title: Automatic message handling for a national counselling service.
abstract: An automatic email handling system (AutoRouter) was introduced at a national counselling service in Australia. In 2003, counsellors responded to a total of 7421 email messages. Over nine days in early May 2004 the administrator responsible for the management of the manual email counselling service recorded the time spent on managing email messages. The AutoRouter was then introduced. Since the implementation of the AutoRouter the administrator's management role has become redundant; an average of 12 h 5 min per week of staff time has been saved. There have been further savings in supervisor time. Counsellors were taking an average of 6.2 days to respond to email messages (n = 4307), with an average delay of 1.2 days from the time counsellors wrote the email to when the email was sent. Thus the response was sent on average 7.4 days after receipt of the original client email message. A significant decrease in response time has been noted since implementation of the AutoRouter, with client responses now taking an average of 5.4 days, a decrease of 2.0 days. Automatic message handling appears to be a promising method of managing the administration of a steadily increasing email counselling service.
authors.affiliation: Centre for Online Health, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
authors.forename: Liam
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Caffery
authors.forename: Karly
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Crew-Wegner
authors.forename: Wendy
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Reid
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Wootton
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D002662:Child Health Services / Q000458:organization & administration*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003376:Counseling / Q000458:organization & administration*; D017598:Efficiency, Organizational; D034742:Electronic Mail / Q000458:organization & administration*; D015277:Hotlines / Q000458:organization & administration*; D006801:Humans; D011793:Queensland