AUTOMATED ANSWERS TO EMAIL
A program, developed by EchoMail Inc., Cambridge, Mass.,
sorts, analyzes and even answers some
of the e-mails sent to companies such as Kmart Corp.,
American Express Co. and Calvin Klein Inc.
Now, after two years of pilot programs, more than 30 U.S.
senators have installed it under a deal
signed by the Senate sergeant-at-arms.
EchoMail was founded by V.A. Shiva, 37 years old, who
sometimes calls himself "Dr. E-Mail." The
company's program is designed to improve corporate
responsiveness to e-mail by automating the
processing. It recognizes preprogrammed key words and their
synonyms and can even tell if the writer
is angry, tipped off by exclamation points and such phrases
as "I hated your product" or "please send
me a replacement."
Some customers use it only to sort mail and route it to the
right person, but many say it is smart
enough to respond to most of the regular e-mail and to
forward to humans the things it doesn't
understand.
In the Senate, at least, most e-mails from constituents
still get a glance from staffers. But "that's not
going to last for long," says Sen. William Frist, a
Tennessee Republican and technology enthusiast. He
says EchoMail is good enough to categorize most e-mails and
send appropriate responses.
Responding to constituents' calls, letters and e-mails
occupies 30% to 60% of the staff time in many
offices, says Richard Shapiro, executive director of the
Congressional Management Foundation, a
nonprofit group that advises congressional staffers on
running their offices. The group, which is urging
congressmen to deploy EchoMail or other automated services
to sort e-mail, says Congress last year
got 80 million e-mails, five times as many as the paper
letters.
Do constituents care that their e-mails weren't read by a
congressman or aide? Mr. Shapiro says that in
focus groups with constituents, "people understood their
communications weren't from the member.
They wanted responsiveness on a timely basis. They didn't
care whether it was staff or whatever."
EchoMail estimates that a company using humans to reply to
all e-mails spends $6.25 a message,
while EchoMail can cut that cost in half, including the
cost of humans for the messages EchoMail
can't handle.
When a client such as Warner Music is running a
compact-disc sale, "Questions about a promotion
become very similar: How long is it running? What are the
terms and conditions?" An EchoMail rep
says, "We've trained it to respond to hundreds of
questions. It's smart enough to tell us when it's got
something it can't answer." In tests, he says, EchoMail
answered as much as 95% of all e-mails correctly.
When e-mails arrive, EchoMail sorts it out and immediately
deletes random "spam," or unsolicited
pitches.
The remaining e-mails are put into what Mr. Shiva calls the
"digital refinery." There, they are analyzed
and forwarded to the right department, or sent replies.
EchoMail also keeps a log of what topics generate the most
e-mails and the percentage of angry
e-mails.
EchoMail generally operates as an application service
provider, hosting the e-mail on its own servers
and charging customers 50 cents to $2 for each message
handled, depending on the amount of
processing the customer contracts for. For other customers,
it licenses the software for $200,000 to
more than $1 million.
Companies sometimes start using EchoMail because they are
inundated with mail on a topic. Kmart
bought EchoMail last spring when it was starting to deal
with letters protesting its decision to stop
carrying handgun ammunition. Since EchoMail batches
together e-mail by key words, "we get them
quickly to the appropriate department," a spokeswoman says.
Similarly, when Nascar driver Dale
Earnhardt was killed, EchoMail sorted e-mail from customers
who wanted to buy memorabilia from
Kmart, she says.
11/15/2001
The Wall Street Journal
