The E-mail Service Provider Coalition trade group has changed its name to the E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition to better reflect the makeup of its membership. The ESPC increasingly has been getting members that aren’t service providers, according to its executive director Trevor Hughes. “We’ve always aimed to be a positive force in the e-mail industry as a whole and we're glad that a broader range of companies are seeing the value of ESPC membership,” said Hughes in a statement.
Two new studies suggest that consumers generally are more satisfied using e-mail than making telephone calls to customer contact centers. Americans typically will hang up if it takes more than 37 seconds for their call to be answered, compared with 67 seconds in Europe, according to Dimension Data’s annual worldwide call center survey. Globally, one in 10 call center interactions occur via e-mail, but the rate of e-mail use is 150% higher in the United States. It takes an average of 11 hours for U.S. consumers to receive responses to e-mail inquiries, vs. 25 hours in Europe, Dimension Data reported. The Aspect Contact Center Index found that 18% of customer interactions happen by e-mail, while 82% of those responses received met or exceeded customers’ expectations. The index represents a collaboration between market research firm Leo J. Shapiro and Associates and Aspect Software Inc. The index said 77% of consumers agreed that contact centers met or exceeded their expectations, significantly lower than the 90% projected by contact center managers.
