Tag: email

The Case for Dropping the Phone

Not all that long ago, if you had a question about or problem with a product the norm was to call the company. Even when online commerce became common, most companies still provided a phone number in addition to an email address as a way to quickly get in touch. But Amazon, from the very beginning, made it very difficult to find their phone number. They offered extensive FAQs and it was pretty easy to find their email or use their contact forms, but it was very, very difficult to talk to person on the phone.

This was an absolute genius move on their part. Phone calls take exponentially longer to resolve than emails, especially those related to predictable problems. If you can predict — as Amazon could, when they were just in the business of selling books online — the majority of the issues your customers will encounter, you can have systems in place to handle those issues quickly and efficiently.

For example, let’s say I ordered a book from Amazon and it arrived with a torn cover. If I called, there would be pleasantries to dispense with, and then the CSR would have to find my order, and then I would have to describe the damage (which might take awhile, depending on how wordy and/or upset I was), and then the CSR would have to tell me what next steps were, and then I might want to argue, or I might have missed something and need them to explain again, and so on. We close up with more pleasantries and perhaps some small talk about the weather if I’m feeling chatty that day, and that simple return has now taken at least 10 minutes, maybe closer to 20.

That same exchange, conducted over email, would take half that time. Less, once you’ve got a handle on the issue and a procedure in place to handle it. Plus, any promises made by the CSR or requests made by the customer are in writing and easily accessible by all parties. Although there may be some initial frustration to your customers as they are still in the mindset of “talking to a person,” you will be able to quickly demonstrate through speedy resolution that there is no need for a phone call.

The key is that your responses to customer queries do need to be speedy and, even more importantly, accurate. Your CSRs absolutely must read and parse what your customers have written. They must know the questions to ask to tease the information they need out of your customers quickly and efficiently. With the right CSRs and the right procedures in place, you will save both your company and your customers time and money by making email your primary communication tool. Everybody wins!

Light, Fluffy, Delicious Email

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.