When to move on from Outlook

Tuesday, August 30, 2011



If you’re receiving 30 or more emails a day, Outlook or any other standard email client is not designed to meet your needs.


Recent studies show that 88% of consumers emailing an online organization expect to receive a response within 24 hours, and 33% say they will not do business with a company if they do not receive a response within an hour of sending their message. Most organizations realize the importance of responsive, professional customer service, yet more often than not they fail to meet their own expectations, or more importantly, their customers. When analyzing why most organizations are not providing quality service via email, you must first look at the tools with which they have to correspond.

As a personal email client, Outlook is an excellent solution to send, receive, and organize individual messages. It also has the lowest learning curve, as company representatives are accustomed to its design and functionality. However, as inbound business email traffic to your organization increases, personal email clients are not equipped to properly route and track messages to meet customer service standards. Automatically routing messages to the appropriate parties or groups, tracking messages and how quickly they are being responded to, alerting executives when messages aren’t responded to in a timely fashion, are all essential functions that are necessary to ensure that business email is being responded to quickly and in accordance with your company guidelines. Personal email clients do not provide this level of functionality.

Email Response Management Systems are designed to remedy these problems, and provide organizations with the essential tools to capitalize on all inbound messages. They are the logical progression from personal email clients to collective business wide email clients, allowing representatives to view all customer history correspondence, create and use standard responses to most frequently asked questions, easily distribute messages to appropriate representatives and more.

Administrators proactively route messages to groups and individuals using highly flexible routing criteria (email to or from address, message content, subject line, etc.), are notified if messages aren’t answered in a reasonable time frame, track emails - who answered what and how quickly, report on overall email traffic and individual performance, and much more.

Akin to the progression from individual phone lines to a phone distribution tree, email management systems automatically route emails to appropriate groups and individuals and ensure quality, timely responses, resulting in vastly improved customer satisfaction and immediate, recognizable ROI.

VisNetic MailFlow 4.9!

Monday, August 1, 2011


Deerfield.com is pleased to announce a new release of VisNetic MailFlow!

VisNetic MailFlow v4.9 helps administrators save time by introducing new features and improvements to streamline configuration while providing departmental managers options to maximize their mail flow effectiveness. MailFlow 4.9 was developed in direct response to customer requests and Deerfield's commitment to continually enhance the software.

Here’s what’s new in 4.9:

Option to Remove Ticket Tracking Data from Subject - Administrators now have the option of where to place MailFlow’s Ticket Tracking Data [123456:654321]. MailFlow uses the data to route and thread incoming messages. Since MailFlow’s inception the tracking data has been added to the Subject line however in this latest release you have the option to add the tracking data to the bottom of the message body.

MailFlow 4.9 also includes the option to remove ticket tracking data entirely. With tracking data removed MailFlow relies on Sender and Subject matching to route replies to outbound messages.

Round Robin Ticket Distribution - A function of Custom Routing Rules administrators can evenly assign Ticket Ownership to selected Agents of a TicketBox. Round Robin Ticket Distribution is ideal for commissioned based leads, ensuring each Agent is receiving an equal number of opportunities as well as balancing the workload.

Regular Expression (RegEx) Support - A regular expression, also referred to as RegEx provides a concise and flexible means for matching strings of text, such as particular characters, words, or patterns of characters. RegEx matching support has been added to Custom Routing Rules and Processing Rules. You might ask, “How can I use RegEx?” Consider this: Every time a customer includes credit card information in an email you would like to send an auto reply reminding them of the risks of sending such information via email. In the Custom Routing Rule you can specify a match using a RegEx string.

Additional RegEx examples and information are available Here.

Assign Agent TicketBox Views when creating/editing a TicketBox – This time saver allows an Admin to quickly add a TicketBox to an Agents view. Let’s say you are creating a new TicketBox and rather than alerting each Agent to add the TicketBox to their list the Admin can simply select from a list of Agents and add the TicketBox to their view for them.

Approval Queue Enhancement – A minor enhancement big on efficiency! Agents assigned to approve queued messages now have the ability to edit and send messages from the Outbound Approval Queue. Previously, approving Agents could only release or return the queued message.

VisNetic MailFlow 4.9 may be downloaded from: http://www.deerfield.com/download/visnetic-mailflow

An update on VisNetic MailFlow v5 – coming this Fall.

MailFlow 5 is scheduled to include:

Additional Browser Support
HTML Support for Standard Responses and Signatures
Mobile Device Support
Message Source IMAP Support
Auto Complete Addresses
Browseable Contacts
Follow-up on Assigned Tickets
More…

If you have any questions or would like a personal demonstration of the new features of v4.9, send us an email at sales at deerfield.com.