As your company grows, you’ll see rapid growth in customer service requests.
If you don’t have systems to manage your customer email, it won’t be long before your team feels overwhelmed and reply times start slipping from minutes to hours, to days.
Sounds familiar?
If so, you need a customer email management system.
What’s that, you’re wondering? In this guide, I’ll clear it up for you.
I’ll show you:
Let’s jump in.
Customer email management is the process of how you manage incoming emails from your customers and users to ensure they get high-quality replies.
Effective customer email management involves:
Your goal should be to have every customer query answered in the best way with as little delay as possible.
You’ll improve your customer experience, improve customer satisfaction, and make life easier for your customer service team.
Improving your email management isn’t a feel-good exercise. There are real business benefits. Here are some of our favorites:
The first benefit of creating a smooth customer email management system is that your team will feel calmer at work. They won’t check-in at 9 AM and be under a flood of emails that they don’t know who should handle.
Everyone will know exactly where to start, and they’ll be able to reply to your customers without wasting time on admin work.
When your team is performing well, your customer satisfaction will go up.
Thanks to your efficient systems, your team can spend less time on inbox management and more time talking to your customers, personalizing replies, and building trust.
Considering one in three people say talking to a friendly support agent is the most essential aspect of customer service, customer satisfaction should be a key goal.
An effective customer service system enables you to close more deals with new customers.
Why?
Effective customer service reflects your entire organization. If you can’t reply to support tickets quickly, sales leads won’t trust that you can deliver the results you promise once they’re a customer.
An effective customer email management system frees up time to prioritize replies to sales leads, showing that you’re dedicated to supporting them.
Choosing you over a competitor will be a simple choice when they see how quickly you respond to questions and concerns.
If everyone on your team has a separate inbox, it’s hard to manage your email effectively. When someone takes a day off, any customer emails they receive won’t get a response. That’s not a great customer experience.
Instead, create a shared support inbox.
This starts with routing all emails to a shared inbox, such as support@timetoreply.com.
All support emails will land there. Then, you set up a system so your team can then jump in and reply to those emails from their personal email addresses to resolve customer questions.
This sounds tedious, but it’s simple to implement with customer email management software like Intercom, Front, or one of the many other options out there. These tools let you invite your whole team and manage every email from one place, so they’re a great option if you’re managing a high volume of customer inquiries.
Once every support email is stored in a shared, accessible location, it becomes easier to start managing your email workflow.
When you receive customer emails, spend 30 seconds reading and categorizing them.
For example:
You can then assign the right team members to them — there’s no use tagging your accounting team onto an email related to a problem with your product.
There are two main benefits to this.
First, your team will know exactly what emails they need to worry about replying to. They’ll understand what topic every email relates to and who is responsible for responding to it.
Second, your time to reply will improve. Considering 67% of customers say their standards for good customer experiences are higher than ever, it’s a vital metric to improve upon.
Setting targets for your team will help ensure customer service is a competitive advantage for your business.
78% of sales go to the first company to respond. If someone is shopping around, considering your product/service, and asks a question in your live chat or sends an email to your team, you need to get back to them as fast as possible.
If your team can answer every email within a defined amount of time, your staff won’t need to worry about outstanding support tickets sitting at the bottom of their inbox for days. Your customers will have confidence that you’re there to help them.
You can easily set and measure your reply time targets with timetoreply’s email and reply tracking system.
If your support team needs to ping your developers or finance team on Slack every time there’s a question they don’t have an answer to, things will get noisy.
To help your support team answer all incoming questions, and build a knowledge base of company information.
When you receive a new support inquiry, your team can use the knowledge base to surface relevant answers instantly — much more straightforward than a back-and-forth Slack thread.
Considering 36% of customers say that support reps not having access to the right information is a key frustration, it’s a simple way to improve the service experience for both your team and your customers.
Source: Microsoft State of Global Customer Service Report
In some customer service tools, you can create a database of saved answers. When you receive an email, your team can auto-fill a relevant response, customize it to the exact scenario, and reply, all in a few clicks. A knowledge base is a highly effective way to increase leverage in your support team.
You can set up systems, processes, and best practices for your customer email management — but none of it matters if you don’t follow through by replying to your customers’ emails quickly.
To ensure you’re always replying to customers and leads on time, use timetoreply.
Our email response management system lets you set goals and targets for you and your team.
You can track how efficient you are at replying to customer emails and support tickets and find actionable ways to improve the time it takes you.
Over time, you’ll see how effective you are at hitting your reply time goals and find ways to improve thanks to detailed reports and analytics.
timetoreply integrates with o365, Outlook, Gmail, and more. Try it out in your organization with a free trial.
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