Client Background

Client: An Asia-based multinational corporation

Industry: Chemicals and cosmetics

Area of Operations: Worldwide

Number of Employees: 30,000+

Challenge

Many companies start using shared mailboxes to manage outsourcing projects. Shared mailboxes allow you to manage your processes, but do not provide efficient, mission-critical customer service. As the volume of daily requests grow, it fails to scale.

The client’s data management service (DMS) used three separate shared mailboxes to receive daily requests from departments like research and development, planning, production, and packaging to set up material master data in the SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. Using shared mailboxes for outsourcing projects presented several challenges:

• Collision — Coworkers can respond to the same email at the same time, resulting in the customer receiving two responses.
• Neglect — The opposite of collision can also happen if someone assumes someone else is handling an email when they are not.
• Inefficiency — Customer service representatives waste up to 20% of their time sifting through customer emails to find the easiest ones to respond to first. This is called cherry picking. This not only wastes the representative's time, but also leaves certain customers with more complex issues waiting too long.
• Lack of context — Representatives lack context when viewing a customer’s email and can waste time searching through email history to gain insight into their issue.
• Lost emails — Shared mailboxes always carry the risk of emails accidentally getting deleted or lost. Customers are left waiting indefinitely unless they decide to reach out again.
• No collaboration — Until a specific representative is assigned to handle the customer issue, it is not possible to collaborate with another representative to resolve the issue. This is limiting and can lead to customer issues taking a considerably longer amount of time to resolve.
• Tracking and allocation — A tracking spreadsheet must be created to ensure that every request is tracked in real time from the shared mailbox. In addition, the request must be assigned manually to associates based on their skill set.

Solution

Wipro integrated Process Manager, its proprietary automation tool, in the client’s DMS process.

Process Manager is a powerful tool from Wipro that automates business processes through a role-based delegation and substitution mechanism. It represents the next logical step in a company’s evolution of customer email management.

• Process Manager is a web-based automated application that seamlessly integrates with customer-shared mailboxes.
• It facilitates tracking of email service requests received from suppliers and customers, by allocating the same to respective associates for action in the core system.
• All queries are followed up and real time reports are provided.

Business impact

Through the successful integration of Process Manager into the DMS process, the client can now better support the growth and expansion of the company. Customer service that addresses requests promptly and professionally sets a company apart from competitors. Wipro’s solution helped the company achieve the following benefits: 

• Mail assignment — Additional supervisory control for manual email assignment and  access to a shared mailbox that agents could claim based on their workload as shared responsibility.
• Routing intelligence — Automation of classification to eliminate intervention of supervisor for mail assignment, robust rule based routing engine to ensure delivery of email of specific agents, teams, or queues, based on any attributes of the email including assigning it to the same associate who has worked on the interaction in the past.
• Lifecycle management — System generated unique ID to track mail lifecycle for accurate service level agreement reporting.
• Unified access — Complete web based platform with no local installation requirement, with direct mail response capability with seamless integration of email exchange services with capability to manage multiple mailboxes in a single instance.
• Work distribution — Load balanced and round robin based email allocation to ensure team members are equally loaded to maintain optimal productivity levels.
• Auto responses — Automated acknowledgement of the customer’s first enquiry to avoid repeat email correspondence and to provide a timeframe for resolving the issue.
• Mail prioritization — Unique email management mechanisms based on time for average turnaround, severity, and criticality as configured by the company, auto alerts to notify the management team of approaching SLAs to ensure minimal breaches, capabilities to follow up, escalate, and transfer to other team members or supervisors.
• SLA reporting — The timeliness of each request can easily be calculated by identifying the start and end times of the request.
• Increase Productivity — It increases the 10% of productivity by the way of streamline the email workflows and saving the time spent to maintain the email tracker.