The art of automation

If you are promoting a hot product on your Web site and you post an e-mail address such as info@mycompany.com, you'd better be prepared. If your sales pitch is successful, the flood of e-mail inquiries may be overwhelming. If you respond slowly, inconsistently or inaccurately, you may lose customers.

To do it right, you can turn to one of several e-mail automation applications. These products examine all e-mail sent to a general corporate address and can automatically route, respond with standard documents, track and pass messages to human agents for more specialized handling (Note: Throughout this story we use "agents" to mean people rather than processes).

We tested three leading e-mail automation products and found they all work well. While there are areas in each that need improvement, the products all help you handle corporate e-mail efficiently.

The three products provide roughly the same services, but each takes a different approach. Our Blue Ribbon winner is Mustang Software's Internet Message Center (IMC), a product with tremendous scope and power. It offers the best reporting facilities of the products we tested and has the most sophisticated message distribution subsystem. Its main drawback is a troublesome installation process.

Running a close second is GFI Fax & Voice's Emailrobot. This is a terrific product - easy to install, fast and well-designed. It offers excellent flexibility and performed flawlessly. Emailrobot's pricing also makes it a great value among these generally expensive products. It was only IMC's more sophisticated reporting and queue management that beat out Emailrobot.

In third place is Calypso Message Center from Micro Computer Systems. This product is written completely in Java, which may be the cause of the sluggishness of its user interface, and may explain why the e-mail retrieval system occasionally paused for no apparent reason. Calypso Message Center needs a lot of polishing to be ready for anything more than a small organization. That said, we like the underlying concept and organization, and we look forward to the next major version.

Getting the message out

An important aspect of e-mail automation is how messages are distributed to queues and agents. Mustang's IMC is the most sophisticated in message distribution. For example, unlike the others, IMC can pull back messages if they sit too long in an agent's queue. Queues, referred to as pools, are also assigned priorities, which allow messages entering a high-priority pool to jump over lower priority messages for faster service. This is a particularly useful feature for maintaining service levels for specific clients. IMC can also dynamically assign priorities to pools by taking into account message age and pool priority.

For load balancing, Emailrobot distributes messages on a round-robin basis to the agents assigned to a departmental queue. Calypso Message Center doesn't offer explicit load balancing, but agents can ask for more than one message at a time from departmental queues.

Canned responses

All the products offer some form of canned response library that lets you send standard replies to common questions.

Adding automation GFI has a companion product for Emailrobot called Emailflow. Emailflow is a workflow product that integrates with Emailrobot and allows you to include workflow and custom procedures to the handling of inbound e-mail. Emailflow includes a graphical editor to define workflows without programming. We were impressed with this product and expect to see other vendors implement similar strategies.

IMC's response library is server-based and accessed through the client. Selecting the library option from the menu provides a hierarchical list of responses that you can search by title or full text. You can copy part or all of a library entry to the clipboard to paste into a response. This was the most sophisticated library function among the products we tested.

Because Emailrobot works with any e-mail program and without a client component, its library function is a separate application. GFI supplies a utility for Windows that pops up when you press a hot key. This is a straightforward service, but unlike IMC, Emailrobot lacks search facilities. This means users need to have a good knowledge of what documents are available.

The Calypso Message Center library interface is built into the client, and library contents are stored at the server. Agents, when working on a reply, can switch from the client to the library, select part or all of a canned response and paste it back into the reply. This library service is comparable to Emailrobot's, but we found it slower and harder to use.

All the products produce reports that allow you to assess service levels. IMC offers a huge number of HTML reports that slice and dice system performance as finely as you please. The IMC manual details how to automate report production.

Emailrobot includes the ability to compare departments' and individual agents' performance and graph their productivity over time. Reports can be output as HTML content for online display.

The reporting in Calypso Message Center is adequate for basic system performance analysis, but there's a lot of room for improvement. For example, you can't break down the statistics on an agent-by-agent basis, a basic requirement for call center management.

Building blocks

While all the products work with Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP)/Post Office Protocol 3 (POP3) servers to send and receive e-mail (Emailrobot works with Microsoft Exchange, as well), that's where the similarities end: Each product uses a different architecture.

Mustang's IMC uses a central server that routes and filters all messages. An IMC Agent Client, which runs alongside any standard e-mail client at the agent's end, connects to the server via HTTP to queue and manipulate messages. IMC's Agent Client is available for Windows and Java.

The IMC server can employ a number of tools to process incoming messages, including autoresponders and filters, as well as techniques such as sophisticated processing using scripting languages through the Windows Scripting Host.

The version of IMC we tested, Enterprise Edition, uses Microsoft SQL Server as its database, while an entry-level system, Business Edition, uses the less-scalable Microsoft Access database.

GFI's Emailrobot runs only on Windows NT 4.0 and can work with Microsoft Exchange Server or SMTP/POP3 servers.

Emailrobot has a central server that retrieves messages from multiple POP3 accounts and provides message processing and routing services.

Emailrobot's agents work with any POP3 client. When Emailrobot determines that a specific agent is the correct recipient for a message, the message is routed to the agent via the SMTP/POP3 server.

Messages routed to agents are modified by adding a tracking code to the subject field and by changing the reply-to address to the address of the server. When the agent has evaluated the message, he can send it back to the server, which routes it back to the originator as a reply; send it to another agent for specialist handling; or ship it to another process, such as a Web conferencing system.

Emailrobot supports sophisticated processing and routing of messages. GFI designed an entire language, similar to Microsoft's Visual Basic for Applications, to drive the processing. To make things easier, GFI supplies a series of wizards to describe a processing task.

The output of the wizards is a program that can be used as is, or modified to integrate with other applications. Output programs can perform database lookups or any other message operation.

Emailrobot can use any Open Database Connectivity database as its message store and to archive messages. The software can also handle the output from Web forms mailed to Emailrobot. This lets you generate e-mail responses to Web-derived content, such as inquiry and order forms, and store and manage the data as needed.

The simplest architecture is that of Micro Computer's Calypso Message Center. This product is potentially the most versatile - it is written entirely in Java and can, at least in theory, be run on any platform that has a Java Runtime Environment. Micro Computer Systems provides installation details for Calypso Message Center on NT, Solaris and NetWare; and details for the client, referred to as a workstation, on NT and Solaris.

Calypso Message Center consists of a central server that polls one or more accounts on a POP3 server. Incoming messages from a particular POP3 account are assigned to a department (a pool of messages) associated with that account - a simple approach to routing.

Calypso Message Center also offers more complex routing that allows for mail from a monitored POP3 account to be subjected to filters. The filters route messages from any POP3 account to any department according to rules you define. For example, although a message is received on the sales POP3 account, because it contains the words "download patch," a filter can reroute the message to the support department.

Agents working on a TCP/IP-enabled PC use the workstation software to connect to the server and handle messages.

Another architectural element worth noting is the Calypso Plug-in Protocol, which allows programmers to extend the message processing facilities of Calypso Message Center with external applications on any platform located anywhere on a TCP/IP network.

For example, you could tie in an external application to search the message header for the "from" address, perform a lookup in a database to find the sender's account status, and send the message to an agent with the account status appended.

Calypso Message Center comes with its own proprietary database. The server can be set up to create complete automatic backups of all messages, statistics and configuration data. Because the database is proprietary, we have a concern that if something should go wrong - for example, a corruption in a critical backup - you could find that a quick recovery is difficult.

The most difficult installation was that of IMC, which uses Microsoft SQL Server 6.5. If there is a failure of any kind in the SQL Server setup process, IMC remains blissfully unaware of the fact and concludes installation with a cheery message as if everything were all right. Once you get beyond installation, IMC is easy to configure and get running, though the documentation is not overly helpful. The manuals have a cobbled-together look, as if multiple authors had documented multiple versions and then a subsequent editor merged the lot.

Installation of Emailrobot was easy. The documentation, while incomplete in some places, is well written compared with the average manual, and it is the most accessible documentation of the products we tested.

Calypso Message Center's server and workstation have long initialization periods after they load (at least 5 minutes and 30 seconds, respectively) for no obvious reason. As neither gave any feedback during this period, we kept thinking something had gone wrong. We also noticed that when agents retrieved messages, the agent software often slowed down. This worsened as we loaded the system.

Micro Computer Systems is also vague about some aspects of Calypso Message Center. The documentation is disorganized and clumsy. We thought that the advice in the manual, "If you feel that the amount of memory used during loading is excessive, you may want to change the initial Java heap size," to be far too general and essentially useless.

Good today, better tomorrow

Today, organizations are realizing that they had better handle e-mail at least as well as they handle the telephone. At the same time, e-mail automation software vendors are trying to roll out complex applications with an array of new technologies, such as HTML content, advanced scripting and Java.

Expect to see this market evolve rapidly over the next couple years, which means you'll have to rethink your strategy at regular intervals as your customer base and the technologies driving the market evolve.

How we did it

Our test hardware platform was a Chatcom server populated with 200-MHz Pentium II boards with 128M bytes of RAM. On the server we ran Windows NT Server 4.0 Service Pack 3 and Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Service Pack 5. Our mail server was the FTGate Mail Gateway from Floosietek.

We configured rules for each product to route certain messages to either or both of two agents, and to reply to other kinds of messages via autoresponders. We sent a total of about 500 messages to each system - 250 requiring agent response and 250 for autoresponse - in a three-hour period.

We focused our evaluation on the products' architectures and on how well each product supports agents, the people who manage mail that can be only partially automated.

RELATED LINKS Gibbs is a Network World contributing editor and columnist, and a marketing and technology consultant. He can be reached at mgibbs@ gibbs.com.

Scorecard and NetResults
How we ranked the three apps in various categories, vendor contact info.

The Big Dogs
A look at four e-mail automation outsourcing services. Network World Fusion, 4/12/99.