Email is the second most popular mode of communication, after the voice calls, used by the customers to get in touch with their brands. Every customer care center should at least have the provision for email support apart from voice support. Email support is not as simple as it sounds. There is a common notion that anyone can write and reply to mails. Yes, anyone can but to what effect? Writing a mail to your pals and writing one for business purposes is quite different. Now, consider another situation you are replying with the intention of pacifying an angry customer who is about to vent his/her discontent on the social network. Your only ammunition is a mail. The masters of email support can not only pacify the person but also convince him/her to continue doing business with the brand. Like any other support service, staying stuck at a place is not the name of the game with email support. There has to be a continuous effort put in to better the quality of emails. To attain the purpose have a look through below given tips.
• Spelling, Grammar and Punctuation Checking: Emails that go out of an email support center represent the brand, so they should be thoroughly professional. If an email contains poorly constructed sentences or wrong spelling, it can significantly undermine the brand image. It is really simple to monitor the grammar and spelling of outgoing mails. Have an expert editor look through them, just before they are shot.
• Striking Perfect Tone: The tone of the emails is a very important facet too. It should justify the nature of customer contact. If a chatty and meandering email is send to the customer than the customer may feel more frustrated than relieved. If on the other hand an email is too formal, then it would be very hard to understand for the customers. There should be a certain template of guideline set for all the emails. This should be in regards to the image of the brand. But then too, the agents should have some amount of freedom to adjust the tone as per the communication.
• Keep the Statistics in Mind: When you are evaluating the performance of email support agents do not judge quality on the basis of one or two emails. Review multiple emails to understand the flaws the agent is committing. When evaluating the quality of a team, always judge multiple agents. Such practices will give the true results. If the agent works across platforms then evaluate his/her scores in all types of communication. If it is found that the agent is good at voice communication and not so confident in email support, then perhaps a special training can be arranged.
• The Mystery Shopping Trick: This is a popular practice in voice calls, where a member of the management poses as a buyer and checks the quality of voice support. It is a proven way to check the quality of voice agents. Well, the same method can be used for email monitoring too. Start a conversation as a mystery shopper and see how the agent deals with your queries.
• Query Answering: One of the basic things about email support is to answer the query of the customers. You must think that is the basic everyone knows, right? Everyone knows this basic alright, but they fail to implement. A recent survey found that about 73% of the customer emails is in regards to some query. But less than half of the emails send in response, 48% to be exact, answer the actual query. This is where first contact resolution becomes an important metrics. If the number of replies going out of an email support system decreases over a period of time, then the agents are doing a fine job.
• Politeness in Emails: As you are getting in touch with the customers through email, it does not mean you do not have to engage in rapport building. So, the politeness is an important criteria for the emails. The effective quality monitoring of emails should always take into consideration whether the agent thanked customer for contacting and whether the email was personalized well.
As you can see the tips mentioned above are bare essentials. Of course the quality monitoring should always be customized as per the specific needs of the industry.