Customer care email is a bit like a soufflé: delightful to both the chef(CSR) and the consumer when done well, but can easily fail if proper care and attention are lacking. As with so many things in customer care, the key elements to running your customer care emails are proper planning and the ability to be flexible with those plans.
First, let’s talk about the different kinds of emails customers may be getting from you. It is very common these days for companies to use emails for everything from promotions to newsletters, so your customers may be used to those communications from you. These are not the emails I’m talking about when I say “customer care emails” (though I will talk about them in another post). Right now I’m talking about the emails generated by your customer care department in response to direct customer inquiries.
You may be using a customer management system (CMS) like Freshdesk or Zendesk, and that’s great. Anything that lets you organize your customer touches for maximum efficiency is useful. Being able to track information about customer contacts is so important that back before these systems were readily available I created a primitive SQL based call/email tracking system for the company I was at. I’m not a programmer, but the time spent learning the code to support this system was 100% worth it. We could identify frequently asked questions, easily find pre-formatted responses to those questions, and also track customer contact numbers: overall contacts, contacts by category, contacts by type, etc. That’s all really important information to have when you’re determining how best to allocate your customer care resources.
CMSs are fantastic because that’s all already built in. Plus, they function as an email queue, with agents able to assign tickets to each other, auto-sorting features, the ability to merge tickets, bulk actions, etc. Each of the big CMSs has advantages and disadvantages, of course, but overall any of them is a good choice. Just make sure you review the feature lists to ensure the system you’re looking at will do what your business needs them to be able to do. And if you don’t see something on the features list of a system you otherwise like very much, ask! Most of these systems are highly customizable.
Even with a great CMS, the sheer volume of emails can be overwhelming, especially if there’s an issue that affects a large percentage of your customers. I have had less tech savvy CSRs suggest “turning email off for the night” as a way to staunch the flow of incoming mail, especially when there’s an issue that touches a large number of customers. It probably goes without saying, but that’s neither practical nor desirable and would only serve to increase customer frustration. However, a well-crafted auto-response can ease that frustration while setting customer expectations. I’d caution, though, that specificity is not necessarily your friend here.
If you, for instance, say that someone will be in contact within three business days and you end up being short staffed or get overwhelmed by an unforeseen issue and unable to respond within that time-frame, your customers are going to be justifiably upset. It is also likely that you will have customers who just see “three days” and don’t allow for the weekend, or who think Saturday is a business day, or any number of other misinterpretations.
It is important to respond to customers quickly, but not at the expense of a quality response. However, if you find that your department is regularly taking more than a day or two to respond to customers, you need to find the underlying cause. Do you need to staff up due to an increased customer base, or are the issues that are causing customers to contact you solvable internally? For example, are your CSRs writing custom responses to each customer when a bulk email would do? Are other departments (marketing, fulfillment, etc.) causing unnecessary confusion or making promises without being able to follow through? Address those issues! Train your CSRs, talk to other departments, do whatever you need to do to ensure that you can care for your customers in a timely and efficient manner.