Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager 4.2 for Cisco Unified Contact Center Express
Cisco® Unified Communications is a comprehensive IP communications system of voice, video, data, and mobility products and applications. It enables more effective, more secure, more personal communications that directly affect both sales and profitability. It brings people together by enabling a new way of communicating-where your business moves with you, security is everywhere, and information is always available...whenever and wherever it is needed. Cisco Unified Communications is part of an integrated solution that includes network infrastructure, security, mobility, network management products, lifecycle services, flexible deployment and outsourced management options, end-user and partner financing packages, and third-party communications applications.
Cisco Unified Contact Center solutions help customers move into the next phase of customer contact-beyond today's contact center to a Customer Interaction Network. The Customer Interaction Network is a distributed, IP-based customer service infrastructure that comprises a continuously evolving suite of innovative, multichannel services and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. These services and applications provide premium responsiveness and streamlined customer exchanges to help your organization deliver superior customer service. A Customer Interaction Network extends customer service capabilities across the entire organization, giving your business a more integrated and collaborative approach to customer satisfaction and leading to a better customer experience.
Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager Overview
Customers are turning to company Websites to locate information about products and services, to seek support, and to conduct transactions. In addition, customers are seeking alternative ways, such as e-mail, to contact customer support centers. Thus, the volume of incoming e-mail interactions to contact centers is growing. As more customers come to rely on e-mail for customer service and support inquiries, the challenge is to develop a cost-effective strategy to enable contact centers, helpdesks, and customer service teams to intelligently and efficiently route and process inbound e-mails and Web form inquiries from customers, employees, and other users. Quickly responding to customer inquiries translates into strengthened customer relationships and added value in the contact center.
Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager increases agent productivity through a powerful yet intuitive user interface. A full suite of tools including suggested responses, a knowledgebase, and customer history are easily accessible, enabling quick, consistent responses. Full HTML support for both inbound and outbound communications and the ability to attach larger files allows for rich e-mail collaboration. Matching the best available agent and relevant response with each e-mail request is critical for improving contact center productivity. Using a powerful visual workflow designer, you can quickly create your e-mail handling process, set up service-level agreement (SLA) triggers and routing mechanisms. Based on the message's contents, an automatic response may be sent from the knowledgebase and suggested responses may be provided to the agent.
A core element to providing a positive impact on your customer service function is a shared single platform between Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager and Cisco Unified Web Interaction Manager. This single platform provides agents with a common intuitive user interface for both e-mail management and Web collaboration, enabling them to access a shared knowledgebase and customer history archive for more effective, efficient and consistent customer service.
How Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager Works
When a customer e-mail or Web form inquiry is received, Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager sends an automatically generated acknowledgement, based on the date and time the inquiry was received, its subject, or the customer's profile. After generating the acknowledgment, the system analyzes the content of the e-mail and generates a list of suggested responses. The system can be configured to send an automatically generated reply if the nature of the inquiry is clear from the subject or contents. Or, when a response requires a more specific or custom response, the system routes the e-mail to an appropriate team or individual agent. The routing is automated with the help of predefined workflows and can be based on the subject, information in the customer profile, or agent availability.
When the agent retrieves the e-mail, the system can access any necessary data from back-office systems and suggest templates for the reply. The agent can drag and drop or insert content from the knowledgebase to quickly create a response. Using the knowledgebase and templates helps ensure consistent yet speedy responses (templates and knowledgebase articles can be partitioned so only items relevant to a specific department or group can be seen and accessed by that group). When the agent sends the reply, the e-mail may be routed to a supervisor or team leader for review before being sent. Team leaders can also monitor service levels, as well as individual agent queues and productivity.
Features and Benefits
Some of the important features and their benefits include:
• Shared infrastructure with Cisco Unified Web Interaction Manager-Includes common user and customer accounts, interaction records, and knowledgebase for easier management across applications.
• Help ensure consistent response and quality-Eliminate the need to cut and paste responses from additional software packages. Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager allows you to easily use answers from the centralized knowledgebase for frequent queries, which often account for a large percentage of all e-mail messages handled. New agents can be productive and consistent using templates, while experienced agents can add value by handling complex queries escalated to them through the system. Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager also allows the monitoring of the quality of outbound e-mails based on rules set by the supervisor. For example, a supervisor may set a rule to scan the response for certain keywords or phrases and route flagged responses to editors before sending them out to customers.
• Provide value-based, personalized service-You can implement effective e-mail workflows and enable your agents to respond personally and accurately. While creating responses, agents can access the customer's complete case history. Furthermore, the Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager provides access to external databases and Websites for added personalization. The content retrieved can be used in routing rules, automatically inserted as part of personalized responses, or simply made available to agents to provide better service. Common examples of such external data sources are CRM systems, customer billing and shipping databases.
• Analyze and manage service operations-Easy-to-use reports in Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager help you improve operations and better understand customer needs. Many built-in reports, with "drill down" options and export capabilities allow contact center managers to track agent productivity, customer behavior, and department trends. For example, managers can track how many e-mails are processed per day and per agent, as well as the number of e-mails in different queues and categories. In addition, customized reports can be created based on business needs. These reports enable your company to gain a complete picture of customer input and agent output, enabling managers to tune operations for optimum performance.
• Provide reliable, available, and scalable service-Benefiting extensively from a J2EE-compliant architecture, Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manger is designed to scale horizontally through distributed service configurations that can be run across multiple servers. Multiple e-mail exchange protocols such as POP3 and IMAP are supported. To help ensure reliability and availability, a service monitoring and management module flags system malfunction and enables quick recovery.
Cisco Unified Communications Services and Support
Using the Cisco Lifecycle Services approach, Cisco and its partners offer a broad portfolio of end-to-end services to support the Cisco Unified Communications system. These services are based on proven methodologies for deploying, operating, and optimizing IP communications solutions. Initial planning and design services, for example, can help you meet aggressive deployment schedules and minimize network disruption during implementation. Operate services reduce the risk of communications downtime with expert technical support, and optimize services enhance solution performance for operational excellence. Cisco and its partners offer a system-level service and support approach that can help you create and maintain a resilient, converged network that meets your business needs.
Summary
As more of your customers come to rely on e-mail for customer service and support inquiries, Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager provides a cost-effective strategy to enable contact centers, helpdesks, and customer service teams to intelligently and efficiently route and process inbound e-mails and Web form inquiries from customers, employees, and other users. Cisco Unified E-Mail Interaction Manager can help contact centers quickly respond to customer inquires received via e-mail, translating customer e-mail inquiries into strengthened customer relationships while adding value and efficiency in the contact center.
