Good customer service is important in any business. While many people
are familiar with the basics of good face-to-face and phone service, they
may have less experience with translating those skills into effective,
customer-friendly e-mails. At the basic level, you should be sure to
cover these customer service concepts:
Concept #1: Immediately acknowledge that you’ve received a
customer’s e-mail. Acknowledge all customer e-mails immediately
(manually or with automation). If the initial e-mail response cannot
resolve the issue in the sender’s e-mail, the acknowledgment should
set time expectations for a complete resolution. Customers who do
not receive an immediate acknowledgment are likely to send followup
e-mails or call to track the status of their inquiries, which increases
servicing costs and complexity.
Concept #2: Send answers to questions. It sounds pretty basic, but
it often slips through the cracks. In fact, according to Jupiter Media
Metrix, the majority of consumers expect to resolve their customer
service inquiry within six hours, but only 38 percent of companies are
meeting this expectation. Another 33 percent are taking three days or
longer to do so or are not responding at all. In fact, Jupiter’s Customer
Service WebTrack Survey found that the percentage of companies that
did not respond to inquiries has risen from 19 percent to 24 percent.
Concept #3: Send those answers, or at least updates, in a timely
manner. To motivate customers to use e-mail, which has the potential
for being less expensive than agent-handled telephone calls, you must
provide service that is at least as good as that a customer would receive
by phone.
Concept #4: Answer the actual question. Templates make it easy to
send “almost right” answers to customers that don’t really answer their
questions. Read carefully, reread and tailor customized responses when necessary. Templates also make it easy to send totally wrong answers.
Be careful. Customers will judge the reliability of your company based
on the reliability of your e-mails.
Concept #5: E-mails should be friendly. Most customers prefer e-mails
addressed to them, rather than a “Dear Sender” e-mail even when the
rest of the e-mail is standardized. Personalization also includes signing
e-mail responses with your name, and sometimes a phone number where
you can be reached.
Concept #6: E-mails should be accurate. Using standard e-mail
response templates as the framework for personalized e-mails can help
eliminate some errors. So can running spellcheck before you send. But
there’s really no substitute for carefully proofreading your work to make
sure you’ve used proper grammar, proper usage and common courtesy.
(For your convenience, we’ve included grammar and spelling refresher
tips and quizzes throughout this book.) It’s also a good idea to buy a
dictionary or bookmark one online.
Concept #7: E-mails should set the right tone. This will vary from
company to company. Your company may use emoticons (smiley faces)
or it may not. Some companies opt for more formal English, others less
formal. Most companies have fairly set policies. You should follow
them to ensure consistency of style. But, as a general rule, e-mails
should be grammatically correct, polite and should use proper English,
not “Internet English.”
Concept #8: E-mails should be easy to read. Using a standard font
(10– and 12-point Times New Roman, Courier and Arial are industry
standard), limiting the number of colors used, and avoiding all capital
letters are important. So is limiting the length of your e-mail. Many
effective e-mails use short, one or two sentence paragraphs, separated
by an extra line space. This makes messages easier to read on screen.
Concept #9: Customer e-mails should be screened for potential
legal threats. Sometimes the threat of a lawsuit can be implied in a
letter without being stated explicitly. These words should raise red flags:misrepresentation, fraud, liability, breach of contract. When you see
the
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