Call Center or Contact Center?

Call Centers had no sooner become “Contact” Centers  when multimedia “nice to have” features became “must have” requirements.   The more mobile the customer base, the more likely they are on a smart phone and not sitting at a desk computer.  They want “contact”, however they want to communicate.  That used to mean voice by telephone, but might now mean text, chat, email and now video!   (See our Blog on this subject.)  Email, however, is an interesting option as it cuts across platforms and can be read at the desk or on the phone. For this reason, it is still a strong feature requirement on the Contact Center landscape. ShoreTel has had the ability to route an incoming email to an agent, much the way an incoming phone call is routed to the next available agent.   Send an email to customerservice@yourcompany.com and the ShoreTel ECC will grab it from the mail server and route it to the next available Agent.  ShoreTel ECC will even allow an Agent, already engaged in a phone call, to take that email and work with it, increasing Agent productivity and cutting customer service response times. One of the challenges with ShoreTel ECC email however, has been the ability to route the email to the same agent who initially responded to the customers’ first email request.   An Agent might get an incoming email, answer the email and send it back to the customer.   The customer might have a follow up request and when they hit reply, to the reply, there is no assurance that the original Agent will get that same email.  Often the email is routed to the next available agent, as if it was a first time contact.

Why do you "Sticky Email"?

The solution here is to create a “sticky” email. One that will relate the original customer request to the Agent who initially handled the response until such time as the case is closed.  This can be done with the existing ShoreTel ECC tool set.   Using the C2G or Interaction reporting database and some SQL glue,  an incoming email can be reviewed before it is passed on to the Agent.  That review process would check the Interaction database to see if the FROM field has been previously entered into the database during, say the last 30 days.   If so, the email is routed to the personal email queue, within ECC, of the Agent who responded to that email! Simple, elegant and actually it is really quite cool!   We have been using this process to manage our Text to ECC email messages for some time and have now adopted it for ShoreTel ECC routing.  Text the word “STICKY” to the phone number 858-223-1040 or email us at DrVoIP@DrVoIP.com. We can get your Contact Center connected! While you are at it,  we can set you up with TEXT to Agent as well! (Note - The CISCO UCCX has "sticky email" built into the application along with Chat, and Social Mining!   This is a great overview of how CISCO does this feature).