Emails are becoming increasingly popular with customers and are already as important as dealing with customer requests by telephone. This finding was discovered in the course of the “Multichannel-Management” study by the novomind software company. The above-mentioned two communication channels receive school marks 2.1 and 1.9 by customers. Companies, on the other hand, appreciate email as a particularly cost-efficient means in order to communicate with clients.
Communication via telefax or postal mail is 20 and 40% more expensive respectively and less appreciated by clients (marks 2.6 for fax and 2.4 for postal letter). Customer service per short message service (sms) has so far not been successful. SMS messages on average only receive mark 3.1 and thus turn out to be the least popular channel for communication with clients.
Therefore, 93% of all German enterprises use email in order to communicate with their customers in fields such as order taking, after-sales-service etc. Thus, the email communication channel is already more widely used than client communication via phone (92%) and in-situ meetings with customers (84%). Emailing is in particular replacing traditional postal letters: one quarter of all companies already do without postal customer communication.
Emails cost about five Euros per customer inquiry and are by 20% more cost efficient than dealing by phone with customer requests. Thus, the change over to email communication may lead to savings of several hundreds of thousands of Euros in counselling and service costs if the enquiry volume is sufficiently extensive.
However, it is important to systematically improve the quality of service when changing over from oral communication channels to emailing which may seem to be less personal. There is hardly anything more annoying to clients than inadequate answers after a long waiting period. Therefore, companies are more and more often using so-called intelligent email systems.
These so-called email response management systems reduce the time it takes to answer customer requests by correctly interpreting more than 80% of all incoming mails and forwarding them to the suitable contact person within a company.
Connected to a central knowledge data base such systems even generate answer suggestions automatically which can be quickly customized by customer managers. This once again reduces costs per client enquiry while at the same time enhancing service quality. 