E-mail is the unappreciated workhorse of e-business.
Accessible to anyone with a computer and an ISP account, e-mail is an effective, low-cost customer contact tool that can be used tell customers about new products and services and special promotions. (For more, see my May 22 column on e-mail marketing.) E-mail is also a great way to maintain a dialogue with customers and gather more information about their concerns and preferences.
E-mail is also important in the realm of customer service. Customers often e-mail questions to online retailers when they can't figure out the answer based on information on the site or even in physical stores. Customers also e-mail questions and concerns after the sale.
Because e-mail is so mundane compared with more exotic CRM and supply chain applications, it's often taken for granted. But proper handling of customer service questions by e-mail has a direct effect on customers' perception of the enterprise and their willingness to continue doing business with it. Slow, vague, inaccurate, or incomplete responses can result in lost sales and unhappy customers.
The good news is that, compared with other technologies, it doesn't take a lot of money to make solid improvements to e-mail customer service. Here are some best practices:
Respond quickly. Making customers wait too long for a response will irritate them and may result in lost sales, particularly when customers are asking questions to help them qualify a purchase. A recent Giga Information Group survey of 50 leading e-commerce sites found that the median response time increased from four hours in the first quarter of 2002 to five hours in the second quarter. (It took the slowest firm a little more than two days to respond.) An auto-response system can help by quickly acknowledging the customer's query, providing some basic information, and letting the customer know that an agent will follow up with a more specific answer. (More on these systems in a minute.)
Respond completely. Responding to customers' questions quickly isn't enough. The quality of the response is also important. Responses that do not solidly address customers' queries leave them frustrated and feeling that the company isn't really paying attention to their concerns. The Giga survey found that 24 percent of the responses it received were either vague or failed to answer the question. The responses to the question, "Do you offer online-only specials or do you offer any discounts for ordering online?" are illustrative:
"Periodically, our company does offer promotional codes via e-mail to registered customers. Thank you for contacting us online."It's not clear what a "promotional code" is and whether it is the same as an online-only special or a discount for ordering online. The message also fails to provide a link to a registration page so customers can follow up. There's also no clear incentive to register, which should always be spelled out given the importance of attracting first-time customers.
"Thank you for your interest in our e-mail promotions. To insure that you receive the next available promotion offered please register your e-mail address on our site at the bottom of the homepage."This response refers to e-mail promotions but it's not clear whether they are discounts or special offers. It could just be a marketing message with no benefit or incentive to the customer to use the online store. And why should the recipient have to navigate back to the home page manually to register when a simple embedded link would make it easier?
Include appropriate links. Every e-mail response should contain a number of links back to the site to make it easier for customers to follow up or get more information. Giga found that fewer than half of the sites surveyed provided a link to the firm's Web site and only 7 percent supplied links to the support home page in the response. Ideally, an e-mail response should include links that are directly related to the question asked--such as a link to the specific help page that addresses the question, or in the case of the question above, to a registration page or a page containing special offers, coupons, or discounts.
Get the tone right. Responses should also provide a reference to either the company or the question asked in the e-mail header and subject line. The response itself should always include a formal but friendly greeting with the customer's last name and it should end with the name of the answering service agent. These conventions may seem trivial, but they help customers quickly identify the e-mail and they demonstrate the company's respect for the individual. Overly familiar or chummy messages may offend some customers, so avoid them.
One way to improve e-mail customer service is through automation. "The more enterprises automate the entire process--the better it's going to be because it will let agents focus on what isn't easy to automate or what they shouldn't automate in any case," says David Alger, a Giga research associate. An auto-suggest template can help agents provide more complete and consistent responses; some systems will even extract information from the customer request and automatically fill in the form with the appropriate information.
Companies should also consider an e-mail response management system, available from such vendors as Amdocs, Cisco, Edify, eGain, Genesys, Firepond, Kana, Oracle, and Siebel.
Beyond automation tools, however, enterprises need to realize that all customer e-mail should eventually be unified to reflect an integrated approach to customer interactions. Most companies currently divide their customer e-mail operations into two parts: e-mail marketing and customer service. Kevin Scott, senior analyst at AMR Research, says enterprises should start pushing vendors to create e-mail management systems that help align these processes. "Open up any e-mail system today and you will see the starting point and ending point of each interaction," he says. "Marketers and customer care managers need to work together to develop the processes for this type of interaction."
How would you rate e-mail customer service? E-mail Adrian or TalkBack below.
