Enquiry Explosion!

April 21st, 2015 | by ViaDataWebAdmin |

We ran into an interesting problem the other day. One of our customers had reworked their website to include lots of “enquire now” screens, and they were getting inundated with sales enquiries. So much so, in fact, that the sales manager found that managing the incoming sales enquiry mail was becoming a full time job as she had to read every email before passing them on to the sales consultants!

There were some fundamental issues at play here:

⦁ They launched a website with “enquire now” triggers all over the place. (Too much of a good thing)!
⦁ They decided to handle the incoming enquiries via email.
⦁ They did not expect the large number of incoming enquiries.
⦁ Handling the number of enquiries became extremely unproductive, and impacted normal work output.

This is an old customer of ours, so we had already done some work for them. This included:

⦁ A sales lead management system.
⦁ A way to manually capture new sales leads and pass them on to the sales consultants.
⦁ A way to see if we had previously communicated with the sales lead (during the capture process).

We now had to close the loop and make the entire system fully automated, a seemingly complicated task, but we had the tools and knowledge to handle the problem.

In our toolbox:

In our tool box we had a mail-watcher that can consume incoming POP3 emails, a reader that can extract data from HTML emails and a POP3 domain that we control and where we can configure new accounts.

How we went about it:

⦁ We added a process to forward a copy of the incoming email to a new enquiries specific email box
⦁ We configured the process that “watches” emails to watch, read-in and clear the new mail box
⦁ We created a new table to store the enquiries in the customer’s incumbent system.
⦁ We lastly created a task to convert an incoming enquiry into a sales lead (and interaction) and assign it to a sales consultant.
⦁ We also provided training on the new process so that everyone was up to speed on the new way of doing things.

Benefits:

The benefit to the customer was immediate, with a 95% drop in incoming inquiry processing time.

⦁ An added benefit to the client was that we used functionality and configurations that we already had on-site.
⦁ We also fully integrated the new process into their current system.
⦁ We provided on-site training.
⦁ In fact, the only code we needed to write was specific to the new process, and so no code was written for the incumbent system.

We helped an old friend with a common problem – how to manage incoming email in a meaningful way that would add value to their current system and working environment. According to them, we did so with flying colours!

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