New solution add-on facilitates email triage and improves inquiries process for customer service departments

Esker, a global cloud platform and leader in AI-driven process automation solutions for finance and customer service functions, today announced the launch of its Customer Inquiries Management solution add-on to help customer service departments address inquiries faster and free up staff to focus on customer-facing activities. Seamlessly integrated with Esker’s Order Management solution, this add-on serves as a digital assistant for the customer service email inbox by classifying and routing messages to the right recipient or the right process.

Traditional email applications often cannot handle the email volumes that crowd the customer service inbox. Emails eventually get dumped into a few different folders, requiring someone to spend hours sorting and forwarding them to the appropriate recipient. Performance is further hampered because there is little to no visibility over which inquiries were answered and a lack of flexibility for other customer service representatives (CSRs) to take over, if necessary.

To improve the process, Esker’s Customer Inquiries Management solution uses AI capabilities to classify emails, such as RFQs, orders, status requests, remittances or claims into categories. Classified inquiries can then be answered using predefined email templates or routed via email to the appropriate person, department or process. Requests are addressed promptly, preserving good customer relationships. Thanks to automation, CSRs have more time to spend on added-value tasks focused on customer satisfaction.

Esker’s intelligent dashboards provide full visibility over the entire process, displaying real-time counters and KPIs to monitor and analyze customer inquiries by type, date or customer, enabling CSRs to quickly identify necessary process improvements.

Esker’s Customer Inquiries Management solution has made the CSR team’s job at Palmer Holland, a North American chemicals and ingredient distributor, noticeably easier. Using automated inquiry classification and routing, Esker’s solution provides CSRs with a collaborative platform to triage and analyze all 5,000 of its monthly customer requests quickly and easily. “It takes maybe a second or two to validate an inquiry now. The time savings is one of the biggest benefits,” said Aiza Toor, Customer Service Manager at Palmer Holland. Routing emails now only takes four hours a week, as opposed to four hours a day, thanks to Esker’s accurate AI-based inquiries classification.

“The addition of our Customer Inquiries Management solution to our Order-to-Cash suite aligns with our positive-sum growth strategy, as it helps both suppliers and customers build stronger relationships and improve the efficiency of their business processes,” said Aurélien Coq, Order Management Product Manager at Esker. “We help empower customer service departments with more strategic, fulfilling work and at the same time provide their customers with an improved experience — everyone wins.”

Esker’s Customer Inquiries Management solution is available worldwide.

About Esker

Esker is a global cloud platform built to unlock strategic value for finance and customer service professionals, and strengthen collaboration between companies by automating the cash conversion cycle. Esker’s solutions incorporate technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) to drive increased productivity, enhanced visibility, reduced fraud risk, and improved collaboration with customers, suppliers and internally. Esker operates in North America, Latin America, Europe and Asia Pacific with global headquarters in Lyon, France, and U.S. headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information on Esker and its solutions, visit www.esker.com. Follow Esker on LinkedIn and join the conversation on the Esker blog at blog.esker.com.

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