posted
Does anyone know of a study comparing the cost and value for a business resolving customer service type issues by email to by calls? I've often heard that it's much cheaper for the company if it can do it by email. I've been trying to google up some statistic or business journal-type article on this subject but so far have not found anything.
The situation: I am one of 4 people answering CS email in a call center that has something like 30-40 people on the phone (some of them are parttime, I don't know the exact number for that). Some of the managers are trying to say that us email folks should get on the phones anytime that the hold times for callers are 3 minutes or longer. I don't think that's a bad thing when our email queues are low, but with only 4 of us and the other responsibilities that we do as well... Let's just say we have plenty of our own work. It doesn't make ANY sense to me to pull us away from a queue of emails that's more likely around 24 hours old* to cut down on a 3-minute holdtime.
*We don't have enough weekend coverage right now, so we're usually working a backlog early in the week. Around wednesday or thursday it's more like 4 to 8 hours and sometimes we get it down to 0.
Anyway, looking for something to point to as backup for the "email is important too" position.
posted
Enig, I do pretty much the same thing, except that e-mails are a secondary CS job for about half of us here. I take about 60 calls per day and answer 35-40 e-mails per day.
It's not so bad and that seems the best use of CS staffers (some folks, however, should never be left to answer e-mails).
Posts: 2848 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
That's a fine arrangement if you have enough people trained on both. We have 4 people answering email and they want those 4 to take more calls. None of the dozens of people on phones help with email and we usually have a LOT more work over here.
I do about 100 emails a day, unless I'm also working on the various other special projects my team gets. Compare a wait time of 24 hours to 3 minutes and tell me which part of workflow needs more staff.
posted
I dunno about a study, but personally, if I need help and have a choice, and my email doesn't get answered in a reasonable amount of time, I call. So they may be getting extra calls especially during the first part of the week from people that could have been handled by email. Hope that made sense.
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posted
Well, the point I was getting at is that they're getting double the amount of contacts on those people (like me). So they're not saving money by having you answer phones, they're doubling the work load on those calls. Also, they're doubling (or more) their customers' frustration with CS. JMO.
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posted
No offense, but they should rotate the email people, quite honestly, since it's very low stress compared to taking calls.
On that note, I've seen some CS centers have the people on call answer emails during their 'spare' time and/or keep an eye on the live chat.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
I refuse to communicate with tech support via E-mail, because it has been my experience that they will never answer my question. I will even endure three hour hold times to get to a human being, because that dramatically increases the odds that I can browbeat a fix out of them.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
I like the live chat option in semi-technical "need specific information about your product X and I can't find it on your website" situations. In those cases I've had much better results with it than phone calls.
Posts: 11265 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
Tom, I've had the same experience. Even on the phone, I need to walk the CS people through their own job half the time.
Posts: 3960 | Registered: Jul 2001
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posted
I agree with Tom on the tech support aspect. That is one thing that is just really ineffective through e-mail.
My current employer is very small in terms of online presence, compared to what I'm used to. At my last job I was doing e-mail CS for 3 years, including time as a trainer and as a supervisor. We had more people doing e-mail as primary task than my current employer has on the phones total.
I don't think rotating email responsibility is a very good idea. Good email CS with actual resolution requires skillsets a lot of call center workers don't have. Sure, most of them could be trained to do it, but with the attrition of most call centers that doesn't seem cost effective. And if you have goals and are responsible for keeping queues down, it's not all that much lower stress. Good email CS includes outbound calls when the situation warrants.
I should probably also mention that with my current job I handle email not just from customers, but also from our retail stores and delivery technicians. Both of those have the potential to be a bigger pain in the neck than the customers.
I get a little fussy on this topic sometimes, because I'm used being required to provide a much higher level of email service than what I ever seem to get when I email most companies. Overall, my job's pretty good though, because my bosses recognize that I have more experience with online CS than pretty much anybody else in the company.
posted
Well, to get back to your question, I just honestly can't see email as ever being more cost effective than talking with someone. It's just too time consuming if you're talking about actually telling people how to do things in a step by step fashion. Though, admittedly, my experience with it may be different than yours.
Now, live chat, that I can definitely see....
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
Enig is doing customer service email for a furniture company, not tech support. There's not a whole lot of things that people do with their beds that you have to talk them through step by step.
Well, maybe there are, but that would be a different type of phone service.
Posts: 9866 | Registered: Apr 2002
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posted
If you've ever worked email customer service and think it's more time consuming than calls, either your company didn't have a good document/response library or wasn't providing one-email resolution. Which, if they're rotating call people or having them answer email in-between calls, is probably the case. I'd say on average I answer 3 or 4 emails in the time it would take me to answer 1 call. Sometimes they do need to email back, but those mostly situation where, on the phone, they would have had to do something and call back later as well. So in terms of cost of paying employees, we're resolving more issues per hourly wage on email than on phone. I'm pretty sure the cost of the email system is less than the cost of the 800-number with enough lines for the call center and people waiting on hold. But I have no numbers for that, and it's what I'm looking for.
When I was at MCI there was a much, much larger email department. Online CS was considered a priority there, and I always heard managers throwing around numbers like "It costs 1/8th as much to resolve a customer's concern through email than by phone." Sometimes that number varied, maybe they did more studies and it changed, or maybe different managers remembered it wrong, or maybe they were pulling numbers out of the air. That's why I'm wondering if anybody's seen an independant study on the comparitive cost and value that I could show management at my current job. I don't have access to any private analysis my old employer may have done.
Also, I know you didn't mean any offense, but please don't treat me like I don't know what I'm talking about on this subject. Email based CS has been my job for 4 years, 2 companies, I've supervized it, and I've trained people how to do it here and at an outsourcing company in India.
Oh, and on dkw's note: Customers do occasionally share information that we'd rather they didn't.
quote: Online CS was considered a priority there, and I always heard managers throwing around numbers like "It costs 1/8th as much to resolve a customer's concern through email than by phone."
Note that the phrase used was "resolve a customer's concern," and not a far more satisfactory "fix a customer's problem."
E-mail questions on product info and the like are fine, and are perfect for cut-and-paste FAQs. For service that actually requires customized answers, calls are far superior -- from the POV of the caller. The company would, I'd imagine, ALWAYS prefer to do E-mail if it could.
But it can't. And that brings us to the main point: you're being asked to take calls when a certain backlog is reached because the only thing more annoying than not getting helpful customer service is waiting on hold for ages. (E-mail doesn't have this problem, but it does have its own version of the problem: no way to know where your E-mail is in the queue. This is why the tech support solution we're using here at the college involves a visible queue of trouble tickets, as well as a visible record of our techs' workloads.) I'm sure the company -- quite rightly -- recognizes that answering E-mails more slowly is far, far less likely to lose them a customer than taking too long to pick up the phone.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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quote: Note that the phrase used was "resolve a customer's concern," and not a far more satisfactory "fix a customer's problem."
This is true. But I'm not doing tech support and "fix a customer's problem" doesn't apply to the majority of the situations we deal with. I see "resolve a concern" as covering fix a problem, answer a question, give a price quote, update an order, and whatever else somebody might call or email about.
Different people have different preferences. I've dealt with a LOT of customers who would rather take care of things entirely by email than have to call in. I think that number is growing as more and more people get online. Every time we get backlogged on email I also see a lot of customers who sent an email first but when we didn't answer fast enough then they call in. If the company had been answering the emails faster they would have less phone calls that day, reducing hold times for everybody else who called. Good CS needs both options to be doing well for customer satisfation.
The call center managers (note: not anyone who's in charge of BOTH groups) want us to switch to calls at a 3 minute hold time, regardless of how old the emails in queue are. On a monday that might mean 3 minutes vs 2 DAYS. That doesn't make sense to me. 3 minutes vs 2 hours on email? Sure, that's not perceived as a long wait for email response so let's help the phones.
My main point here is that if they have 40 people on the phones and 4 answering emails, taking those 4 off emails to do phones is usually going to do less to help the overall holdtimes and call volume. When people don't get a reply they call in, and they're even more upset on the call when that happens.
But we could trade anecdotes all day. I've heard people quote cost/value studies comparing the two but pure googling hasn't helped me find anything so far. Does anyone know an online business journal or discussion group or something like that so I could narrow my search?
posted
I don't know of any study, but my experience is that efficiency of the medium depends on the issue. I prefer to get my issues via email, and if I can fix or answer the issue via email, I do. But sometimes the email doesn't have enough info, or the explanation is too long or complicated to put into an email easily, in which case I call.
In other words, if email makes sense, and I can answer it quickly with one email answer, that makes email more effective and efficient. I prefer it only because on the phone, inevitably the customer thinks of three other things that are also an issue, and since he has me on the line...
That said, I think it would be very difficult to do a valid cost/value analysis, since the mediums both have strengths and weaknesses. They both require a human to look at them and respond. Also, industries would vary for the efficiency of one method over another. Office supplies might find email support very efficient, where electronics might find it more cumbersome than phone.
Much as it is my preferred medium, email is not particularly personable. In my case, it can equate to good customer service because sometimes my answers are rather technical, and it is helpful for the customer to be able to print it out to work with.
But I've met almost all of my customers in person, worked at their offices physically, and talk with them at least a couple of times a month on the phone. So email is not so really so unpersonal.
Were it me managing a call center focused on good customer service, where the relationship to the customer exists only during the time they call, I'd probably ditch email entirely and go fully to phone. Email could be used as supplementary to a given phone call ("may I email you more explicit instructions?"), but I wouldn't use it as a method for incoming issues.
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote: If you've ever worked email customer service and think it's more time consuming than calls, either your company didn't have a good document/response library or wasn't providing one-email resolution.
Or it was a different customer base, or there were a different set of problems....
quote: Also, I know you didn't mean any offense, but please don't treat me like I don't know what I'm talking about on this subject. Email based CS has been my job for 4 years, 2 companies, I've supervized it, and I've trained people how to do it here and at an outsourcing company in India.
*mumble Wow, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition*
Uh, I had no idea I was treating you that way. So, pardon if I did.
It seems like you're already sold on the idea of email customer service/support, whatever, and are just looking for a study to back up your experiences so you can sell it to your current company or something. It seemed like from your first post that you were looking for feedback in general from people regarding email versus phone support. Sorry if I misunderstood.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
Sorry Storm, that was a bit of a grouchy morning post for me. Perhaps an overreaction to a "meh, email's not important" vibe I was getting from some of the posts, which may have been completely unintended. Sorry for the snippiness.
Yes, I'm trying to find a study to back my opinion at my current company, because the email service here is relatively new and still growing and developing. The other company I'd been working at had been doing customer service in general for at least twice as long as this one, had a much more fully developed online CS group and policy set, and the consensus there was that prompt and thorough email response was as important to customer satisfaction as prompt and thorough phone response. It's not that opinions aren't welcome, it's just that opinions either way aren't necessarily going to convince management here, who doesn't have as much experience with this whole email "thing" and I was asking about a larger study/analysis in the first post.
Here's something related that general feedback would be really good for: How long do you consider "too much wait" for waiting on hold and for waiting for an email answer? At my last company the email response time goal was 2 hours or less, which seems like overkill to me. (Great if you can manage it, but not necessary.)
Personally, if I call a company and wait on hold 3-5 minutes I don't think that's a big deal, but as it gets closer to 10 minutes I'd be upset. For email I think the 4-8 hour range is a reasonable target (send it before work, have an answer when you get home, that kind of thing) and when it's over 24 hours I start getting annoyed. What do other people think about waiting?
posted
Enigmatic, some months ago I had to do some shifting around of flights with Alaska Air. I was working on-site with a customer, which for me means 15+ hour days. I really, really didn't have time to be on the phone waiting to talk to an agent. Yet I had to take care of the problem with my flight, or risk having to stay the weekend. I sent an email after waiting for a few minutes on hold and realizing I really didn't have time for it.
The next day, and maybe 10 email exchanges later, the problem was taken care of and I hadn't really lost any customer time since I could write and send the emails during meetings. Plus the agent that helped me really showed her concern for good customer service via her emails. I could tell it was a person on the other end, not a machine. It was very nice, and it didn't make it quite so impersonal.
It was a good experience only because their response time (which was critical to me for the issue) was fairly quick (hours, not days), and my problem was taken care of. She even went above the call of duty and checked my other booked flights for subsequent weeks to make sure they were all set.
Posts: 5948 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote: How long do you consider "too much wait" for waiting on hold and for waiting for an email answer?
Too much waiting for E-mail is 6 hours. Too much waiting for a phone call can range from 3 to 10 minutes, depending on what it is I'm calling for.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
When waiting for an email answer, I would consider 4 hours too long. Ideally, within 2 hours would be good.
When waiting on hold, I would consider 10 minutes too long. I would hope to wait less than 5 minutes.
Posts: 5879 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:Originally posted by camus: Just wondering...are you working right now?
Well, I am at work now. I work the later shift. See how dilligent I am, doing work-related research during my break?
From the answers here so far about respective acceptable wait times my current employer would need to move people from calls to help with email more often than the other way around. I think part of the issue in this specific case is that 1 year ago they only had 2 people on emails and the wait time was constantly in days, sometimes 1-2 weeks. Some of the managers seem to think "Well, you're not as behind as THAT was, so you can spare the workhours to help my team out."
Right at the moment: Oldest email in queue is 26 hours and longest call on hold is 90 seconds.
posted
Enigmatic, try back issues of "Telephony" magazine. Also, I'll check tomorrow, but you might also ask your sister if she has a contact at Telcordia who would have access to their library of papers and studies. She is closer to the right department than I am. I can't believe that there isn't a bunch of industry information on this. You might alos try someone who is marketing email systems. Companies are in and out of our DSL demo labs all the time. I'll see if I can snag one for you.
Posts: 21 | Registered: Dec 2004
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