Email Support is a cost-effective channel for delivering services to customers. As a result, today's customers are progressively more Internet-savvy.

Email and web-based communications are growing faster than Voice based means of customer interaction. Email has the capacity to help you deliver quality online service, establish lasting customer relationships, improve customer loyalty and satisfaction, and even reduce service costs.

Effectively managing email is critical to your ITES organization's ongoing ability to service customers. The customer of today is increasingly familiar with your competitors, and is no longer willing to wait for you to get back to them.

Email Service providers should have capacity to:

• Answer customer inquiries quickly and efficiently, despite potentially high volumes of email
• Answer customer inquiries accurately, with information relevant to the customer's needs
• Build and sustain lasting relationships with your customers

Email Services drawbacks include:

• Very difficult to monitor employee productivity
• No ability to intelligently or efficiently distribute employee workload
• No centralized store of communications history with customers
• Limited system administration potential (backups, archiving, etc.)
• Limited ability to increase productivity and training potential via collaboration
• No ability to report on mail loads in order to refine business processes & operations
• No ability to access email systems from remote locations via the web
• No centralized store of customer contacts

Conclusion

Regardless of what means of customer communications your organization prefers, email is quickly becoming the medium preferred by a large percentage of Internet-savvy customers. Organizations of any size must be prepared to provide excellent customer service via email. With the proper email management tools in place, service providers in India, can succeed like never before.

Amit Nayak
Mentor
ITESGrads India

October 2003