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Customer e-mails go astray
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Every third customer enquiry fails to reach the appropriate service agent
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Artificial intelligence helps improve the channelling of e-mails
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Hamburg, February 20th 2007 –
Customer service agents are tapping messages into their keyboard instead of picking up the phone when replying to enquiries. The volume of e-mails received by call centres in 2006 was 28 per cent higher than in the previous year—and the trend is upwards. In order to be able to cope with the rising number of client e-mails, businesses are increasingly relying on assistance from e-mail management systems. Nonetheless, many companies are experience difficulties with interpreting, classifying and distributing incoming e-mails. The result: a considerable percentage of customer enquiries ends up with the wrong service agent or goes astray. The software developer novomind estimates that nearly one in every three enquiries remains unanswered.
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The reason for wrongly distributed customer enquiries is that conventional e-mail management systems search an e-mail text only for key words. More modern software programs, on the other hand, run a content-related search. novomind is the only software provider in the world to use a combination of statistical and rule-based text recognition in the analysis of incoming enquiries which is based on the so-called "Artificial Intelligence Method” (AIM). On the one hand, the software searches through e-mails for frequently occurring words and assigns the enquiry to the most likely category. For categories with a poor recognition rate, the method is also capable of interpreting context beyond individual sentences in customer enquiries so that they can be forwarded straight to the correct service agent. The success rate is almost 100 per cent.
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Leading European computer linguists and AI experts have for some time now been calling for the development of this kind of flexible system. The statistical method (AIM 1) is particularly good at assigning e-mails to a limited number of thematically very different categories, such as changes of address or supplier enquiries. The rule-based method (AIM 2) makes it possible to perform a more thorough search of the content of customer enquiries. This is done according to the rules of computer linguistics. In addition to this, both methods can be further combined (AIM 3 to 5) to meet the different needs of individual contact centres. Each company picks the method best suited to its requirements.
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All modules of the novomind Self Service Suite™ 5.0 are equipped with these text recognition methods. Thanks to the multichannel capability of the software, it is irrelevant whether customer enquiries are received via e-mail, live chat system or a virtual service agent on the homepage.
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From 27 February to 1 March 2007, novomind AG is exhibiting at stand A2 in hall 5 of CallCenterWorld at the Estrel Convention Center Berlin. Among the products featured at the IT service provider’s stand is version 5.0 of the multichannel-capable software solution novomind Self Service Suite™.
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novomind is a software developer in Hamburg and the fastest-growing company in the field of electronic customer communications and mail management. As the leading provider of innovative solutions for digital customer communications, novomind AG provides software for service-oriented and personalised customer dealings. The software not only optimises efficiency in customer administration significantly, it also gives the user a faster return on investment. The portfolio of the Products division includes the novomind Self-Service Suite™. The software package contains all the communication modules necessary for a customer service centre on a central knowledge basis: e-mail management, virtual customer consulting and systems for interactive, real-time communication. The novomind AG Services division implements complex e-business applications. More than 40 major companies have already decided in favour of novomind technology, among them Citibank, Otto, Yello Strom and the German pension institution Deutsche Rentenversicherung Bund. Club Bertelsmann, EnBW and Mexx as well as public-sector users, such as the German Bundestag (parliament) and the German Department of Trade and Industry, have already successfully introduced novomind systems to optimise their customer communications, turnover and PR.
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