When customers need help, they open their email. One report found that 72% of consumers worldwide used email for customer support. With that in mind, there are clear steps companies can take to make sure their email support is solid, helping customers at scale and resolving their queries quickly and efficiently.
5 rules for managing incoming emails
1. Be responsive.
Customers don’t expect their issue to be addressed immediately, but an instant automated response lets them know you’ve received their email and will be in touch. This gives them confidence that you’re on the case and starts the interaction on a positive note. Your response should also include useful information like a reference or case number, which they can refer to in future.
2. Keep track of your cases.
A sure way to annoy customers is to make them repeat themselves. If they’ve already shared information or if a previous agent has already helped them, they aren’t going to want to start from the beginning. A good case management system will avoid this common frustration. Agents need ready access to email (and phone) logs for all customers.
3. Prepare pre-written responses.
Pre-written, standard answers are a great resource that save agents time and effort on commonly asked questions. However, this only works when the answers are up-to-date and address the customer’s specific question. One common pitfall is a knowledge base filled with duplicate or obsolete answers, which can make it hard for an agent to find the relevant answer.
To make sure your pre-written answers are helpful to agents and customers:
- Designate an editorial team to review and edit pre-written responses regularly to ensure they’re accurate and consistent.
- Employ an intelligent search engine, like the one powered by Inbenta’s Natural Language Processing (NLP), which can understand user intent and surface the best answer quickly.
- Manage your knowledge base. A knowledge base containing between 500 and 2,500 pre-written answers is typically strong enough to meet 80% of the requests while remaining small enough to be easily managed.
4. Help customers help themselves.
If you’ve followed the previous rule, the next one is a no-brainer: let customers search the same knowledge base your agents use. A self-service platform can reduce customer calls and emails by 80% or more. This could include an AI-powered chatbot, interactive demos and semantic search.
5. Analyze the data.
A good email management system will track key metrics to show you how it’s working. These can include:
- How many emails are received and sent.
- Average response times.
- Success and failure rates.
- Customer satisfaction.
- Agent performance.
A continous stream of data helps you improve the performance of the system over time, letting you identify what adjustments are needed to the customer experience or the way your business is communicating.
