The expectations of the average consumer have changed drastically over the past couple decades. While offering a great product or service to your customers is still essential to your company’s success, you now also need to ensure your customers’ overall experience with your brand is great as well.
Given we live in an ever-connected world, it’s essential to do everything you can to ensure your customers remain engaged with your brand – even when they aren’t actively using your services.
Email is a powerful, low-cost communication channel of customer support for most companies to provide a better customer experience. Research has found that 62% of customers say that email support is their preferred way to communicate with brands. For online businesses, email customer service is a non-negotiable channel.
In this article, we’ll look at the best ways in which to use email as a means of providing high-quality customer service and support.
The effectiveness of email in customer support
For businesses, email as a customer service channel has many advantages. It is convenient for customers because they don’t have to wait on hold or queue to get a response. It acts as a catalyst for businesses to manage and segment such customers and send them emails instantly. Email can also be used either proactively or reactively in order to fulfil your customers’ expectations.
Using email support, customers can describe their concerns by adding all the essential points. It helps to understand customer pain points and provide step-wise solutions. Email support can also be easily integrated into other channels like voice or chat support.
Professional email support systems
To take your customer service capabilities to the next level, you should consider using a professional email support system. Platforms such as Life Agent and Zendesk have ticketing features that allow you to convert multiple customer emails into tickets. These tickets are then organised in a single place so that customer issues and requests can be easily tracked and managed.
Email ticketing tools can automatically convert support conversations into unique tickets. So whether a customer writes an email or contacts a support team via chat, all incoming conversations can be tracked in one place. You can set up email forwarding rules to route all support emails from multiple email accounts into a single, shared inbox.
Email marketing platforms
Smaller businesses may not require all the functionality of a professional email support system, and instead could opt for an email marketing platform that provides features such as email automation, data analytics, personalisation, and customisable email templates.
You can find both free and paid email marketing tools in the market. Some of the top names include ActiveCampaign, Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor and Mailerlite. A number of these either integrate with CRM platforms or some platforms like Hubspot offer both capabilities.
The impact of personalisation
Personalisation is the act of targeting an email to a specific subscriber by leveraging the data and information you have about them. This could be information like their first name, the last product they bought, where they live or a number of other data points.
Studies have shown that emails with personalised subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than those without. Your customers will be more receptive to persuasion if you take the time to personalise your emails. Personalising emails can help put your customers in a more cooperative frame of mind, and make it more likely they will act on your email message.
You can create a positive customer experience by personalising emails such as:
- Welcome emails
- Discounts, deals or incentives
- Thank you messages
- Reward reminders
- Contests
- Feedback and surveys
Timing is everything
Email automation is a powerful tool that can help you save time, increase your productivity, and boost your sales. It allows you to create automated sequences of emails that are sent out based on a certain set of conditions.
For example, you could create an automated sequence that sends out a series of welcome emails to new subscribers, or an automated sequence that sends out an email reminder to customers who have not made a purchase in a while.
Email automation can be used for a variety of purposes including:
- Sending automatic welcome emails to new subscribers
- Sending automated birthday wishes
- Creating and managing email lists
- Automatically responding to customer inquiries
Developing an IT strategy to support customer service
IT can help pave the way for a customer service transformation of your business. The more rapidly your business can launch applications in today’s market, the better positioned you are to improve customer experience and reap the associated benefits. Partnering with an IT managed service provider such as Neo Technologies, will ensure your technology is implemented with a solid strategy to support the current and future customer service requirements.
At Neo Technologies, we partner with our clients to provide technology solutions for their customer service needs. We offer cloud and data centre services that enable your business to run advanced applications and protect sensitive data. With over 25 years’ experience working with professional services companies, our clients span diverse industries from law firms to medical centres. Our deep wealth of knowledge and key focus on providing outstanding customer service is reflected in our long-term relationships with our clients. Contact us on 1300 661 832 to discuss how we can help you create a customer service technology strategy today.
