Putting aside my own aversion to yet another opportunity to ramp up my continuous partial attention deficit, this strikes me as a solution looking for a problem.
One of my smartest friends noticed that when his support team answered emails quickly, the customer would treat this as an implicit invitation to shift the support thread into a support chat, via email.
They added a 3-hour delay before support sees any email, specifically to prevent threads from becoming chats. Note that phone support is also available; people with time-critical issues are encouraged to call in for immediate help.
The delay has been a huge success because people correctly assign priority to their concerns by selecting the medium. The back-and-forth is more focused and does not get off-track.
An unexpected bonus is that before the delay was introduced, people would often remember how one particular support rep helped them in the past and would hit reply on an old thread to pose a new question, unrelated to the original request. This was confusing (support people leave) and would mess up their issue tracking and happiness metrics.
After the delay, this behaviour went away almost completely and they didn't experience a statistically significant drop in incident satisfaction.
In conclusion, use email for email and use chat for chat. Email starts to feel like chat if you reply too quickly, and that's not a good thing.
I completely agree, not because of opinion but because of experience!
For six months i answered all of my e-mails within minutes, because i thought that superb support was the way to go. But it only took a couple of months before i saw the negative effects - both employees and bosses started asking questions about every little problem that they encountered! This distracted me in the middle of all other work, and billing for it was impossible because they implied it only "took 2 minutes" to reply to. At the end of the sixth month, i got a large job and couldn't reply quickly any longer, now, client's only ask things of real value (billable value) and often they solve the problem themselves.
You make some excellent points about using email in a support organization. To be fair though, Hum isn't designed to be used by employees in a call center.
Instead, Hum addresses a much more fundamental shift in communication patterns that is already in full swing. Conversations are getting shorter and shorter, and more to the point. Most teens I know never check their email. Many of them don't even have email addresses.
Hum combines some of the core organization elements of email, like threads and subject lines, with features that many people have come to expect from their more modern IM/text/Twitter client like instant updates, presence, typing indicators, @mentions, etc. It strikes a balance between the two that helps bridge the gap from email to a much faster and more productive medium.
About a year ago I started making a point of sampling all of the teens I found myself in conversation with — family dinners, speaking at high schools, friends' siblings — and asking about their email usage patterns.
While it's true that they don't use email as a primary communication medium (yet) it seems likely that this is because they also don't have jobs (yet) and that it's currently easier to talk to their friends via Instagram, WhatsApp and Tumblr.
And yet they all have email addresses, because otherwise there's no way to access most of the stuff on the web. You have to sign up, and unless you're talking about a phone-centric app like WhatsApp, there's no practical way to avoid email.
Even if you can login with Facebook Connect, you still need email to use Facebook.
So, can we dispel the myth that "teens don't have email" please?
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As for my referencing a support operation delaying email, I used it as an example because I wanted to demonstrate that it wasn't a half-baked notion based on anecdotal evidence from one guy.
Meanwhile, conversations are most certainly NOT getting shorter. Each message in an exchange might itself be quite short, but the conversation itself really never ends.
Ask yourself what is more distracting: a long email or a series of 80 individual "short, to the point" texts, where each one vibrates your pocket and you have no idea when the next one is coming. You already know the answer. Often times you give up trying to do anything else and just stare at the messaging interface, waiting for the next message/fix to arrive.
Don't get me wrong; I use iMessage constantly and vastly prefer texting to calling people for most trivial things. But I also gave up IRC and ICQ (dating myself) cold turkey because eventually I was forced to acknowledge that it was holding me back in life. It was not more productive; it was incredibly counter-productive.
To throw it in, the first one or two years using it email used to feel like something that has to be replied timely, and after a while it appears that's not viable. IMs feel the same now, it's supposed to be instant, but putting it away for a while and dealing with discussions in batches every hour or two hours becomes an option.
If urgent matters may come through, checking the messages only when two or three come in rapid succession is a good heuristic.
> So, can we dispel the myth that "teens don't have email" please?
Well, of course teens have email, it's just not a primary method of communication for them (as you admit). To them, email is just how they sign up for 'real' (to them, at least) methods of communication.
This may as well be the same as 'teens don't have email'
It's rather hard to believe that any number of them wouldn't have an email address, considering everything they would use in place of it requires an email address to sign up for.
Are they mostly talking to friends via email? Probably not--I don't think that's ever been the case with teens--but I can't imagine that they just flat out do not have an account anywhere.
> Most teens I know never check their email. Many of them don't even have email addresses.
Because most teens don't have any need to be productive. This isn't a sign that the times are changing, this is a sign that the people you are using as a focus group have no need for the type of communication email facilitates.
IM / text conversations are shorter but they also drift from one topic to the other.
Generally chats are grouped based on people while emails are grouped based on topics. Categorizing them with subjects wouldnt really be practical.
> people with time-critical issues are encouraged to call in for immediate help
This is a company that doesn't want my business. If I have to pick up a phone, you've already lost.
Email provides quick but asynchronous communication. Each side can take a few minutes to do research or investigation, find someone with more information, and try possible solutions, without heavy distraction.
Discarding this communications channel and demanding my attention be monopolized by a voice following a script is somewhere between disrespectful and outright inhumane.
Discarding this communications channel and demanding my attention be monopolized by a voice following a script is somewhere between disrespectful and outright inhumane.
Why do you claim the OP would have the customer monopolized by a voice following a script? How much do you know about this particular company?
In my experience it is far easier for someone to follow a script in E-mail than on the phone. If a company wants to give users the runaround there are much better ways than a 3-hour hold on E-mail replies.
OP explained how E-mail was handled. It's not discarded, it's used in a way suitable for the medium.
Trying to have a real-time conversation in email is nowhere as good as an actual voice conversation. If that's what's needed then that's the better option and people should be encouraged in that direction.
If the support staff knows the answer to the questions immediately, and needs to probe the client a bit to find the problem, voice calls could be preferred.
However, if the support staff needs to look into the problem a bit, and already has required information from the client, I think email is far preferable. Being on the phone is likely to put the support person on the spot to make instant answers, else appearing to lack knowledge), whether or not correct.
> How much do you know about this particular company?
I know what was posted. What was posted gave me no reason to believe it's any different than 99.9% of companies. Even if it were, that would be inadequate to reverse my opinion of the stupidity of this strategy.
> In my experience it is far easier for someone to follow a script in E-mail than on the phone.
And equally easy to spot. My business is also lost at that point.
> it's used in a way suitable for the medium.
It should be plainly obvious that I disagree with that assessment.
> Trying to have a real-time conversation in email
Is not what I was talking about. Quite the contrary. The non-real-time nature of email is exactly what makes it superior to voice communication.
> They added a 3-hour delay before support sees any email, specifically to prevent threads from becoming chats. Note that phone support is also available; people with time-critical issues are encouraged to call in for immediate help.
Interesting observation (and "solution"). I'd say that model of dividing things is completely wrong, though. When I worked in support, I would much prefer to get everything via email. At the time we had a small user base (small office internal support) -- and this wasn't an issue -- we could educate our users (if needed).
But the general rule I've formulated, is don't let the user set the priority level. They'll be wrong. So for email, you might want to triage/prioritize every issue at once (and: eg group requests that have to do with a service being down/unreliable) -- adding a full 3 hours delay on top of every email sounds like the wrong approach for most help desks. If for no other reason than that it seems it would generate an increase in calls -- which are much harder to handle (scale) than email.
>One of my smartest friends noticed that when his support team answered emails quickly, the customer would treat this as an implicit invitation to shift the support thread into a support chat, via email.
Haha, had the same experience too! Started taking longer to respond and this stopped.
It's funny to see someone rushing to the defense of the idea of customer engagement, as if it really needs additional promotion or protection. I mean, we only hear about how much companies need to be creating deep emotional connections with their customers and making sweet, sweet love to them 24/7.
As a customer, I want great service too. As a business owner, I understand that their are economics behind delivering such service, especially when customers also want low prices. There has to be a balance, and avoiding unnecessary interaction (or engagement) is an absolute key to providing better service overall.
I immediately become furious when I have to speak to someone on the phone because I assume, from years of experience, that the person I'm speaking to will be useless. Not because they aren't intelligent, but because they simply aren't given the authority to solve my problem. It's an unfortunate side effect of the tiered support system. Most people are calling because of a PEBKAC error, but I typically have a much better understanding of the problem and of the solution that should be instituted.
If you can be un-furious long enough to consider that you might have a blind-spot, here's what I can tell you about the company I am referencing:
- they are well-loved
- it's highly likely that you are their customer or know someone that is
- it's flat, not tiered (there's no "supervisors")
- the system I'm describing is working specifically because those people that pick up are carefully trained and well paid North Americans that are actually subject-domain experts
The key detail and the reason I'm replying is because I know that what I described is working and you're not allowing yourself to imagine the possibility that it could actually work just fine.
I'm sure support via phone can work. I'm just saying that it usually doesn't. For exactly the opposite reasons you give. Most call center employees aren't especially technical, have little or no training, and are basically forced to stick to a script. I'm not saying it's their fault, quite the contrary. But because of these experiences, I'm automatically put off by the idea of speaking with a phone representative.
One of my smartest friends noticed that when his support team answered emails quickly, the customer would treat this as an implicit invitation to shift the support thread into a support chat, via email.
They added a 3-hour delay before support sees any email, specifically to prevent threads from becoming chats. Note that phone support is also available; people with time-critical issues are encouraged to call in for immediate help.
The delay has been a huge success because people correctly assign priority to their concerns by selecting the medium. The back-and-forth is more focused and does not get off-track.
An unexpected bonus is that before the delay was introduced, people would often remember how one particular support rep helped them in the past and would hit reply on an old thread to pose a new question, unrelated to the original request. This was confusing (support people leave) and would mess up their issue tracking and happiness metrics.
After the delay, this behaviour went away almost completely and they didn't experience a statistically significant drop in incident satisfaction.
In conclusion, use email for email and use chat for chat. Email starts to feel like chat if you reply too quickly, and that's not a good thing.