Make Email Your Best Consumers Service Tool
When you are developing a consumer service program for your small business, it is tempting to think that you have to cover a possible communication channel. Run a phone queue, offer live chat, manage social media messaging, as well as email support, to name a few. But a little team can get stretched thin trying to cover all these channels, particularly if responding to your customers’ requirements is one aspect of your role. But here is the thing, you do not have to offer support over multiple channels to provide the best service. If you need to prioritize efficiency, personal service, as well as better communication with your consumers, email is your great bet. Here are some ways to turn email into your great customer service tool.
Flexible support hours
With phone and chat support, your consumers have to wait unless your offices are open before they may reach you. With email, they can reach out at any time of day that is convenient for them. This flexibility is particularly useful if you have clients in different time zones. Because they may get a message to you any time, clients feel like they have been heard, which isn’t the case when they call you and get a voicemail and an automated phone tree.
Not that, with an asynchronous communication tool like email that your clients will have many expectations that there will be a short delay before they receive a response. Obviously, it is best to respond as rapidly as you can, but email does allow your team small breathing space to research or brainstorm solutions to issues.
Automate processes without hurting relationships
Some of us may have the painful experience of calling a consumer service line, to be met by a recording telling us to press 1 for this, press 2 for that, as well as now please hold for the next available agent. This automation can save a lot of time, but it is not a good experience for the client. But when you provide email support, you can automate your email response procedures without losing the feeling of personal service. You can, for instance, set up email templates for replies your team sends often.
Your team can begin with these canned responses and then customize them depending on the customers’ requirements. It saves time, but your client experiences the response as personal. You can use email auto-responders to help set expectations. Add a brief automated reply that thanks to the customer to write, allow them to know what your business hours are, and when they can expect a reply. Practices like these help a little team grow relationships with their customers and make sure that customers not feel like their requests are left unheard.
Make complex messages bite-sized
There can be times when you need for sending your customer an especially detailed message. But never all of your clients want to read a long email. In these cases, email is unsurpassed to let your team format much information into short, simple to digest messages. You can, for instance, make visual separations between points in a complex email by using your emailer’s native editing tools, like bold type, numbered lists, bulleted, and indenting.
If you are explaining where something is located or a step by step procedure, you can drop in screenshots to illustrate them. If more explanation is essential, you can include links to videos articles and your company’s FAQs. All of these tricks help turn long emails into shorter ones, and busy consumers are much more probably to read them.
Now if you have long and detailed passages of details or info that you often use, instead of putting them in mail template form, set them up as PDF documents instead. Then your team will attach them to brief emails. Give the client a fast summary of what is in the attached document, so they can decide when they need to read it. That tiny amount of choice greatly increases consumer satisfaction.
Make client happiness
Ultimately, email offers many easy, efficient ways to delight your consumers. For instance, you can attach surprises to any email. If you need to reward loyalty, make up for a not best outcome, and make a client’s day, you can set up coupons, promo codes, and digital freebies. You should provide the freedom to your team to share these in emails. It is a type of service you cannot do over the phone. You may do unobtrusive follow-ups by email.
Once you have resolved a problem of customer, set yourself a reminder to send them another message a couple of weeks later, asking whether they are happy with the outcome and if they want anything else. Even if they do not answer, seeing that evidence that you care will go a long way toward deepening their engagement with your company. Your team can wrap up emails with an offer to get on the phone with consumers to help more. This way you can offer phone service to those clients who prefer it, without having to maintain a full-time phone bank.
Remember quality beats quantity
Most consider email for being outdated, but that has more to do with how businesses use it instead of it becoming obsolete. In a globe where everybody is pushing out generic marketing emails, the secret is to try as well as stand out from the crowd by sending a personalized email. Refining the way, you communicate via email can help inform how you handle other customers’ service channels while growing your reputation as a client-first business.
Try these tricks for improving your consumer service emails, and you will see how email can become your company’s great customer service tool.
Track, search and share conversations
Of course, email makes a written record of everything your customers say an archive that is growing all the time. That archive can come in handy to your company if you can extract the info you want from it. That is where tools like tagging and saved searches come in handy. If you are using Outpost, you can add tags to email conversations, which allows you to group them by theme and simply locate them later.
You can tag complaint and suggestion emails, for instance, so you may comb through them later to help you develop updates to your product/service. You might add tags for any info that is important to your business such as locations, upcoming company events, products, and so on.
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