Email support offers several advantages to customer care departments. Not only does email support offer an additional means for customers to solve their issues, but it is also a cost-effective and quick method to provide solutions that boost customer satisfaction. Enhancing the way your business responds to customer emails thus comes becomes important.

Improving Email Support Customer Service

More often than not, a customer or a potential one writes to you to provide feedback or to inquire about a product or service. For that, he or she has to search for your company’s official website and then find your email address. If he or she is making such an effort in reaching out to the company, the least the company can do is to make this process hassle-free.

Tips to Make Pre-Contact Easier for Customers

1) Add your email address while submitting your web directory to search engines and verify it immediately.

2) Add your email address in Google maps, and other online maps.

3) Do not confuse the user with multiple email addresses and make sure you have one for customer support.

4) Make sure the email address is mentioned in your “Contact us” and in all correspondence with the customer, both offline and online.

5) Go for a contact form if possible. This dispenses the need to use Outlook or other email service agents, which is quite cumbersome on phones and tablets.

6) Make sure you send an acknowledgment of the customer’s email as soon as possible (an auto responder is a good idea) and a message such as “Thank you. We have received your message and will revert within 24 hours. If there is something urgent, please call us at…” for those contacting you via contact forms.

Tips on Email Handling

1) Segregate your incoming emails into different broad categories with a specialized team for each category.

2) Then assign a team and deadline for each email/category.

Such an organized approach will help you plug loopholes easily, plan mass mails whenever the opportunity arises, facilitate real-time training, and troubleshoot problems more efficiently and quickly.

While there could be several ways to reply to a query or a complaint, make sure your email team is aware of basic rules in email communication.

Tips on Email Etiquette

• Policy:

Your company’s emails should be as professional as your email policy is. Most large companies have a communication strategy and it could be used to develop an email policy. Make sure you have both hard and soft copies distributed and discussed with your email handling teams. As you know, consistency is key in any form of communication, and more so in email service.

• Being Formal and Professional:

While it is tempting for email handling agents to go for shortcuts, use a lot of exclamation marks, insert emoticons, and use terms such as LOL to add a personal touch, it is best to be formal or risk the wrath of the unimpressed customer.

Email support teams should be advised to use simple words, and follow standard rules of grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. Quality checks should be carried out frequently and feedback shared. Poor grammar should not be taken lightly. In fact, customers often get brutal and do not hesitate to post hilarious grammar mistakes on social media.

• Message:

Focus on conveying the real message as soon as possible. A strong and clear subject line and a crisp introductory paragraph that summarizes the problem at hand are required to do that. One question that needs to be asked and checked continuously is: “Has the customer’s query been clearly answered, and a clear call for action provided?”

• Response time:

Any response time of over an hour is considered late. To address customer complaints and queries promptly is the real game-changer with emails, and a quick response prevents the customer’s agony or doubt from snowballing into something negative.

If the number of emails is large and a personal reply is likely to take time, take the help of an automated responder and personalize it if possible. Similarly, developing a template for similar queries or during product launches could help save a lot of time in email handling.

• Problem Solving:

Make sure you let the customer know that the customer email support team is working on a solution, or ask the customer for a solution if required. It is significant to note that a bulk of emails includes complaints. These emails are often the last resort for many clients. Thus, the email team should try its best to not prolong the distress of the customer. You may provide explanations if asked for; however you should never question the customer’s intelligence, or point out that the mistake lies with the customer. Instead, a prompt apology, a replacement or refund, and quick action could be your best chance to retain the customer.