The issues / the stakes

Since early 2005, ADLPartner has noticed a rapid increase of their inbound emails (100% increase between 2005 and 2006) due to a massive use of the Internet for commercial practices and a significant boost of household computer penetration rate.

Outlook was not sufficient to deal with this flow or efficiently follow and control email responses sent to customers. Implementing a professional inbound emails management solution was essential to enable collaborative work between several agents, multiple similar responses, and above all, a much precise follow-up and control of the activity. This last point is essential to ADLPartner’s relational marketing activity since the largest flow of inbound emails usually comes after an emailing operation.

The deployment

Once chosen, ADLPartner had to work on the emails management organization before the software’s launching. Two levels in emails treatment were implemented: level one, dedicated to standard inquiries (information, unsubscription, basic  complaints, and so on) and level two, in charge of inquiries needing a more specialized and personalized treatment (complaints on invoicing, reception of magazines problems, collection, and so on.)

Based on this organization, ADLPartner decided to internally address the level two inquiries while outsourcing the level one emails to a service provider. In this organization, AKIO solution had the advantage to enable prioritization of these treatment levels through thirty-five (35) online mailboxes. Furthermore, statistics and daily follow-up allowed accurate reporting of the activity.

From that point, deployment was rapid: two (2) days were sufficient for AKIO, ADLPartner, and the providers’ teams to set up an efficient organization and to train the agents. Romain Gava adds, “To be as efficient as possible, we worked hard upfront on our mailboxes organization and allocation and collected the required information to properly configure the solution”.

Configuration was then completed quickly; the software userfriendliness also enabled the teams to be trained in a very short time.

The benefits

After examining various solutions in the marketplace, ADLPartner opted for Akio Mail Center, “a user friendly, ergonomic, and convivial solution with an available and very reactive technical team”, stated Romain Gava, ADLPartner Customer Service Manager.

After a few months production, ADLPartner is pleased to have fulfilled its goals: increase of the emails treatment capacity and improvement of the Quality of Service. As far as the level one is concerned, the ROI (return on investment) is measured via productivity gain - more than 20% of capacity of treatment was gained mainly due to the solution features to insert templates and to send a single response to several similar queries.

Regarding the level 2, ADLPartner measured a dramatic increase in quality of response due to the experts’ proficiency and the possibility to format responses (with logo, graphic chart, and so on). Also, an accurate follow-up on ongoing activities, treated volumes, and the like guarantees good indicators for the client relationship.

Globally, the number of answered emails per hour has rocketed, while AKIO solution enabled to decrease the incoming flow.  Explains Romain Gava, “Thanks to Akio Mail Center, the number of inbound emails has decreased since a customer doesn’t need to send another inquiry if they receive an answer within 24 or 48 hours”. After a few months use, the number of incoming emails went from 8,500 in September 2006 to 7,500 in June 2007.

Project results: a better quality of service provided to customers in an optimum delay and a better activity follow-up with support by reactive AKIO Team.