Almost all company websites now offer an email contact point. This is also true of marketing brochures and even packaging. You might therefore think that email has become an efficient and controlled means of interacting with customers. It does indeed offer real advantages for businesses: less expensive to process than a phone call, letter, or fax, it allows for delayed, in-depth processing, and is also easier to store, distribute, and process than a letter.
Finally, it ensures complete traceability of exchanges with clients. But the observation is often the same: emails receive no response at all, or responses are late, inconsistent, and inadequate to the case being addressed. Some businesses choose to hire a virtual assistant to manage their email inbox to ensure everything else is monitored.
Without a response by email, the consequence is immediate: customers end up calling the call center and asking their question to an agent who, of course, doesn’t have access to the customer’s email history. As for websites that don’t offer an email contact point, you can imagine the frustration they generate.
Undeniably, successfully managing customer service email channels is challenging. By following the 12 tips below, VA Staff, a virtual assistant agency in the Philippines created this guide to help businesses overcome the main pitfalls of managing incoming emails and learn how to organize email inboxonce and for all.
1. Assess customer expectations
The gap between customer expectations and the level of service offered by the company is often the result of two misjudgments. Companies often mistakenly consider email processing either as an extension of individual email, which is not designed to handle complete response processes, or as an extension of the telephone call distribution system without taking into account the specific characteristics of email.
Effectively managing incoming emails requires analyzing customer expectations based on two criteria: response time and the relevance of the response. Excessively long response times quickly become a disadvantage, as they discourage customers from making further inquiries or online purchases.
As for the relevance of the response, while it may be a more subjective criterion, it remains essential; it helps, among other things, to avoid sending further messages of dissatisfaction or requests for additional information. Finally, it is important to cross-reference the customer’s expectations with the customer segment to which they belong in order to adjust the time spent to the value that this customer represents for the company.
2. Define the contact point strategy and use the forms
To effectively respond to a customer’s request, it’s essential to route the email to the right advisor in the right department. Forms on websites that collect information such as customer identity, request, and project type facilitate email routing and enable appropriate responses. It’s also worth noting that forms are useful for combating spam and email saturation attacks: by requiring information and masking the email address, they prevent the mass sending of files and keep the email address from ending up in spammers’ mailing lists. This is a crucial aspect of company security.
The challenge, therefore, is to clearly define which email address to provide for which purpose, because every email address shared externally is an open door that the client will use. And in the case of forms, it’s crucial to carefully consider the amount of information – beyond ten or so fields, with mandatory entries and validations, the desired outcome may be to test the client’s good faith.
It would therefore be beneficial to implement a contact form that adapts based on the initial information provided by the customer. The recipient’s email address would then be linked to a list of information related to the message subject, the customer’s geographic location, or any other relevant details. This would allow for more precise email routing well before the message is sent to the server.
3. Practice pre-processing emails to ensure intelligent routing
Incoming email management software has powerful pre-processing and routing functions that allow for upstream analysis of the information contained in the email (recipient and sender addresses, email subject, body of text, etc.).
The goal of automated replies is to free up agents’ time and allow them to handle complex, more engaging, and less routine requests more quickly. However, it’s not applicable to all emails, but is primarily suited to standard and recurring questions (password reset requests, account balance inquiries, requests for documentation, requests for explanations regarding a malfunction or product defect, etc.). Finally, automated replies are also useful for responding to emails containing profanity.
Nevertheless, companies with the highest automated response relevance rates use a large number of rules—up to a hundred—each to identify a specific topic. The more rules there are, and the more specific they are, the more precisely the topic will be identified and the more efficiently the case will be handled.
4 Make customer information available to agents
Agents must be able to access customer information through a simple and user-friendly interface. The customer information used by the agent depends on the context: customer details and profile, products and contracts held, history of interactions and pending requests, details of recent invoices, current orders, etc.
Each customer file must therefore be accessible, and the history of all interactions, notifications, and sent messages must be displayed in a simple and readily accessible manner.
5. Integrate email with other interaction media
Who hasn’t heard on the phone: “Write, we’ll get back to you…” or “I haven’t seen your email because you’re on a call center call”? Nothing is more frustrating for a customer than feeling the silo between their different interaction channels with the company and having to waste precious minutes recounting the history of all the facts of the case to each new contact.
Some IT applications aggregate the entire history of customer interactions, regardless of whether the contacts took place via appointment, telephone, email, or postal mail. The challenge is to implement a 360° approach to all these remote interactions with the customer.
This will allow for prioritizing communication channels, managing agent skills, availability, and routing rules, maximizing the use of rare skills, and calculating statistics that aggregate processing times per customer or per agent.
Developing standardized procedures will offer the opportunity to manage a greater number of customer cases based on the nature of the request and the communication channel used.
It must be acknowledged that a unified and undifferentiated handling of different media by the same teams of agents remains rare in companies. Email processing is often reserved for a dedicated team; and in some cases, agents will focus on calls or emails depending on the day’s peak periods.
6. Make a knowledge base available to agents
This is perhaps the most important piece of advice. You will discover that using a comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge base is the answer to your concerns.
It’s possible to create a knowledge base from simple, recurring customer requests (the famous FAQs: “Frequently Asked Questions”). Also, create rich, visually appealing content using HTML to make the information attractive and easy to read. Finally, create content that agents can customize for emails with multiple questions.
Easy for agents to use, this knowledge base allows them to write high-quality, higher-value responses by drawing on existing answer elements. Furthermore, the idea is that each new response created can be saved in the knowledge base and reused by other agents.
7. Offer customers self-service access to the knowledge base
Offering customers self-access to the knowledge base is an effective avoidance strategy for certain types of jobs or customer profiles, such as technical support.
The self-service model saves agent time (especially in technical support) while improving customer satisfaction. Including a link to the knowledge base in every email is a good way to promote it so the customer will use it next time. However, the answer to the query should be included in the body text, as customers who don’t necessarily read their emails online won’t appreciate being forced to log in to access it.
8. Use a style guide to personalize emails according to certain standards and train agents
The style and structure of an email differ considerably from those of a traditional letter. However, certain aspects can be standardized in the form of a style guide (the opening salutation, the font, words to avoid, the personalization of the signature, etc.).
On the other hand, agents responsible for responding to emails must possess different skills than those answering the telephone, including typing speed, writing fluency, and mastery of spelling. They must receive specific training to learn appropriate writing techniques.
It is also essential to train agents to carefully proofread the text of messages and their replies before sending them. The reply may be partially or completely inapplicable; it must be systematically checked because while customers expect a quick response, they also expect an answer to the question asked.
Finally, agents must know the company’s values, as well as its offers and products; they must be able to analyze complex problems and master computer applications.
9. Choose a software solution adapted to your needs
Solutions dedicated to managing incoming emails do not replace the mail server, but rather use it to retrieve emails from a mailbox and route replies to clients. Therefore, message reception will depend on a processing method tailored to each business application.
Since each software program has its own logic, it’s essential to verify that it fits within the organizational structure being implemented. Among the technical criteria to check beforehand are the architecture (J2EE, .NET, etc.), the availability of a thick or thin client, the existence of APIs, and support for different operating environments.
If there is no need for numerous interfaces with other information systems, the ASP model can be considered. Finally, it is also possible to completely outsource email response to a provider that will use its own software solution and agents.
10. Start with a pilot
After conducting a feasibility study and selecting a solution, it is important to build a pilot application to, among other things, better understand the intricacies of the software. This is essential for implementing non-standard features, validating the parsing engine, refining standard responses, and sizing agent teams based on actual email processing times.
Much more than just an email client, it’s a business application that brings together tools and simplifies tasks for agents, leading to greater efficiency. Incoming emails, and therefore workload, are better distributed according to message content.
11. Managing service quality
You can’t control what you don’t measure. For emails, as in all contact centers, the key performance indicators (KPIs) relate to flows (volume of emails received and sent, average response time, number of emails in storage, age of the storage, etc.) or to processing (number of emails processed, standard response rate, relevance level of responses, etc.). These KPIs are broken down by day, week, month, type, department, agent, receiving group, etc.
Customer relevance or satisfaction is a complex indicator derived either from a customer perspective through satisfaction surveys or from an internal perspective by assigning a rating based on quality criteria through sampling. These indicators will then inform the company’s customer/product strategies, the staffing levels required, the information to prioritize, and the working methods to develop within the contact center.
Caution: focusing solely on processing time often leads to less relevant responses. The relevance of the message should not be sacrificed for the sake of speed. A certain amount of time should be allocated to each email, except for emails on standard topics, where an automated reply method is acceptable.
12. Measure the return on investment of the project
The return on investment of a project based on specific software is evaluated by comparing the cost items with the gains achieved.
The cost reductions relate to the analysis and selection of the solution, the acquisition of software licenses, the acquisition of a server, the integration of the software and the maintenance of the solution.
As for the gains, they are measured by the reduction in payroll spent on processing emails, the time no longer spent on producing statistics, the increasing use of the knowledge base to develop marketing actions and improve products and services, etc.
With 45% of American people connected to the internet, businesses can no longer ignore their customers’ emails. Improving email processing is not an insurmountable challenge; it’s actually a quick and easy win with an immediate impact on customer satisfaction.
Implementing automated processing tools, training staff, and establishing a CRM-type knowledge base where all customer interactions are recorded provide a solid foundation and a virtuous cycle to cultivate.
Managing customer follow-up and gaining a better understanding of the customer database are also valuable for developing future marketing campaigns, enabling the deployment of automated yet targeted messages.
The key point to remember is not to sacrifice the relevance of emails for the sake of response speed. Some processes can be automated, and simple methods can be implemented to better manage all emails.
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