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Improving eCustomer Service
An estimated 11 billion emails are sent everyday worldwide, triple the level of 1999. If your Customer Service Department 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. This week I am sharing with you simple strategies to increase the value of E Customer Service – for both companies and customers by automating many functions that will save you time 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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