>>How
can we improve productivity with email responses?
My
call center is struggling with email customer service.
Our average resolution time is lower than our targets
and our email agents actually are less productive than
agents who are exclusively phone agents. Can you offer
any tips on how we can streamline email communication in
order to be more effective and productive?
Myra's
answer to How
can we improve productivity with email responses?
If
your call center receives 100 emails a day and each one
takes an average of 10 minutes to deal with, that’s
more than two full work days involved in simply
responding to email coming in on just one day! If this
is your situation, your employees are probably
overwhelmed and your customers are dissatisfied because
they are experiencing unacceptable response delays.
E-Customer Service is supposed to make our lives easier,
not harder. When E Customer Service is handled right it
offers many benefits, including increased customer
satisfaction and retention, increased productivity, and
reduced operations costs. Moving routine interactions
online saves Cisco Systems nearly $270 million
annually—with increased customer satisfaction.
I can
feel your pain and I will attempt to ease this
pain with a few strategies to increase the value
of E Customer Service – for both companies and
customers by automating many functions that increase
your agents' productivity and increase customer
satisfaction.
1. Use Auto Responders
Auto responders allow you to send an immediate,
pre-written response to anyone sending email to a
designated address. For example, anyone sending an email
to product44info@company.com could receive an automatic
immediate reply with specific product information for
Product #44 and no live person would have to read or
respond to the message unless the auto responder
doesn’t completely answer the customer’s question.
To use Auto Responders, you’ll simply need to set up
the pre-written messages and attach them to designated
email addresses. (Your IT Department can help with this
2. Save Frequent Reply Messages
in Draft Folders
If you find that you’re saying the same thing over and
over again to several customers, you can type the reply
one time and save it as “draft” and then go back and
copy it and paste in your customer’s email. This draft
can be saved on a folder on the company’s network or
each representative can have a copy saved in their email
manager.
3. Use Signatures
Instead of typing your name and contact information at
the end of every message, set up a signature file with
the relevant information and let your email program
automatically append your "sig file" to the
end of every outgoing message. If your email program
supports it, set up different signatures for clients,
friends and coworkers. Make sure your email signature
lists company contact information, including the
employees name, email address, and company website.
4. Put Commonly Requested
Documents In Portable Document Format (PDF)
You can immediately send customers documents, even large
documents such as User’s Manuals or Warranty
Information without expensive postage and time delays by
creating PDF (Portable Document Format) documents.
Create Adobe® (www.createpdf.com)
lets you convert a variety of documents into PDF files
that anyone can view using the free Adobe® Reader®.
5. Make Your Website a
Self-Service Center
Generate a list of commonly asked questions and put the
questions and your answers on your website so customers
can search your database and find their own answers.
This can save an enormous amount of time and money
because customers can serve themselves instead of
calling your reps or sending emails for help. One of my
clients, Vistakon – a division of Johnson &
Johnson, has the best example of online customer service
I’ve seen. Check out Vistakon’s FAQ page by going to
http://www.jnjvision.com/faq.html.
Four out of 10 workers don’t find that email makes
them more productive and that’s probably because they
haven’t learned to automate common functions.
Implement the ideas I presented here and you’ll find
that email not only makes you more productive, but it
increases customer satisfaction and frees staff up for
more tasks.
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