Company

A directory and search company in the Nordic media market, Eniro is listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange, and in 2007 its revenues amounted to €683M. Eniro’s services are designed to make it easy to find people, businesses and products via its printed directories, direct enquiry, internet and mobile phone services.

As a service-oriented company, Eniro’s online and telephone customer service operations are the lifeblood of the organisation. With over 600 employees working in contact centres spread across the region, the ability of Eniro’s customer service agents to respond to all telephone and email enquiries quickly, efficiently and accurately is critical to Eniro’s business performance and continued competitive advantage.

Challenge

From the time that its first online service was launched almost six years ago, Eniro has used Microsoft(R) Outlook™ within its contact centres to manage email enquiries. With a customer base of over 60,000, Eniro’s customer service organisation handles on average 3,000 to 5,000 emails per month.

With email-based customer enquiries continuing to increase, Eniro’s customer service organisation started to find it increasingly difficult to manage, track and respond to them as Pirjo Väyrynen, Project Manager of Customer Service and Production at Eniro, explains, "Too much time was being wasted by agents sifting through emails - and Outlook only seemed to exacerbate the problem. We receive an incredible mix of email enquiries round the clock and cherry-picking them simply wasn’t an option."

Similarly, Eniro’s marketing department was experiencing difficulties extracting and collating timely and accurate information for reporting requirements, which was becoming a manually intensive task with the incumbent email system. Eniro looked to implement an email management solution that would improve routing and handle times as well as agent performance and marketing management through analytics and reporting.

Pirjo Väyrynen comments, "Reporting on response handling time and the content of our enquiries is key to gaining a better understanding of our customer base. Having to track emails manually and compile the necessary information and statistics for regular reporting and analysis was proving very time-consuming. We wanted to invest in a new email management solution that would enable us to easily profile customers that email in, so that we could not only better the customer experience, but also adjust marketing and sales initiatives to ensure agents can promote and cross-sell suitable products accordingly."

Solution

Following a competitive tender process involving twelve other providers, Eniro chose to trial eGain’s powerful solution, eGain Mail™, as the only email management system that could provide the comprehensive analysis and feature-rich management that Eniro needed. A solution for scalable email customer service, eGain Mail had been in the market for over a decade.

In November 2007, Eniro began a pilot of eGain Mail™ for a selected number of agents. Once in place, the email system enabled agents to handle the large volumes of customer emails responsively and effectively, utilising predefined workflows to manage incoming email enquiries and automating email routing and monitoring.

The agents taking part in the pilot of eGain Mail™ immediately noticed the difference in managing email volume, and the results speak for themselves with a 30% reduction in email handling time.

Following the success of this pilot, Eniro immediately began the rollout of the eGain Mail™ solution into production. Pirjo Väyrynen explains, "We rely heavily on our back office systems for information and databases, and the next step of our IT strategy was to integrate eGain into our own systems to ensure we could get maximum benefit from the solution."

During the implementation, eGain worked very closely with Eniro to integrate eGain Mail™ with Eniro’s backend systems through eGain Data Adapters™. Pirjo Väyrynen, says, "Implementation, testing, training and all other issues were efficient with eGain and during the transition from Outlook to eGain Mail™, they ensured that every configuration we requested was exactly how we wanted it."

Results

With roll-out completed in March 2008, Eniro’s email handling response times across its dispersed contact centres has improved dramatically, helping the organisation maintain a fast, consistent and accurate level of customer service. Pirjo Väyrynen describes:

"We have seen a notable difference in our customer service operations and the results we saw in the pilot program have been extended to the entire agent pool. It was imperative that the email management system could differentiate between each and every enquiry to improve our handling and customer response times. By ticketing each and every email we receive, eGain Mail™ has made our whole communications process faster and a lot more efficient."

With the ability to parse and monitor the content of all email queries, eGain is enabling Eniro to send content relevant auto-responses directly to customers and also provide recommended responses to agents, making life easier for agents, while improving their productivity at the same time.

Pirjo Väyrynen describes one exceptional situation this year, where an extra 2000 email messages were received within 24 hours, "We had only one agent to handle these additional queries, and one year ago this would have been an exceptionally difficult task. With eGain Mail, we were able to create a separate queue for these emails and also use auto acknowledgements and provide the agent with suggested responses, which enabled this one agent to handle and resolve these email enquiries as soon as they came in. If we had still been using our legacy email management system, all of these mails would have been on queue, and all activity in the contact centre would have suffered from a severe bottleneck.

"Now, with the system in place, the email load is much more balanced across our agents," explains Pirjo Väyrynen. "We can handle bulk emails more efficiently now, redirecting emails directly to the agents based on their experience and knowledge. The auto reply feature has also made a dramatic different to agent workloads."

eGain Mail is empowering Eniro’s agents with the information they need at their fingertips, when they need it. The new system ensures that agents have a complete view of prior interactions so they can be more effective in resolving enquiries.

Pirjo Väyrynen, explains, "The reply process is much simpler now and our agents don’t have to waste time dragging and dropping emails to different folders. We can be sure the information agents use is accessible, accurate and timely, which in turn has mitigated any service bottlenecks."

In addition, the company is now benefiting from the analytics features of eGain Mail including the automatic generation of periodic reports for customer service management. "Not only is it simple to follow and track all incoming and outgoing enquiries throughout the entire email lifecycle, but the powerful monitoring and reporting tools from eGain enables us to draw up reports almost instantaneously, where it previously took a number of hours per week," concludes Pirjo Väyrynen.