By Ludré Stevens – Inbotiqa, Chief Product Officer

One of our Tier 1 banking clients just completed their Inbotiqa YUDOmail pilot. A fascinating insight was brought to light by a very specific metric: the chase rates of both internal and external counterparties (i.e. how many follow follow-ups or reminders were sent) and who they had to chase. The client shared with us a few recurring themes around this valuable discovery so we tested it with some of our other clients, including non-banking ones.  This revealed a number of recurring behaviour patterns across the board, all of which can be identified and resolved with the volumes metric from YUDOmail.

Here, we are pleased to share some lessons we gained from this revealing exercise.

Inbound chaser emails: Noise and recurring issues

We define an inbound chaser email as an inbound email following a previous inbound email on the same topic and from the same email address. We uncovered two key inbound-chaser themes.

Firstly, a significant number of inbound chaser emails are not only system generated, they are also sent within one hour of the original email. These are deemed as ‘noise’ chasers by Inbotiqa clients. With the volumes metric in YUDOmail, our clients can request the generators of these emails to switch them off or to increase the chasing interval to a reasonable time. This small change means that human resources are not distracted from solving the actual underlying issues by interim noise.

The second was the ability to identify the root causes of ‘true’ chasers. Our clients were able to identify recurring chasers from the same sources, which indicated a root issue on their side. With this information, they were able to eliminate root causes thereby removing the need for the initial query as well as the chasers.

Outbound chasing and repeat offenders

Outbound chasers are defined as “an outbound email following another outbound email on the same topic and to the same email address”. A major theme emerged from our data: most chasing was needed for repeat offenders. The YUDOmail metrics revealed two indicators: Firstly, often 80% of chasers where sent to only a handful of repeat offenders. Secondly, that multiple chasers were needed to an even smaller recurring group of repeat offenders.

Inbotiqa clients are therefore able to influence staff behaviour so that the number of chaser emails required to resolve an issue can be reduced, improving task turnaround time and operational efficiency. Another key benefit of YUDOmail’s data is that not only does it tell you who needs chasing – it also exposes the types of issues they are being chased about. This allows our clients to reach out to repeat offenders to resolve any specific recurring issues and eliminate those root causes.

Actionable analytics and metrics

The beauty is that these simple metrics, namely the volumes of inbound and outbound chasers, and who and which issues they involve, provide immediately actionable metrics. These can then be used to:

• Reduce email volumes which in turn frees up valuable human resources to do real work;
• Identify recurring issues within your organisation and fix root causes, thereby preventing issues arising in the first place; and
• Enable positive behaviour change among both internal and external stakeholders.

The bottom line is that fixing root causes and enabling behaviour change means fewer breaks, fewer emails and happier clients.