How quickly do you expect a company you call for information to pick up the phone? Two rings? Five? But what if you send an email instead? A new study shows you are lucky to get a reply. Software that responds to email automatically could be the answer.
London-based marketing agency Rainier found that nearly half of all FTSE100 companies used their websites as little more than online wallpaper - either not replying to messages or making it hard to get in touch.
Of these, 26, including the British Airports Authority, NatWest and Tesco, hadn't replied to an email asking for basic investor information after 100 days.
Stephen Waddington, a director of Rainier, says: "Having a website without having a direct feedback mechanism is like having a freephone helpline, but no receptionist."
The problem is that companies often rush to put up a website without thinking about the extra manpower required to deal with emails.
Eva Pascoe, managing director of Zoom, which sells Topshop and other clothes online, says: "We're getting 20,000 emails a month. Far more than we ever expected."
The first few weeks were horrendous. "Myself, another manager and John Hoerner chief executive of Arcadia (which owns Zoom) were in the office till midnight answering messages. That's because we know from our experience of catalogue shopping that if a customer does not get a reply within a few days, you've lost them forever."
One UK retail bank estimates that the cost of answering 30 email messages a day for a year (assuming that 20% of them were reviewed by a supervisor) is £60,250. And the cost of dealing with the web-email mountain is rising.
Lastminute. com, which lets customers book holidays at the last minute, says its site receives 3,000 emails a month and the number is growing at 25% a fortnight. To Brent Hoberman, the company's managing director, "it is important that we answer inbound emails promptly and in our own style". Yet he concedes that "answering email is a time-consuming necessity which carries many associated costs".
Rainier found that of the 58% of FTSE 100 companies that replied, 23 took less than three hours (which it considers acceptable), 21 took between three hours and a day, 10 took one-three days, and a further four took more than three days.
Slow responders included Boots (30 days, 21 hours 43 mins), Standard Chartered (20 days), Ladbroke (nine days, 44 mins), and Severn Trent (six days, 20 hours, 52 mins).
Anna Maria Trusky of the US-based Bureau of Business Practice says marketing and sales divisions "may not know how equipped customer service is to handle customer requests. For example, the customer service manager may be the only one who is web-enabled".
However, it is possible to automate many of the routine enquiries sent to web sites ensuring a reply in less than 15 minutes or in some cases instantly. Most feedback from customers who use the Zoom.co.uk site is via an online form which is sent back to Zoom as an email. This helps to structure the reply, and displays different subject lines according to the options selected by the customer.
So Zoom has already been able to speed up the information flow by routing emails to the right customer service or call centre staff based on the subject line.
It has also prepared some standard replies to common requests , such as for brochures. And it is using two databases (Oracle and MySQL)to store messages from customers, so that when it gets back to them it can look up its previous correspondence with them.
But, says Pascoe, customers also want to be able to send more open-ended messages. So the next big step is to introduce software based on natural language processing.
Zoom plans to start a detailed trial of natural language processing package Brightware software shortly and, if it fits the bill, start using it next spring. It has also considered US natural language processing (NLP) product, The Post. Other email-answering products include Kana (a call-centre solution), Egain and Mustang.
According to Mike Wheatley, US-based Brightware's managing director for international business, natural language processing is based on artificial intelligence techniques. "Instead of just looking for keywords like less intelligent software, Brightware looks at clusters of words to work out their meaning. A cluster like "problem with my holiday" would differentiate a complaint from a simple request for a travel brochure."
The software is also rule-based so it can be refined over time. It works by identifying the type of message and sending an appropriate reply. But if the software is not sure of the reply, it will attach a "best-guess" answer and forward it to a supervisor. If the supervisor agrees with the choice, then the email can simply be sent on to the customer. If the supervisor disagrees, he or she can go into the system and refine the rules.
Brightware reckons its software can reply accurately to 60% to 80% of messages, and attach best-guess answers to the remaining 20% to 40%.
This has a number of benefits. To begin with, automating such a large percentage of messages can save companies hundreds of thousands of pounds.
A spokesman for a UK bank, which is using Brightware's software says: "It is answering 50% to 80% of emails reliably. In some categories 100%. And it is easy to ensure that the standard replies comply with all the banking regulations." The software is also being used by Abbey National, and by US-based Mortgage.com, which sells mortgages on the net.
Pascoe says that for Zoom the issue is speed of response rather than saving money. The company does not plan to get rid of any of its customer service staff when it starts to use Brightware.
Moreover, she believes "there will always be a proportion of messages that are answered in person, because retailing is about emotional fulfilment".
Brightware costs £95,000 but there are also cheaper "autoresponders"on the market that will fire off up to 10 follow-up emails after an initial enquiry has been made to a website. One example is Marketer's Dream Autoresponder from the Florida-based Big Web Development which costs $297.
Now there's no excuse for the website equivalent of a phone that just rings and rings and rings.
