Chief Product Officer at Emplifi, Alex helps grow the company’s capabilities in technology, strategic partnerships and new business models.
getty
Software is eating the world, as Marc Andreessen once famously wrote in the Wall Street Journal (paywall). Now I think it's safe to say AI is eating the world.
In 2020, AI has seen tremendous progress, driven by the Covid-19 pandemic. According to Rob Thomas, senior vice president of IBM’s cloud and data platform, the Covid-19 pandemic created an increased demand for virtual assistants in customer service functions.
New technology like OpenAI’s language-generating AI, GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3), has 175 billion parameters, enabling it to produce human-like responses "in a range of different styles when prompted with an opening sentence." Businesses have an opportunity to harness these new and modern technologies to solve incredibly old problems, like email.
Businesses receive thousands of emails daily, most of which are repetitive. An all-time favorite of mine is: “Where’s my order?” AI-powered technology is helping businesses deal with their cluttered inboxes and better manage customer expectations.
An Old Problem In A New World
Ray Tomlinson invented electronic mail (email) in 1971. Since then, it has become one of the most useful inventions for personal and business use. Nearly 50 years later, email remains a central part of daily digital life. We check email several times a day from multiple devices, and if you’re like me, your inbox is probably open right now. Although email has evolved from rudimentary text messages to include support for CSS3 and HTML5 with videos, gifs and images, not much else has changed.
It’s no surprise that many businesses are overwhelmed with emails. More than 306 billion emails were sent and received each day in 2020. Since the start of the pandemic, email communication has skyrocketed with many businesses seeing huge spikes in customer inquiries. Some industries saw a huge increase during the first several weeks of the pandemic. With so much unknown, consumers have more questions than ever including inquiries they’ve never had before. For example, customers are asking about facility cleaning procedures, supply chain issues, hand hygiene measures and so on.
With so many businesses overwhelmed, many emails are going unanswered. Netomi found in its 2020 Customer Service Benchmark Report for retail and consumer brands that 70% of companies that have customer service emails never responded to an inquiry. Those that did respond didn’t do so in a timely fashion. It took an average of 36 hours to respond to a customer’s email. Only one in five retailers responded within 24 hours. Overall, according to findings from Simplr, the average email response time for all companies was 48 hours and 25 hours for top-performing companies. Long wait times like these can lead to disgruntled customers and decreased brand loyalty.
A Microsoft survey revealed that 96% of customers say customer service is important in their loyalty to a brand. Part of that customer service includes email responsiveness. A recent HubSpot study found that 90% of customers expect an "immediate" response, translating to 10 minutes or less.
Modern Response
Technology gives businesses the ability to handle unexpected email spikes, including on weekends and holidays. GPT-3, for instance, can create anything that has a language structure — which means businesses can harness this innovative technology to perform real work like responding to emails. When used in a support or sales scenario with a handful of scripted questions, replies can be regenerated to be different every time or slightly adjusted for the person or situation.
Email automation allows businesses to solve the age-old problem of email overload while increasing their response time. According to findings from an Accenture survey, 84% of those surveyed cited anytime availability as a benefit of computer-based applications. In fact, in one A/B test, when put to the test against human-generated content, AI-generated copy gained more clicks or interactions twice, and human-authored copy performed better once.
Regardless of what tech businesses utilize, automated email software should be able to:
• Understand customer issues using NLP.
• Code cases.
• Look at old cases to determine the best way to respond.
• Determine the next best action.
ROI In Your Inbox
Email automation allows businesses to create stability within their core team by improving the agent experience. Agents can spend more time handling important and sometimes difficult live customer interactions without worrying about emails building up.
According to predictions by IDC, 70% of all organizations by 2020, "will have accelerated use of digital technologies, transforming existing business processes to drive customer engagement, employee productivity and business resiliency."
Even as more organizations implement such digital technologies, email will continue to be a primary mode of communication. More than 347 billion emails will be sent and received per day by 2023. With email automation, businesses can process inbound emails and craft highly accurate responses quickly and effectively, drastically reducing the time and cost associated with customer email management. Agents only have to spend one minute reviewing and approving a response, instead of up to five minutes drafting emails.
Considerations
Like any new practice, there are learning curves when transitioning to email automation.
Personalization is key to an effective email marketing strategy, and it goes much deeper than demographics. Emails can be segmented in so many different ways based on data you have already acquired. Knowing what data to look for and where to look for these insights is where things get complicated. A proper strategy isn't something that's created overnight — it can take months. Always test and retest to really understand the impact of even the smallest change.
A trap that marketers can easily fall into is sending too many emails that aren't of any value to the customer. Just because it's easy to do doesn't mean you should do more of it because you can. It's important for brands to thoroughly research their audiences and develop personalized email journeys that correlate with the challenges they are having. Your own research and data can help power an optimal email cadence. Ask yourself: Are you linking to pages that actually convert? Are you checking customer reviews and implementing those pain points in your story?
Email automation can be ideal for spam management, temporary backlog management or when companies need greater elasticity in managing call centers through uncertain times.
Forbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?
