Email Response Management

This article is for readers who are new to email response management software and will explain what the software does and what the business benefits are.

There are three areas that we will cover:

1. Allocating email.
2. Replying to mail.
3. Policies and reporting.

Allocating email

Logically the first task of an email response management system is to allocate an email that has been received to a user to deal with (note that we use the term 'user' to refer to someone who will be answering email, sometimes users are referred to as agents).

The simplest way of allocating mail is to use a "round robin" rule; so for example if there were three users looking after email arriving at support@example.com each user would take it in turns to receive the mails.

For low volumes of mail this simple approach will make sense but there are some problems with this arrangement:

• Some mails may take much longer to deal with than others, so the workload may not be shared out evenly.
• One of the users may be on vacation or not in the office for some other reason so should not receive mail.
• Not all users will have the skills to deal with all incoming email. This might be a technical skill or perhaps in an enironment where email is arriving in different languages not every user may be able to speak every language.

Email response management products will solve these problems by using a queue system. When a user is ready to deal with an email they can request a mail from the queue and will be given an appropriate mail to deal with.

Replying to mail

In a business that receives large volumes of mail finding the most important mails to reply to can be difficult. It can be tempting for users to "cherry pick" the easiest mails to deal with which are not always the mails that are most urgent.

In MailManager the system can be set up either to give users a list of mails with suggested priorities or alternatively the user can simply be allocated the mail that the system believes is the most urgent.

Email response management is also about making it easier for the user to reply to the mails that they have been given. All systems will have standard reply templates but MailManager also has a standard attachments repository which can be used to store the latest documents ready for attaching to outgoing mail.

An email search engine is also very useful, this should allow the user to find out the history of all emails the customers has sent or received. It should also allow the user to find out if similar issues have been raised in the past by other customers and to see what the replies were.

Polices and Reporting

Most managers will want to implement email policies covering topics such as:

• How quickly particular types of emails should be replied to.
• How long email should be retained for.
• Standard disclaimers that should be added to outgoing email.

An email response management product such as MailManager will allow these policies to be set centrally and then help users to implement them.

Reporting will be available on how well the performance targets were met but there should also reports on volumes of mail received which can be useful for capacity planning.