7 Efficiency Tips to Improving Your Email Support

7 Efficiency Tips to Improving Your Email Support

Every customer service channel is an opportunity for your brand to provide a positive customer experience, build customer relationship, and increase customer loyalty. However, not all businesses provide efficient and effective customer email support.

Email is King

In today’s digital age, people no longer have the patience to call a hotline. They know they can send a quick message to customer support and go on with their daily lives while waiting for the information or solution they’re looking for.

Email is quick, simple, and convenient. It’s no surprise that email remains the most common digital customer service channel used—with 54% of customers having used the channel in the last year. Unfortunately, not every organization knows how to leverage the power of their email support to help their business thrive.

The good news is that crafting an effective email is simple and easy. Leave your customers delighted with these tips to improve your email support.

1. Define Your Customer Support Style

The tone you use in your emails reflects the overall personality of your brand. Make sure to define the tone, language, and voice that your whole team will be using in all customer interaction.

Do you want to sound friendly and conversational or do you think a formal, business-like tone would be better appreciated by your customers? How fast do you want to respond to queries and resolve problems? How would you address issues and concerns where customers are demanding products and services outside the normal provisions?

Decide on particular rules, guidelines, structure, and values in your customer support process. Create a style guide that your customer support team can regularly use as a basis in their daily work.

2. Personalize Your Emails

There’s nothing worse than receiving an email that’s obviously automated. Make your customer feel like they’re dealing with a human being, not a chatbot.

Customers who feel like they’re getting personal service become more confident about the information they’re receiving, and as a result, they become better customers.

Using their names in the email is a powerful way of establishing familiarity. Don’t forget to sign off with your name and position in the company. Your signature is a great way to humanize the communication between two people who’ve never met.

3. Automate

Whether you operate 24/7 or within specific business hours, you need to find the right balance between personalization and automation. There will be instances when your team can’t immediately address a customer’s needs due to a long queue of customer emails, holidays, and technical issues. In these cases, an automated, canned response can help appease the customer’s anxiety.

Customers also have similar, repeating issues that can be answered with the same message. An autoresponder can also help you efficiently address such problems. This will save your team a lot of man hours, but make sure to implement personalization in your autoresponder still.

4. Acknowledge Their Problem

When writing customer support emails, you should always acknowledge their problem. Firstly, acknowledging and restating their problem ensures that you understand their concern. Secondly, showing empathy can help diffuse your customer’s anger or frustration.

In most cases, customers are more upset about the inconvenience that their specific issue is causing, rather than the actual product or service. Despite how irate your customer’s email reads, it’s crucial that you maintain a positive tone and language.

5. Use the ELI5 Technique

When giving instructions to customers, use the ELI5 (Explain it Like I’m 5) technique. Remember, these customers are reaching out to you because there’s something they don’t understand. So, don’t talk to them as if they know what they’re doing or that you expect them to be familiar with your product and/or service.

Break down complex topics and provide simple, clear instructions. Provide images and screenshots as possible to illustrate your instructions.

6. Send Them Links to Helpful Content or Instructions

Sometimes, customers don’t like reading long, tedious emails, especially when they’re reading your message from a mobile device with a smaller screen. So, write them a short email with a link to the full instructions. This will allow your customer to get back to your instruction when they have access to a computer or immerse themselves in the resolution you provided.

More importantly, you’re teaching them to be self-sufficient. Should another concern arise about your product or service, they now know where to find solutions.

7. Ask for Customer Feedback

Ask for feedback after resolving your customer’s concerns. This will not only provide your team critical information about how you can improve your email support, but it will also show them that you care.

Conclusion

Improving your email customer support is crucial in keeping your customers satisfied and loyal to your brand. In the past, customers were patient enough to wait on the phone just to talk to a customer service representative.

Nowadays, customers expect immediate resolutions without the inconvenience of calling a hotline and dedicating their precious time to problems that, in their minds, should not have occurred to begin with. So, make it as frictionless as possible and make sure that your email support is top notch.

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