In an increasingly digitalised world, the way we communicate is changing rapidly. In 2015, 205 billion emails were sent and received every day. This number is predicted to rise by 3% annually through 2019, ultimately reaching a predicted 246 billion email exchanges daily. Many customers use email as their preferred channel for both sales and aftersales support, and it’s important for businesses to ensure the tone and quality of content is consistent and in line with their expectations of your brand. Customers also demand timely responses, personalised to their needs. So with increasing volumes of inbound customer communications, how do you provide the experience they expect?
Whilst responding to customer communications is becoming easier, sometimes speed of response prevents the application of quality control and consistency in messaging. So the first step is to ensure consistency is enabled for all communications. Creating templates with placeholders for improved personalisation, to which your team can add their knowledge of that customer’s case, is a big step forwards. But this also means it’s critical to have an effective way of accessing customer and case information from a centralised managed location. And, importantly, the information you have in your correspondence must be consistent with the information the customer receives from other touchpoints, whether online or in store.
Secondly, customers don’t just measure the quality of their experience based on accuracy and helpfulness of the information they receive. It’s almost always measured on the management of their expectations. This means providing timely acknowledgements and regular updates, preventing the customer from having to chase for an update. (As we all know from personal experience, a well-timed email explaining the progress of an issue can keep it from escalating further).
Lastly, you need to think about the ongoing management of communications, to keep the content relevant and ultimately ensure employees are representing the brand as you would expect. This means having a QA process in place, both in terms of updating content on the templates (from an admin perspective) and having the ability to review some outbound communications before they go out. This is especially important if you have any new team members. To help with consistency, consider a software solution that offers a toolbox to make it easier for your team, including suggested template responses, built-in spelling and profanity checks, and multi-language support services for international organisations.
Take a look at our case study to find out how we created a bespoke email management solution for one of our clients, leading to a 70% increase in contact volumes but a 15% fall in operational costs.