung up over the last decade. You might be forgiven for thinking that email is old news and that contact centres manage it as well as they do voice calls.
It’s one thing to deliver emails to your contact center agents, but quite another to do so in a way that maintains the delicate balance between keeping agents busy, keeping inbound queues within their SLAs and making sure that emails are not just answered, but actually resolved.
So how do wise contact centers cope with this challenge?
- Automate. A ‘bot’ can pick out the key phrases in your emails and ensure they go to the most suitable agent or team. This will make you more efficient, but don’t overestimate the bot – a human agent is the real value in your contact center.
- Distribute. Make sure that you are using an automated method for distributing emails fairly as they arrive. They should be allocated based on a strategy such as ‘longest waiting agent’.
- Blend. Agents working on emails are great candidates to be blended across to voice calls when your incoming phone lines get busy. Make use of the fact that an email is not as urgent as a call and move agents based on the urgency of your workload.
- Track. An email may contain several questions and need answers from different sources. Make sure your emails have a conclusion. A response should ideally be a resolution, not the start of a thread.
- Report. As a supervisor, know the average response time and how effective your agents are at giving a single response to resolve each query.
- Personalise. If an agent already has a relationship with a customer you will usually want to exploit this. This applies to other media channels, but the slower nature of emails means that this is easier to effect. The personal touch is something that consumers prefer, so exploit this as far as you can.
Email is not an exciting new media that presents a whole new set of challenges. Quite the reverse. It has not changed significantly in many years. However, after voice it is still the single most important source of inbound contact center queries. Customers like it, so you should ensure that you give it the priority it deserves and manage those emails as efficiently as you do other media channels.
What We Offer
Sytel Limited develops and supplies Softdial Contact Center® (SCC) – multimedia, multichannel, fully blended cloud contact center solutions.
Available by subscription as CCaaS, fully managed and supported by Sytel, or for quick and easy deployment by partners and enterprise users.
All Sytel cloud components are secure, resilient and scale seamlessly from 10 agents to 10,000+, whether local, mobile or remote.
Flexible Contact Center Software
Softdial Contact Center™ – rich functionality, all-in-one, designed to deliver at scale
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Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS)
CCaaS for subscribers – global service, with no upfront costs
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Contact Center Platform – CCaaS Partners
Build your own CCaaS business using the power and flexibility of Sytel software
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Contact Center Platform – Enterprise
High performance platform to drive contact center productivity – cloud, on-premise or hybrid
Blended Media Desktop
Fully customisable, multi-channel, multi-session workspace
Work Anywhere
Browser-based tools, no software installation required
Customise, Localise, White Label
Design all user interfaces to individual requirements
Integration via APIs
‘Swap out’ components and integrate with 3rd party apps
World Class Development
Continuous evolution pushing technical boundaries
Capabilities
Softdial Contact Center™ (SCC) is designed to be flexible, extensible and scalable, integrating with any legacy equipment, and meeting the most complex of requirements.
All Media Channels
Voice, chat, email, social, etc – fully integrated and blended
Agent Multi-Tasking
Work with multiple live contact sessions of any media channel
Dynamic Workforce Management
Optimise agent usage and balance workloads in real-time without human intervention, across all media channels
Predictive Dialing
Best-of-breed performance under compliance
Optimised Inbound Routing
Smart rules and ‘best-available’ decisions to drive great customer service
Agent Scripts
Help agents achieve and maintain excellence
Voice and Screen Recording
See and hear exactly how agents are interacting
Analytics and Data Feeds
Measure and evaluate performance at every level
IVR, Bots & Conversational AI
Design effective automated flows or integrate with 3rd party providers
Customer Journey Tracking
Stored customer contact history, to aid routing and add context to conversations
Modules
Drive operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction & improve agent performance
Softdial One™
Highly flexible unified web UI for agents, supervisors and administrators
Softdial Scripter™
Create complex process flow scripts for agents, IVR, chatbots and other applications
Sytel AI Dialer™
Maximum predictive dialing performance, under any compliance rules
Softdial Pathfinder™
Precise routing rules for ‘best available’ connection
Softdial Media Server™
Core telephony functions to manage all inbound/outbound SIP calls
Softdial Reporter™ 5
Fully customisable performance stats, charts and reports, across all channels
Softdial Publisher™
Comprehensive data output to build your own reports
Softdial Recording Monitor™
Audio and screen recording of agent activity to ensure the highest standards
Softdial Campaign Manager™
Automation to optimise any outreach strategy
Softdial Repository™
Central storage and configuration of common resources
Sytel Global Compliance™
Flexible ‘no contact’ rules to protect contact center and consumer
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Performance and efficiency for a wide range of business applications
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Best-of-breed predictive dialing with CATI integration
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