Inform Communications

KEY SERVICE AREAS:    Organisation-wide – wherever email contact is / should be utilised.

SERVICE OPTIONS:    As an additional contact method with your Inform 360 Self Service telephone service.

As a stand-alone service in any business area where email enquiries are received or should be encouraged.

Email is the instant, free, electronic communication method most of us use every day - so why is this method not generally widely promoted and why is there often long lead-times for a reply?

Telephone enquiries would not be left unmanaged to arrive in any volume, any time of day, for any possible enquiry topic without some form of filtering or enquiry management. We believe the same strategic management should apply to email enquiries to enable fast, efficient and productive responses that your residents expect. 

A typical email enquiry can be as follows:

a)    A potentially long, rambling free-text email is received.

b)    The email is read to establish what the enquiry is exactly about.

c)    The possibility of the enquiry being received by the wrong person/team and needing to be forwarded is relatively high, duplicating the function from b) again.

d)    If the enquiry is to the right person/team, the likelihood of the reason being unclear or the customer not providing the right information to process the query immediately, is high.

e)    If so, an email needs to be sent to the customer requesting clarification / further information.

f)    A reply is received and the process is repeated.

This results in a lengthy and time consuming process, possibly explaining the relatively unexploited use of email for this type of communication. We believe even a small percentage of efficiency improvement could save considerable resources and resolve far more enquiries first time.

If you provide the same comprehensive, interactive Self Service information as we recommend for the equivalent telephone service in the initial customer enquiry email reply, your team will only ever receive clear, concise enquiries with all of the information they need to process the enquiry first time. Even these can be further reduced by adding to the information in the initial email, depending on the enquiry type and its suitability for Self Service.  

Inform 360 Self Service then manages this information in much the same way as the telephone services, by prompting regular reviews and making any additions/changes required to keep the information up-to-date and relevant. Your service would connect to any electronic forms / payment lines / web sections that you already have in place. Where you don’t have any or a particular online form or PDF version, we will create these for you. We will re-create your organisation logo and style so that the content remains fluid and consistent throughout the service.