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photo from the Clattery MacHinery blog

If You're Going to do Email Customer Service, do it Right

by Jay Snider on April 16, 2010

Is email useful as a way of providing customer service? Pete Slease, a Customer Contact Council member advisor, apparently doesn’t think so. On the CCC blog in February, Pete wrote:

Call me the jaded contact center geek, but it seems that the usefulness of email as a service channel has expired.  I recognize some B2B interactions may be an exception to the rule – given more regular customer interactions – but for most service interactions, it’s a poor channel.

After receiving poor email customer service, Pete took to the blog, basically saying that offering email customer service isn’t worth the cost. It’s too time consuming, he wrote. Too hard to manage.

photo from the DailyMail.co.uk

photo from the DailyMail.co.uk

On February 11, the day Pete posted his blog, (a Thursday, when things are typically rather slow around here at Palo Alto Software), our main 800 number received 104 phone calls. Of those calls, 11 came before business hours, 10 after business hours and 9 lasted less than one minute (suggesting they hung up before speaking with an agent). Either those 30 customers (or potential customers) called back another time, left a voicemail, or gave up. Or sent an email when they realized the office was closed. Regardless, they didn’t get the information they were seeking on their first try.

On the same day, our Customer Service mailboxes received 40 emails. Every one of them, regardless of the time it was sent, was answered without any additional effort on the sender’s part. A quick look at the Contact Us page on our website shows that our current adjusted average response time for those mailboxes is 9 minutes. Which means during business hours, that’s how long our customers waited to hear back from us. The customer who sent an email at 2:48 a.m. experienced the longest wait for a reply that day. Our response was timestamped 7:30 a.m., which means he heard back from us in less than five hours.

So the question was: is email a useful way of providing customer service? Based on the numbers, the answer is: How could you think otherwise??

Roughly a third of our communications on a randomly selected day took place via email. Our customers in different time zones were able to send their message on their time, without having to schedule their day (or night) around a phone call. And every single customer who sent an email got a reply.

The real issue isn’t whether email is useful as a customer service channel. That’s a given. It’s how do you maximize its usefulness?

The answer to that question is simple. You don’t just put an email address out there for the public and call it email customer service. You might as well hire a trained monkey. Instead, you put together a good team, prioritize email and build efficiencies into your workflow.

You incorporate a tool like Email Center Pro which is ideal for upping your email customer service game. It provides features that help users respond to emails quickly, consistently, and accurately. It lets customer service managers track response times, employee productivity, and overall traffic. The more efficient you are at responding to email, the more you can handle. Which improves your bottom line AND makes your customers happy.

(It also makes it easy to extract the information you need for your blog. With about three minutes of effort, I was able to see all the email sent and received by our customer service team on February 11.)

Back to Pete. He was the victim of poor customer service, which can (and does) happen sometimes no matter what channel the customer chooses. And interestingly, as he questions email’s usefulness and whether it’s cost effective, he writes:

I’m getting ready to send my third email to get a simple issue resolved.  What if that issue was really complex? Despite any e-mail management system the company has, there is an increasing labor cost for each additional e-mail. Plus, I’m almost ready to call, which adds on the handle time of a frustrated customer.

How useless could email be if, even after two unsuccessful contacts, he’s sticking with it and is only ‘almost ready’ to pick up the phone?

Sounds like he should be making a case for better customer service through email, rather than no email customer service at all.

Jay Snider
Editor, Palo Alto Software

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Contacts List Fails Email

by Steve Lange on January 20, 2010

My sister-in-law is due for some very specialized heart surgery. She has to travel from Hawaii to Los Angeles for the procedure.

For several weeks she was emailing the surgeon’s office, trying to confirm the day and time of her procedure, pre-op appointments, preparatory instructions and the like. Irritatingly, the surgeon’s office never replied.

Finally, out of desperation, my sister-in-law called the surgeon’s office and was transferred to the Patient Contact Coordinator. When she told the Coordinator that she’d been emailing for weeks but had received no answer, the coordinator replied, “Oh, your emails went to the SPAM folder and were deleted. If you’re not in my Contacts List, emails are automatically listed as SPAM and deleted.”

“So, can I confirm my appointments and get my pre-op information?” asked sister-in-law.

“Sure. Just send me an email,” replied Patient Contact Coordinator.

Pause. Wait. Wait for it.

“Soooooo, do you want my email address to add to your Contacts List?” finally inquired exasperated sister-in-law.

“Huh?” responded the quick-on-the-uptake Coordinator.

“So that the email you just asked me to send you doesn’t get automatically sent to SPAM and deleted ….. again?”

“Uh … Oh … Yeah, I guess.”

To quote a sage, contemporary American icon: “D’oh!”

How does this surgeon ever stay in business if they never get new patients because new patient emails are summarily deleted because they are not in the Coordinator’s current patient Contacts List?

This office, or at least this Patient Contact Coordinator, could benefit from the advanced email management features of Email Center Pro.

Steve Lange
Senior Editor (Ret.)
Palo Alto Software

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formspring

Getting Closer to Your Customers

by Guest Author on July 17, 2009

Today’s post is from John Wechsler, President of FormSpring. The company, which recently partnered with Email Center Pro, focuses on data collection and management through the use of Web-based forms. As a service, FormSpring ties together improved customer relationships with business success. Sounds very much like the Email Center Pro approach.

“What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”  This romantic view of the world espoused by Ralph Waldo Emerson can be adapted to business to help us stop looking at past and future customers and focus some love and attention on our existing customers.  It is, for most of us, much less costly to keep an existing customer than to acquire a new one.

Increasingly, an enterprise’s long-term viability will hinge on the strength of its relationships with its customers. So where do we start when it comes to getting closer to our customers?  Tim Berry, president of Palo Alto Software, suggests that “unless you are a new business without a customer base at all, your market research should begin with learning as much as possible about your present customers.” Berry goes on to advise that businesses learn the following about their customers:

•    Who are they?
•    How did they find you?
•    What do they like about you?
•    What don’t they like?

Oftentimes a simple online survey is effective in letting customers know you care about them while also helping you learn a few things about your customers that will help you better serve them.

Traditionally one of the biggest challenges of getting so close to your customers has been purely logistical. This included: developing and designing a survey, printing and mailing it and compiling and analyzing the results. Any one of these tasks was difficult to manage “back in the day.”

Today the management barriers are largely removed. Online tools make it easier than ever to collect and manage data online.  There are no excuses for not understanding who your customers are, what they like and dislike, and what they think about your company.

When you’ve made the decision to start getting closer to your customers by using online surveys, it’s important to remember a few rules of the road.

K.I.S.S. (Keep It Super Simple)

When designing an online survey you want to keep it simple. Keep questions clear and answer choices easy to understand.  Spend time thinking about the flow of your survey. Do the questions progress in a logical and thoughtful manner? Once you think you’ve nailed it, take the survey yourself from the beginning.  You’ll probably see a few more things you can improve.

Make it easy for your customers to use

Make the exchange of information easy.  Keep required fields to a minimum so it’s easy for people to participate.  Be careful not to use unnecessary CAPTCHA (a challenge-response test used in computing to ensure that the response is not generated by a computer). The easier it is for someone to actually submit their information, the more you will learn and the better your customers will feel about interacting with you.

Make sure your forms are secure

Lock down information that you collect that is of a sensitive nature or could harm your customers if compromised. Use SSL for a secure browser connection (the URL will start with https://). Also, encrypt data stored in the database. Since your forms provider or IT department won’t be able to retrieve your data, don’t forget your password.  Finally, Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is a way to encrypt emails to ensure that only the intended recipient(s) see emails that are meant to be secure. Make sure to use PGP for email privacy if you are receiving notification emails of the submitted data.  It does not help you or your customers to make a secure connection online and encrypt data if you then send emails without the protection of encryption. Alternatively, don’t send the actual data via email, instead just send notices that a submission has been received and use the security of an SSL connection to log in and view or download your data.

In Summary

Making your contact forms, surveys and other online forms simple for the user to complete, easy to access and use, and secure are three steps towards building strong relationships with your customers. It’s best to take the initiative now to ask your customers what they think than to wait for your competitors to do it!  With this knowledge, you will be on your way to creating an environment that helps you achieve the maximum lifetime value of your customers.

formspringJohn Wechsler is president of Indianapolis-based FormSpring. With nearly 20 years of business experience including extensive startup experience, John is uniquely qualified to comment on many aspects of running startup, early-stage and high-growth organizations. John can be reached via email at john@formspring.com.

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TXTG FSHNCY

by Steve Lange on June 2, 2009

I try not to get too upset by the texting-based trend of contracting perfectly good words to a rebus of sometimes indecipherable characters. But mostly I just shrug it off because I don’t use those gadgets and tools that specialize in reducing communication clarity.

But sometimes I get a chuckle or good laugh out of the concept. Just the other day I laughed at the May 27 installment of Adrian Raeside’s comic The Other Coast. There the cell phone texter had eliminated almost all the vowels. “omg u r my bfflnmw u qtpi.”

The next day in Working Daze, by John Zakour and Scott Roberts, one of the characters says that she’d save more time if she eliminated all the consonants instead. “AY I EE O EE OU O”.

In keeping with the trends, and moving them forward, I think I’m going adopt both these strategies, removing vowels and removing consonants for my texting, blogging, IMs, and the like. So, you’ll know it’s me when you receive the cogent, succinct, efficient
“

.”

I look forward to your response, in kind.
Steve Lange
Senior Editor
Palo Alto Software

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What a Guy

by Jason Gallic on March 20, 2009

It’s nice when Guy Kawasaki writes about/alludes to/makes cursory mention of the product or service into which you pour a significant portion of your waking hours.

It means more than enjoying an influx of traffic to your website (a handy side-effect, no doubt). It’s also an encouraging validation that you’re taking some steps in the right direction. This is especially true when the praise comes for the method of evangelism as well as for the actual product or service.

Guy has built an ecosystem of success based as much on evangelism methodology as on the services he creates. Truemors, for instance, is a cool concept. But the story of how it came to be might actually be better known. Kawasaki built, developed and registered the site for a few thousand dollars.

So it’s nice when he folds your technique into his own as he did in this article that features Email Center Pro.

It’s an added bonus when the topic at hand is something about which we’re so passionate: Telling the story of our service as quickly, succinctly and creatively as possible. This is something on which every small business should focus. The marketplace is more crowded than ever. It’s vital to explain in two minutes or less what you do and why that matters.

Jason Gallic
Product Manager
Palo Alto Software

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Email sure is dead…if "dead" means "useful"

by Jason Gallic on March 17, 2009

Every so often (a rather ambiguous date range, don’t you think?) the demise of email is predicted.

It’s a pain.

It’s a spam-laden nightmare.

It’s archaic and clunky.

It’s possible that you, too, see email through this lens. But I’m going to hazard a guess and say that, regardless, email is still an essential part of your business and of your life.

In fact, I’ll go a step further: Without email, your overall communication plan (business or personal) would be irrevocably stunted. This is nothing to be ashamed of (though it seems many are). Without the keyless entry on my car, I’d drop a lot more groceries. I don’t think this makes me a bad person.

The latest fad in the “email is dead” game is to claim that social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace will replace traditional email. Status updates, it is said, will suffice for passing along the critical information that travels through email. Check out this BBC article to prove it.

If this appears to be a sleek, trendy, agile solution to the headaches associated with email, well, it’s a bit premature. There is a long list of interesting and useful business applications possible with social networks. Conveying developed pieces of information necessary both internally and externally as part of the business process is not one of them.

That’s still the job of email.

  • Email is a place where you get more than 140 characters to decode your message (unlike Twitter, for instance).
  • Traditional email (as opposed to Facebook messages, for instance) is a credible, go-to business communication channel. It’s still a vehicle for CEOs to reach out to one another and for customer service reps to personally engage your customers.
  • With 210 billion messages sent every day (a large percentage spam, I know), email is a part of our communication fabric, tied undeniably to much of what we do.

Want to make email even more useful? Check out some tips and tricks by clicking here.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager

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Mind Your E-mail Send-to-Receive Ratio

by Tim Berry on October 30, 2008

Here’s an interesting view of the dashboard I now have on my timberry.com e-mail. This line chart compares my e-mails received to my e-mails sent. Hmmm . . .

It looks like I’m falling behind, doesn’t it? If yours got lost, I apologize. Then again, if you were spamming me or, for that matter, sending me a message about what you’re selling without my having asked for it, then maybe it’s not that sincere an apology.

I used to love e-mail. It still has its advantages. And e-mail visibility, like a dashboard with statistics and all, helps me manage.

By the way, that’s a picture of one of the dashboard widgets in Email Center Pro. And, full disclosure, it’s published by Palo Alto Software, of which I’m one of the main owners.

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Newsletters: The basic information you need

by Chelle Parmele on October 8, 2008

In our Bplans.com newsletter, we’ve been publishing a series of articles from iContact about email marketing. This first in a series touches on the basics of having and running a newsletter for your business.

iContact’s Brandon Milford focuses on the basics of using a newsletter to reach out to your customer/client base. Brandon Milford is the Vice President of Marketing for iContact, based in Durham, NC, and he writes about Entrepreneurship, Marketing, and Design on his blog at www.brandonmilford.com.

iContact allows businesses, non-profit organizations, and associations to easily create, publish, and track email newsletters, surveys, blogs, autoresponders, and RSS feeds. We are thrilled to be able to share their expertise with you and give you an opportunity to use their best-in-class email marketing software for a special 10% off the lifetime of your account.

Your Newsletter: The Basics
by Brandon Milford, VP of Marketing, iContact

When designing your newsletter always keep in mind the amount of time you can expect your reader to spend viewing your newsletter. Everyone today is information hungry, but always in a hurry. How you display your content within your newsletter can capitalize on this assumption.

What Information Should I Include in My Newsletter?
Obviously, this will depend on your business and the audience in which you are marketing, but here are three recommendations:

  • Announcements: Include recent information about your company and/or products that impacts your readers. For instance, you can include a link to an upcoming trade show where your company will be exhibiting or perhaps a seminar that your company will be sponsoring.
  • Article: Include an article that relates to your products or services and helps your readers. It is also a great idea to develop a resource library that contains additional articles and provide a link for your readers so they can find more information on similar topics.
  • Case Study: Provide an example of a client who has achieved great results while using your products or services. This will help build credibility with your readers. Again, provide a link where your readers can view additional case studies.

Those are three key items to include in your newsletter. If you include these, you are keeping your readers up to date on recent information about your products or services, including an article providing value on topics affecting them and by providing a case study you are proving to your readers that others are achieving success by using your products or services.

Making Your Articles Easier to Digest
Think of how we read newspapers; the same holds true for how we read material on the Web. We skim headlines looking for something that interests us and only then will we begin reading an article. We also stop to view photographs and any visual cues offering greater insight as to the information held within an article. I see far too many articles within newsletters that are very long (greater than 900 words). When writing your article try to keep it at 800 words or less and break each section into smaller, easy-to-read blocks with bolded headlines over each section. This will encourage your reader to skim your article and stop at each section they find interesting. If you are finding it impossible to trim your article simply find a good point within 800 or fewer words and provide a link to a webpage that contains the article in its entirety.

Sharing Your Newsletter with Others
Always give your readers a reason and a means to share your newsletter with others. By providing valuable and relevant content to your subscribers, they will be inclined to share this information with others by forwarding your newsletter. Email marketing software, like iContact, provide a “Forward-to-a-Friend” feature that inserts a link within the footer of your message allowing your readers to easily forward your newsletter. The goal is to obviously reach out to as many people as possible by providing valuable, relevant, timely content and an easy way for your readers to share this information with others.

Learn more about iContact and sign up for the special 10% off for the lifetime of your account at www.bplans.com/icontact

‘Chelle Parmele
Social Media Marketing Manager
Palo Alto Software

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The Psychology of Email

by Steve Lange on September 25, 2008

The science behind email behavior is extensive, I’m sure, and not something that I purport to know much about, from a factual standpoint. Most of the email-based thoughts and assumptions I make throughout my day are driven by a fair bit of intuitiveness — with a dash and a half of instinct and a peppering of intelligence gathering.

I would hazard a guess that most people fall into my category — that is, if they think at all about email as anything more thhan simply a communication medium.

But not Kaitlin “Ducky” Sherwood. You can click on her name to read her full bio, but I’ll give you enough information to establish context. She’s written two books on overcoming email overload, was the first Webmaster at the University of Illinois (during the Mosaic creation days) and just recently earned an MS in Computer Science.

I got to spend an hour on the phone with her, aggressively asking for her opinion on email and cautiously tip-toeing into her thoughts on Email Center Pro.

Sherwood speaks with confident conviction about all manner of topics, but, for my purposes, focused most of her energy on email. Much of what was said centered around the idea that, as yet, the perfect email system doesn’t exist. And the reason for that is that no provider is meeting all of Sherwood’s standards — many of which have to do with efficiently and effectiveely moving through email in a reasonably organized way.

She chuckles at the notion of “Inbox Zero,” the popular concept that basically mystifies people into thinking they’ve properly dealt with all of their messages just by clearning their inbox. But, have they? Have they adequately addressed that communication channel, or have they simply shifted it from one place to another so as to better manage the guilt associated with 100 unread messages?

Sherwood argues for the latter, asserting that the psychology of seeing “0″ as an Inbox tally is ggiven disproportionate weight in relationship to proper management of email as a communication vehicle — creating a false sense of security, if you will.

Much of that, Sherwood continues, is driven by the passionate pursuit of perfect filtering. Users constantly seeking to compartmentalize the various buckets of information flowing into their Inboxes chew up time that can’t possibly be recovered through the convenience associated with “more easily” scanning through those folders.

In essence, filters/folders/etc. are not effective means of organizing data — given the existence of an uber-powerful search function. Wiith the reality of virtually limitless data storage, it no longer makes efficient sense to try to organize things the way we needed to when filing cabinets held all of our pertinent paper work. Without proper paper management, I might lose a week looking for a single document. Now, I type “2006 tax returns” into the search bar and PRESTO!

In light of that, it’s comforting to know that an advanced search functionality provides the infrastructure for version 2 of Email Center Pro, which is scheduled for release in the next couple of weeks.

So, do the psychological aspects of email resonate with you? Do you struggle against the rising tide of email overload? What is your method for managing your inbox?

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager
jason@paloalto.com

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Palo Alto getting SaaS-y

by Jason Gallic on September 15, 2008

I was in San Francisco two weeks ago for Office 2.0 conference. The effort was the third installment of Ismael Gahlimi’s pledge to bring together leading minds in the Web 2.0 space for a 3-day discussion about moving the duties associated with work off of the hard drive and onto the Internet — exclusively.

That means all of it, from data storage to accounting, and everything in between. It’s a radical shift in concept. Moving all of a business’ operations into “the clouds” gives pause to some (data security junkies) and brings smiles to others (whomever might be concerned about the bottom line).

Whatever your feeling about moving organizational functionality into a hosted state, the fact that it’s gaining momentum is impossible to deny.

Thankfully for those of you who need to use email (please don’t overlook the sarcasm there), Email Center Pro is a product with its eye on “the clouds”. And that’s probably one reason I felt so at ease while scrolling through the demo booths last week in San Francisco. Yes, there were plenty of cool applications on display. But were any of them attempting to do to email what we are? No, not that I could tell.

With a rich feature set that’s only sweetening as we approach the public release of version 2, it was nice to see that Email Center Pro might be standing in the gap between the obligation of email and the genuine usability of a collaborative tool.

Jason Gallic
Product Marketing Manager

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