Multi-modal email address capture
A simple way to capture missing or out-of-date email addresses, especially through voice where voice input of an email is impractical.
Initiative overview
Background
A large retail energy supplier, taking over 200,000 voice calls and 60,000 chats every week. Over 30% of customer accounts don’t have a valid email address or mobile phone number.
Opportunity
When customer’s use self-service bots, or are waiting in a queue to speak to us, we have the chance to update their accounts. Having a validated email address and/or mobile number increases speed of communication to the customer, and reduces print & postage costs.
Solution
I implemented a final “value add” module to our bot orchestration layer, where customers are routed when completing a successful customer journey, just before they route to an agent or end the interaction. This module can also be called in-queue if the queue time is over a certain length.
The module uses business rules to determine which service to offer, and one of these is email address capture.
Bot design
Avoiding annoyance by repetition
With value-add journeys, it’s important not to annoy customers who contact you frequently. All of these bots remember the last time we asked the customer each question, and how long ago it was. In this case, if the customer declines to provide an email address then we won’t ask again for another 6 months.
Benefits
Over 1,000 new valid customer email addresses captured each week where we previously didn’t hold one. Over the course of 2 years this number decreased gradually as the number of accounts with email addresses went up.