According to statistics, 4.5 billion accounts send 205 billion emails every day. An average office worker receives 121 emails per day!
Staggering, isn’t it? We all pass through this storm of emails every day. Yet, sometimes, we miss out on catching that important unsaid message in those dozens of emails the customer has been sending for the last two weeks!
Text analytics is here to help. We can analyze email exchanges with customers and gain critical customer insights.
So, how do we do this?
Before going to that, you need to know that email communications are considered unstructured data. Unstructured data (or unstructured information) refers to information that either does not have a pre-defined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. The only structured information in an email is the sender, receiver, date, time, and subject.
Email analytics empowered with machine learning can open a gold mine to get actionable customer insights. Machine learning makes sentiment analysis and pattern recognition possible. Sentiment analysis helps to understand customer sentiment about your product or service. Sentiment recognition at an early stage of the customer cycle can be a magic wand for your customer service.
Email analytics is a part of Emergys ‘Gadfly’ (Unstructured Data Analytics Platform), and it can answer the following business questions
- Is there a customer issue escalation on the cards? – Based on analysis of past customer escalations, the algorithm predicts the likelihood of an escalation from customers.
- Which are the most important topics that the customers care about?
- Are there any customers who need help understanding because replies to them are short/incomplete, or too late?
- Who are the experts in the team on specific topics? How efficient they are in answering customer questions on specific topics.
- What is the ‘social network’ among my team and customer team? Who does everyone approach most trusted person in case of issues?
These questions are important for customer service organizations. Also, for an IT organization’s project management team, these questions are very important for ensuring client satisfaction.
A few important considerations to follow while implementing an email analytics solution
- On-premise implementation, avoid cloud – Many organizations are sensitive to letting email data leave their premises. Prefer On-premise implementation of email analytics.
- Ensure strict access control – Only a select few should get access to the analytics as it may contain sensitive client information. Recommend hierarchy-based access control
Email analytics is a very important component of a 360-degree view of customers. An organization that is assisted by Big Data technologies can analyze email exchanges with customers and enhance its 360-degree view of customers.
Note: This article is a part of the ‘Big Data for Actionable Customer Insights’ series. Stay tuned for upcoming articles.
