Chapter 10 – Contact Management Contact Management Overview
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My Contacts
You can create contacts who can be agents, employees, customers, people on your people database, or any other third party.
Email
You can give customers and/or potential clients email addresses to send queries.
The email feature makes a good impression on your customers and potential customers. If you have a large volume of contact management traffic, this feature speeds up the allocation of incidents to the correct agents considerably. It can also dramatically reduce your administration costs.
To configure this feature, you create additional email addresses in your company. These email addresses are for Contact Management’s use only. For each email address, you specify information such as which database it links to, the incident type. You can therefore create separate email addresses for sales and support, or for specific sales and/or support areas. The closer you model the email addresses to your contact management structure, the more accurate the assignment of incidents is.
You can also set up an automatic response to the email. This will send a reply to the sender. You could say, for example, that you will respond to the email within two working days.
This means, in effect, that Contact Management contains the tools you need for a completely automated email help centre.
Reports and Enquiries
Since management of the Contact Management function is one of the prime reasons for using it, the reporting and enquiry functions form a prominent part of day-to-day processing:
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Supervisors and managers have instant access to the current state of play.
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Managers can use feedback from reports and charts to re-allocate resources depending on the actual, live situation. For example, if a particular agent group has too many incidents to handle, a manager can simply add new agents from less active agent groups into the busier agent groups.
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Agents themselves get to see all outstanding incidents allocated to them. They can group these by priority, date due, product types, customer, or any number of criteria.
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All incidents are visible to everyone at any time. This principle, combined with Contact Management’s ability to group incidents, allows personnel in your organisation to use incident data in many ways:
» Supervisors can identify inefficient agents by looking at incident closing statistics, and agents with inadequate skills by looking at assignments of incidents to other agents.
» Customer relationship personnel can see incidents grouped by customer, and can gauge service levels and identify potential hotspots.
