Timberland, Inc. is a retailer that designs, produces and sells footwear, apparel, and accessories. They sell their products mainly through department stores, specialty stores, and their own retail stores. Four years ago, when the company opened up Timberland.com for online sales, the amount of customer inquiries the company received daily via e-mail went from zero to 30,000. With this volume, Timberland’s customer service representatives needed more than 24 hours to answer every inquiry. They didn’t feel this was in line with their customer service mindset and customers weren’t happy about it either.

In order to deal with the high volume of messages they were receiving from customers, the company installed an e-mail management program called eGain Mail. This program helps them rout messages to the appropriate customer service representative based on their area of expertise. The program utilizes an acknowledgment feature which lets customer know that their message has been received. Representatives can also provide live website links and product images in the body of their response to help them to communicate with their customer. Timberland says the program has helped to increase productivity of their CSRs by 300% while reducing training time by 93.75%.