Staples Responds to Customer Emails in Less Than 4 Hours

January 31, 2005

Email response has to be a key component of almost any call center operation nowadays, and that is certainly so of any company operating an e-commerce Web site. Two of the primary considerations around email response management are the timeliness and the quality of email responses to customer inquiries.

As a retailer with a large-volume e-commerce operation, Staples has decided to employ KANA Response email management solution to handle this side of its operation. See this press release on our site for the details:

Staples Improves Customer Service and Cuts Costs with KANA Response; Leading Retailer Relies on KANA for Superior Service Resolution Management

As frequently happens, I find this news release kind of frustrating to read. I would really, really like to know some hard figures, such as how many reps Staples devotes to email responses, how many email customer inquiries they get, and how much an improvement they expect to get with KANA. For the most part, though, the release just contains puffery like this:

"By using KANA Response for e-mail based customer inquires, the company is increasing efficiency and significantly reducing response times. Staples selected KANA Response based upon the rich functionality of the product, ease of deployment and ability to scale." Yes, thank you.

I do see this snippet of data in a quote from Doug Woodard, vice president of customer service for Staples: "With KANA Response, we are able to answer customer inquiries in less than four hours."

Four hours is quite good response time. I do wonder whether they can do that 24/7, but the release doesn't say.

AB -- 1/31/05