Achieve rapid ROI by automating email management
Organisations are increasingly reliant on email as a primary channel for customer contact. As email communication continues to grow faster than any other means of customer interaction, the volume of inbound email is dramatically increasing. In today's climate, Customer Service Departments must maintain excellent service levels and be cost-effective.
Trends and challenges in today's business environment
- Organisations are looking for cost-reduction measures, particularly reducing the cost-to-serve.
- Web and email usage is significantly increasing as organisations encourage customers to use cheaper communication channels and customers value the convenience of 24/7 interaction.
- Email surges, e.g. from product promotions or recalls, can result in significant administrative overheads (paying overtime or hiring temporary staff).
- Customers expect the same service quality applied through other communication channels, such as the telephone. Yet overflowing inboxes cause a backlog of inbound queries resulting in poor quality responses and dissatisfied customers taking business elsewhere.
- A 360-degree customer view becomes harder to achieve as vital customer information becomes diluted through the multiplicity of contact channels. This is challenging when emails are still managed on manual platforms.
SAP Email Response Management System (ERMS) provides a fast, cost-efficient solution and can deliver ROI in 6-12 months. It also enables organisations to use their email channel as a strategic asset to increase customer loyalty, generate a rounded customer view and turn inbound queries into sales opportunities.
Business benefits
- Reduce cost-to-serve of high-volume email traffic by reducing agent intervention.
- Redeploy agents to more value adding complex interactions.
- Route emails from high-value customers to specialist teams.
- Improve data quality and generate a 360-degree customer view.
- Turn inbound queries into future sales opportunities by tailoring email responses with relevant marketing offers.
- Improve customer satisfaction through increased accuracy and consistency of outbound communication.
How does SAP ERMS work?
SAP ERMS applies automated business rules to large volumes of inbound email and web forms, to trigger various workflow processes. The automation reduces the need for manual intervention by Customer Service Agents, increasing efficiency, maintaining response quality and reducing cost-to-serve.
The table highlights email response implementation scenarios.
| Scenario |
Minimum SAP CRM functionality setup |
Scenario description |
| Auto-respond |
None |
Responses to frequent and routine enquiries are automated through intelligent analysis of the email or web form content and pre-defined solutions are generated |
| Auto-prepare |
Interaction Centre |
Similar to Auto-respond, but Customer Service Agents can review email content and make changes before the response is sent |
| Routing |
None or Interaction Centre |
Emails are routed to agents based on email content analysis and pre-defined business rules |
| Bounce management |
None |
Enables the recognition and processing of undelivered e-mails which are returned to the sender as auto-reply |
What investment is needed to implement a successful ERMS solution?
A project can be implemented within 3-6 weeks with visible ROI within 6-12 months. It presents a compelling business case for a relatively complex-free project and beyond a SAP CRM license, does not require any additional hardware or software licenses.
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