Mailto: Oblivion?

Southwest Airlines is not afraid of technology. The Dallas carrier was one of the first airlines to institute ticketless travel when in 1996 it launched Southwest Airlines Home Gate, its Web site at www.southwest.com.

Ironically, the same customers who can book flights online cannot e-mail the airline. On the home page, the airline states: "At the moment, our ability to support e-mail in a manner consistent with our service expectation is not fully in place."

At the airline, more than 200 customer relations employees have a strict duty to respond, by phone or letter, to every customer contact. A reply might take four to six weeks, but that's not bad considering 50 million people fly Southwest in a year, says Beth Harbin, a company spokeswoman.

Southwest based its decision not to accept e-mail primarily on its commitment to answering every customer inquiry. Technology wasn't a concern - e-mail is, in fact, a part of the airline's culture. Employees have e-mail on an intranet.

Volvo is another company that has justified its decision not to allow e-mail based on a business rationale. At www.volvocars.com, if you click on "Talk to us," you'll get a toll-free number, address and the assertion: "Many questions are best answered by your nearby Volvo retailer."

It wasn't always like that, says one marketing consultant who has been watching the site. When www.volvocars.com appeared two years ago, visitors could click and send e-mail to the Webmaster.

Volvo has revamped the site several times, says Jim Sterne, president of Target Marketing in Santa Barbara, Calif. As he understands it, Volvo closed its electronic mailbox not for technological reasons but because the company wants to avoid legal gray areas, such as how e-mailed complaints are used as part of lemon-law actions.

But Volvo is forfeiting the World Wide Web's opportunity of interactivity, Sterne says. "Volvo took a perfectly good telephone, threw away the earpiece and turned it into a radio," he says metaphorically.

Mail to: links must be part of a site when a company decides to allow buying or opens an extranet door for business partners, industry watchers say. And technology needs to be considered.

Polk Audio, for example, has revamped its online systems with increased customer contact in mind.

It did so by building a supersite - an intranet that feeds data to an extranet and Web site - in spring 1997 (see Intranet, July 1998, page 14). "Our vision is that this is a way to develop a one-to-one relationship with our customers," says Paul DiComo, marketing manager of Polk Audio in Baltimore.

At Polk Audio, three customer service representatives handle every e-mail message that comes their way - up to 400 per week. Most e-mail messages are product inquiries that are answered easily and quickly, DiComo notes. Customer interaction is a priority, so the company shelled out a lot of money for the supersite technology it needed to support those efforts.

"Customer e-mail can provide invaluable research, product information, comments on likes, dislikes, good and poor service, as well as a start for developing a database of customers," says Dan Fine, CEO of Fine.Com, an Internet direct marketing firm in Seattle. According to Fine, the firm spends a lot of time educating clients about the business opportunity, not just the challenge, of close and fast customer interaction.

"Not accepting e-mail is the No. 1 thing you cannot do," says Catherine Graeber, senior vice president and marketing director at Bank of America in San Francisco. "It stops so short of what this medium is about."

At Bank of America, the Web has become another distribution channel, so learning to manage and use e-mail effectively has been crucial - and no small challenge. "You can't underestimate what it takes to pull this off," Graeber says.

Bank of America was well-prepared for a deluge of electronic inquiries because it installed an automated routing system to help manage e-mail coming from its intranet and extranet, Graeber says. Nonetheless, a couple hundred messages per day are so specific that somebody must personally go through them.

Federal Plans

Congress also relies heavily on automated e-mail routing to handle electronic inquiries. Few organizations handle as much mail, particularly involving unpredictable volumes, as does Congress.

For years, Congress has operated the Correspondence Management System (CMS), a filtering system that uses an Oracle database on an IBM RS/6000 server. About two years ago, the IT staff added a Web front end for CMS and created an intranet.

Now when a visitor to a Congressional Web site clicks on the "Send mail" option, the Web front end, called Citizen Direct, pops up. The visitor completes online forms that feed the CMS database with information, such as name, address, topic and e-mail address. The CMS application sorts mail by subject matter for quick replies. Congressional staff members can send responses via Web mail instead of printing them for mailing.

The process speeds standard inquiries, such as requests for flags and tour information. Users can retrieve common forms via the Citizen Direct database. And IT administrators can customize the Web interface with hot issue subjects.

Fine.Com consultants build automated systems that involve Web forms and SQL databases. Such a system would reply instantly to customers, then forward the mail to the right department for attention, Fine says.

An acknowledgement should commit to a response time such as, "We'll reply to your message within 24 hours." Of course, follow-up is vital. And the second message should address the query, not offer another, "We'll get back to you," response.

Alternatively, a company could forward all e-mail to its customer service department for immediate handling or contract with a service bureau to ensure prompt response, Fine says.

If you don't want to custom build an automated routing system, you could use Web-based customer service software such as eGain Communications' eGain Email Management System. EMS can look for keywords and phrases and return content from a knowledge base or route e-mail with which it can't deal. And it can monitor how the message is handled.

Likewise, Unisyn Software provides a programmable message-handling environment in its E-volve Manager package. E-volve Manager looks for keywords in the message header or body and redirects the e-mail to a designated user or issues a reply. It also can execute Visual Basic for Applications scripts and integrate with Open Database Connectivity-compliant databases to store and retrieve customer data and documents.

In a support environment, such a product can handle the majority of routine queries.

Another product, Neuromedia's NeuroStudio, lets you build an automated response system that uses artificial intelligence. With this package, you create "bots" that can respond to English language questions in sophisticated ways.

Effectively integrating Web e-mail into business operations doesn't stop at automated routing. You also should be monitoring and analyzing e-mail requests and looking for trends. You should be able to spot growth patterns and track your response times. This forms your quality assurance program and helps keep your organization looking good.

Most mail servers can be configured to create detailed activity logs, a primary source of data for trending and analysis. E-mail tracking is a function of products such as AbirNet's SessionWall-3 and Kansmen's LittleBrother Pro. These desktop tools monitor all traffic, including

e-mail, and provide raw audit data. Administrators can create custom analysis methods to get statistical information.

FOREWARNED IS FOREARMED

Stopping e-mail from hurtling into a black hole clearly requires some technical smarts, but advance planning helps, too.

Warner-Chappell Music, a Burbank, Calif., Time Warner company, took e-mail inquiries into consideration when it decided to build an extranet through which the general public and business customers could search its music databases online. It installed an Oracle database on a

multiprocessor server also running Netscape's Enterprise Server to prepare for the extranet launch.

E-mail now makes up 15% of the daily inquiries for catalog information, and the company hasn't missed a beat, says Steve Scott, director of new media at Warner-Chappell Music. "We were prepared technologically," he adds.

He doesn't think the operations occur significantly faster online, but Warner-Chappell appears to be garnering new business through the online commerce. "We're serving customers in a different way, and they are often customers who have not previously done business with us on a regular basis," he says.

Several staff members regularly check and manually distribute e-mail inquiries. Scott says he wants to keep close tabs on interaction because the extranet is new, but he expects to automate some requests eventually.

Some new Web functions and marketing to promote them are also in the works, so Scott expects traffic will get a boost again. "We'll be promoting the site, and we'll be ready for more volume," he says.

The problem of handling customer e-mail is not really a technology issue - it's a planning and management one. Unless you've thought through the issues of how - not whether - you'll handle e-mail requests in a timely and effective manner, you may well be consigning not just e-mail to oblivion but your business as well.