Lost in the Web: companies fail to respond to e-mails

Forty per cent of companies leave customer e-mails unanswered
Conventional e-mail management systems are not accurate enough

Uncoordinated e-mails vex customers  
A sorry state of affairs in the age of the Internet: 40% of Germany’s companies, ministries and government authorities leave customer e-mail enquiries unanswered. Electronic customer letters are still simply getting lost amid the mass of e-mails. Every unanswered e-mail leaves behind an irritated customer. Granted, 80 million electronic mails land in German companies’ virtual mailboxes every day, but firms can no longer afford to neglect their customer service like that. These are the findings of the novomind survey entitled "Reality Check 2009". 
  
Conventional e-mail management solutions only search for keywords  
Additional IT support should actually bring order to electronic customer management. But even common e-mail management solutions don’t relieve the burden as they should. Many software packages don’t sort incoming mails by subject, nor by which customer consultant is responsible for them. Furthermore, they only search the enquiries on the basis of keywords and do not examine them for their content. This means that enquiries from customers in need of a quick answer arrive too late, or sometimes never, at the customer consultant responsible. 
  
The modern e-mail management solution novomind iMail™ enables accurate e-mail processing  
Modern software is now able to deliver much better results. The e-mail management system novomind iMail™ conducts a much more accurate assessment. In order to analyse the content of an e-mail, the system uses a combination of statistical and rule-based text recognition. The software searches through the electronic post using semantic text analysis, allocating enquiries to the most likely categories. This makes it more than 80% likely that an e-mail will arrive at exactly the right customer consultant. The e-mail management system is also able to detect meaning contexts beyond the limits of single sentences, and thus forward e-mails correctly that belong to categories with low recognition rates. 
  
novomind AG: innovative software for professional customer communication  
Hamburg-based software company novomind is the fastest-growing company in the fields of electronic customer communication and mail management. As a leading provider of innovative solutions for digital customer communication, novomind AG offers software for service-based, personalised interaction with customers. This achieves noticeable increases in the efficiency of customer administration, as well as a fast return on investment. The service portfolio of the Products Business Unit includes the novomind Self Service Suite™. This software package contains all of the communication modules required for a customer service centre, which revolve around a central knowledge base: e-mail management, virtual customer consulting and systems for interactive real-time communication. In its Services Business Unit, novomind AG implements complex eBusiness applications. More than 40 big-name companies have already opted for novomind technology, including Citibank, Otto and the Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund (German Pensions Association). Club Bertelsmann, EnBW and Mexx, as well as public sector institutions such as the German Bundestag and the Federal Ministry of Economics, are already using novomind systems successfully to back up their customer communication, increase their turnover and improve their public relations. 

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