How musicMagpie Automated 15,000 Customer Emails a Week

As musicMagpie grew into a major online recommerce business, increasing volumes of customer enquiries placed significant pressure on its customer service team. Managing multiple email inboxes and responding to thousands of messages each week had become increasingly difficult.

Using ThinkAutomation’s email automation software, musicMagpie centralised more than 35 email inboxes and introduced automated workflows to categorise, process and extract information from incoming messages. The solution now processes approximately 15,000 emails per week, helping the business reduce customer response times from as long as a week to just 8–16 hours.

Sector: Recommerce

Requirement: To increase internal efficiency and customer response times

Solution: Advanced inbound email automation, integration and resource optimisation

The challenge: Managing Growing Customer Email Volumes

musicMagpie was experiencing ever-increasing volumes of customer queries. Unfortunately, this also meant resource challenges.

The previous solution (Outlook and an Autohotkey implementation) was a temporary fix to manage workflow and emails. It provided only a basic level of structure to the customer service process. This temporary workaround was demanding on resource, due to constant maintenance needs. It was a client-side solution, so required installation across every machine in the business — which also resulted in management challenges.

This solution could not withstand the rapid pace of growth and customer contact. As the business grew, delays from a customer’s first email to receiving a response increased. musicMagpie took on additional employees to meet SLAs, but it could still take anywhere up to 1 week for customers to hear back. Employees were stretched to capacity.

The solution: Centralising and Automating Customer Emails

musicMagpie found ThinkAutomation in their search for alleviation. The software enabled musicMagpie to centralise their disparate email inboxes into one hub. Inboxes were set up for each of musicMagpie’s different retail outlets (such as their USA website decluttr.)

From there, ThinkAutomation’s workflow automation software processes incoming emails using predefined rules, identifying standardised subject headers and phrases within message content to categorise customer enquiries automatically. Using ThinkAutomation’s database automation capabilities, relevant information is extracted from incoming emails and stored in a database for further analysis, reducing the need for manual data entry.

This automated processing removed the need for user interaction at key operational stages. It also provided a high level of continuity across the business, and allowed the customer service department to have a more rigid and structured workflow. Plus, ThinkAutomation helps musicMagpie track and report on KPIs, something which was not possible prior to its implementation.