- Which groups in your organization have the largest email volume?
Groups with the largest email volume benefit most from using Siebel Email Response. Analyze all groups in your organization to determine which can benefit from using a Siebel Email Response product. Mail server administrators in your organization can help you identify the email addresses that are the most heavily used.
- What email addresses will you use for Siebel Email Response?
Develop a list of current and/or new email addresses that you want to use for all groups that will use Siebel Email Response. Specify the email addresses you need to create to receive incoming email. Your mail server administrator can tell you what email addresses your company currently uses.
Each email address must be designated as receiving unstructured (free-form) or structured (keyword-based or Web-form) email.
- Does your organization use structured (web-form) or unstructured (free-form) email messages?
If your company uses many structured email messages, you might want to use Siebel eService. This product can automate many of the processes solved with Web forms. For example, service request submissions or status updates can be automated with Siebel eService.
- Web forms. An example of a Web form is an order status form. Make a list of Web forms that you may use. If you currently use Web forms, gather examples with your standard responses.
A Web form saves time because no human interaction is necessary to respond to the initial email. However, it takes special skills and time to set up and maintain Web forms with their associated responses. You cannot use them in every situation, but they are useful to handle high-volume communications that require standard responses.
- Free-form messages. Examples of free-form messages are a free-form email request for a customer's order status and a free-form request for help with a product purchased from your company.
Agents have to respond to each free-form email individually.
When you set up your workflow processes, you will decide which workflow you want to use to process incoming messages, eMail Response - Process Message or eMail Response - Process Service Request.
- What are the most frequently asked questions that you currently receive at each corporate email address?
Gather examples of the most common questions (with their responses) and estimate how many you receive of each. Templates can be modified, so you should concentrate on determining the most frequently asked questions you receive at present.
One of the most valuable features of any email response product is the ability to store templates that can be used by agents to respond to common questions.
You can identify questions that can be answered with templates by asking customer service agents for a list of the most commonly asked questions, including the appropriate response for each. Other sources of template candidates are FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions documents) that have been developed for your customers.
- What solution documents do you currently use?
A solution document can be any document prepared for customers that provides a fix or a recommended approach to a problem.
See Solutions and Templates Decision Table to find out when to use solution documents (called FAQs in Siebel eService), when to use reply templates, and how each compares to a free-form reply.
Gather copies or make a list of these electronic documents and their network locations. Specify new documents that are needed and existing documents that can be converted to electronic documents.
- What categories do you want to associate with templates and solutions?
Sort the templates and solutions from Step 4 and Step 5 into types of email questions (categories) and assign a category to each solution and template. During Siebel Email Response setup, you will associate solutions and templates with categories so that solutions and templates can be inserted into the body of Siebel Email Response replies.
NOTE: Only templates intended to be used as body templates should be associated to a category.
- Who will be responsible for template maintenance and developing maintenance procedures?
Develop a process and specify a person to be responsible. Develop procedures for maintaining templates and notifying agents that new or changed templates are available and how templates are to be used.
You must review templates for changes if your business changes in some way. For example, when you launch a new product or discontinue a product, you may want to review the templates to determine whether they need updating. Another example would be adding the URL of a new Web site to the signature line of an email template.
- Do you want to automatically acknowledge receipt of incoming mail?
An auto-acknowledge message sets reasonable customer expectations for a response and reduces the chance that customers will send follow-up emails or communicate through other channels.
If there is an existing auto-acknowledge message, obtain a copy. An auto-acknowledge message should thank the customer for the inquiry and tell the customer how long it will take to respond.
- How are groups currently routing email messages? Why do you use the current routing approach?
Determine how each of your target email response deployments (such as, Sales or Call Center) currently routes an incoming email message to an agent best suited to handle the message. Most organizations simply have agents select email messages from a list of messages sent to a particular address. How are incoming email queues managed and why? Why do you use your current approach to email queues?
- Which routing and queuing method meets your needs for email response?
When using Siebel Email Response, you can choose from several methods to route email messages to the correct agent. To review a comparison of different routing and queuing methods, see Routing and Queuing Methods Comparison Table.
The method you use should be based on the way your business needs to route incoming mail. For example, if you need to notify agents immediately after routing a message, you need Siebel Universal Queuing or another universal queuing engine. For more information, see Siebel Universal Queuing Administration Guide.
If your contact center already has CTI software set up, you can use universal queuing technologies to make multiple media channels available to your agents. For example, customer service representatives may be dedicated to handling telephone calls, but when they are not busy with telephone calls, they can be assigned email messages.
- Language Support.
- In what languages do your customers send email? In what languages do you reply using email?
- Do you have templates in multiple languages?
For additional information about supported languages, see Siebel System Requirements and Supported Platforms on Siebel SupportWeb.
- Do you need to set up multiple organizations for your company?
