As e-commerce businesses, we have a variety of reasons to email our customers. These emails include order confirmations, shipping notifications, customer service response emails, marketing emails, and much more. In this post, I want to focus primarily on customer service emails. Shoppers have come to expect the human touch almost as much online as they do when they visit a store in person at their local mall.
Given this expectation, let’s discuss how you can optimize customer service emails to create a stronger relationship with your customers.
Email Addresses
When you contact a customer via email, what email address do you use? Have you considered the impressions that you give simply based on your email address? In my opinion, the following is a best-to-worst ordered list of email addresses used by e-commerce companies.
- [email protected] – Using the name of a person, whether it’s a customer service rep of a major brand or the owner of a part-time hobby business, gives customers the impression that there’s a dedicated person willing to help them complete a purchase and support them after the sale. You can use full names or, for privacy purposes, shorten it to first names or first-name-and-last-initial. This kind of email address allows customers to create a mental image of the person behind the keyboard, and is the best way to create a relationship between the customer and your store.
- [email protected] – Any variation on support or service indicates that you at least have a dedicated email account for helping customers with any issues they may have. It might be monitored by one person or many, but there’s the idea of a dedicated department willing to handle the customer’s questions or problems.
- [email protected] – This is my least favorite kind of email address – another variation is [email protected] This gives customers the impression that the store’s main focus is on income and sales. And of course it is, otherwise you wouldn’t be in business – but a customer wants to feel like THEIR business, and therefore their experience, is your primary objective. Not your overall profit and loss statement.
Email Content
The obvious goal your customer service email should have is to answer the customer’s question or address their issue. Beyond that, you can do much more to strengthen the sense of a relationship that your customer perceives by doing the following:
- First of all, address all responses with the customer’s name, just like you do on formal correspondence. Your policy might be to use the customer’s first name, or to address a customer as Mr. or Ms. Lastname, but be consistent.
- Restate their question or concern in your own words, so that it’s clear that you have read their email and aren’t an automated software bot guessing at an answer.
- Then offer the solution or answer.
- Finally, sign your name and let the customer know they can respond to the email to contact the same person again. Even better, offer a direct phone number or extension they can use if they would like to continue the discussion by phone.
If the response leads to a sale, provide the “wow factor” by having the CSR sign his or her name and a short “thank you” on the packing slip or as an insert in the box.
Is a Helpdesk OK?
Of course! Even if customers can tell the email comes from a piece of software, it’s way better than no response at all! If your volume of correspondence requires this kind of software, just make sure to optimize your emails and CSR accounts to keep them as personalized as possible. And if you use canned responses, sign them with a real person’s name for that personal touch.
Timeliness
Faster is always better when it comes to email response – or any kind of response at all. (Especially on social media!) Customers have come to expect a response within just a few hours at most. Try to complete your responses in that amount of time. And if you don’t have 24-hour support, have your system send an automatic receipt of email. And within the body of that message, alert them as to when they can expect a response.
Email List Dude says
Nice information on the importance of a friendly customer service email address. Personalization and making sure the customer feels like they’re talking to an actual person that cares for their needs and wants definitely helps your company’s reputation. Too many companies today don’t seem very interested in their customers, and generically signing their emails such as using a “[email protected]” address adds to this perception. Companies that shift to a more personalized approach will certainly benefit.
Susan Petracco says
Fortunately Zappos popularized the new trend of “being people” to your customers! I hope you are right that we’ll start to see a larger shift.
www.eSimply.com - Email Broadcasting with Personalization says
I agree with ‘Email List Dude’, personalization is key. I send emails out for our whole organization and merge in each sales reps information on the bottom. I suggest checking out http://www.eSimply.com
– It is my favorite way to send emails to my clients. I sometime just send text only emails. It makes for a more personable touch. I love how easy it is to merge custom fields too.
— It takes more file types than I have seen anywhere, even PDFs and Microsoft Word files. The best thing is they also are not in Constant Contact with my credit card like most of the other email companies I have found.
— Just pay as you go. Trust me, it only takes 20 seconds to signup and you will be emailing your clients within minutes. I believe they even now offer the first 1000 emails for free.
Amanda says
I agree, it is very important to personalise customer email. With more and more people choosing to communicate with the organisations they buy from via email companies are finding it harder and harder to do this. It is an interesting topic.
aheadWorks says
Yes, the human touch and caring attitude are highly important, no matter how many clients you should contact.