Excellent customer service begins with a lasting impression. Only one in five consumers will forgive a bad experience at a company. A company's reputation greatly depends on how it handles customer service needs.
Since many customer service inquiries are completed online via email, your internal team likely manages a company inbox that can significantly impact returning customers and sales volume. A positive customer service experience will ultimately shape the consumer's journey to convert. But it all comes down to how your team operates internally.
With email being the prime source for communication between companies and customers, companies must implement robust email management software to maintain inbox organization and ensure customer inquiries are met with satisfaction.
Ready to level up your email strategy for customer service? Try Gmelius for free.
Identifying Email Management Issues
Poor email management can mean the difference between positive customer experiences and loss of revenue. Think about the last customer service experience you had via email? Did the company answer your inquiry promptly? Was your problem addressed? Was the company friendly? When approaching your team email management system, these are critical questions to ask yourself.
If you find that a cluttered inbox and poor communication are getting in the way of answering these commonly asked questions, it's time for a better solution.
Common email management issues may include:
- a cluttered inbox
- lack of organization
- poor communication
- reply errors
- countless extensions
Inbox clutter and email overload are common for teams addressing high-volume customer service inquiries. Yet many companies lack a solid email management solution for their team. As a result, emails go unanswered or receive duplicate responses.
Email Management Software Features for Customer Service
Email management software helps your team organize, sort, and respond to large volumes of emails collaboratively.
Email management software can help your team:
Hold accountability
Assigning and delegating emails is half the battle in keeping an inbox organized. Accountability ensures the correct email gets to the right person to deliver quality customer service. With an email management software solution such as Gmelius, teams can delegate emails right from their Gmail account.
This allows team members to change the status of an email and add tags for better accountability. Every email will have a clear owner and status to facilitate quality customer service.
Automate replies
Repetitive email replies are a part of the customer service process. But addressing incoming emails can take hours. Setting up simple automation rules for your company inbox can save your employees hours of productivity time.
To lessen the response load, you need software that offers powerful automation features. Gmelius offers automation rules so teams can address emails with efficiency.
Teams can set up triggers and automatically send instant replies with a personalized touch. For instance, if your customer service team receives an incoming email, automation rules can be set to auto-reply to the email and sort it into the necessary Shared label for better organization. This is done through an "if-this, then-that" methodology.
For example, if an email subject line contains “support," that email can be organized into the appropriate label for better handling. There is no need to shuffle through an entire inbox to find emails pertaining to support.
Additionally, Gmelius can assist with ensuring adherence to service-level agreements. For example, if a priority client request comes through via email, that email can automatically get assigned to the appropriate person on the team just by the subject line containing specific words.
Auto replies can also be set for particular return addresses to ensure SLA policies are not breached. Preventing potential mistakes and ensuring customer satisfaction is crucial in providing quality customer service.
If your team has a set reply in place for all team members to use, Gmelius also offers shared Gmail templates and shared email drafts. Your team can turn your most effective and repetitive emails into Gmail templates that can be personalized and shared with your team or collaborate on an existing draft to deliver the best response possible.
Visualize team workload
Email management software can help your team utilize delegation features, emails notes, automation, and much more. However, Gmelius takes email organization one step further by offering teams a visual project management solution.
Rather than implement a project management solution on top of an existing email structure, Gmelius allows teams to turn emails into actionable tickets with Gmail Kanban boards.
Kanban boards bring a visual element to your team's tasks. For example, if a customer service team needs to add actionable project tickets, they can do so with specifically labeled columns. This might include "to do," "in progress," "pending," and "closed."
This allows managers to visually track the entire customer service process and ensure requests stay on track and are completed on time. You can also set it up so that columns represent each person on your team to visualize and distribute workload evenly. Having a line of sight into the process and physically moving tasks across a board creates an efficient and productive workflow.
Employee burnout is common amongst a team. A recent survey from Indeed found that employee burnout is more prominent amongst remote workers since the heightened global pandemic. Of 1,500 workers surveyed, 61% reported they are finding it difficult to “unplug” from their position outside of working hours. 39% reported they check emails outside of regular work hours every day.
When employee workload is not managed properly, it can result in negative implications for a business that could affect how a team member addresses a customer service request.
Gmelius works to prevent teams from assignment overload by visually seeing how many tasks each employee has. Through effective workload distribution, hundreds of emails can be resolved every week by multiple team members, opposed to far less if only one team member is assigned the bulk of the work.
Gain insight with analytics
To deliver top-notch customer service, managers must gain visibility on team workload distribution. The best service starts with a team that operates to the best of its ability. With Gmelius, managers can see detailed team analytics to generate productivity insights, analyze the progress of each teammate, and view prime support hours.
Business hours reporting can help your team discover when the busiest days and times are for your organization. Better support can then be provided for those times to ensure high-quality customer satisfaction. Furthermore, reports on tags can give insights into whether the amount of SLA-tagged emails has decreased.
Customers often expect a fast and efficient response during their interaction with a company. Analytics can provide team managers the number of emails that have been closed for the day as well as the time it took to close those requests. This insightful data can identify and unlock bottlenecks to set goals for faster and more efficient customer service.
As discussed above, team burnout has increasingly become an issue as more teams become remote. Team analytics can help managers monitor the number of assigned emails per team member to avoid email overload and boost team morale.
Stellar Customer Service with Gmelius
As a communication and collaboration platform for Gmail, Gmelius is designed to assist teams in delivering the best customer service possible. What sets Gmelius apart is the ability to work within one platform for all customer service needs and provide a more personal communication. Teams can collaborate right from Gmail to address incoming emails, delegate emails as assignments, automate workflow, and gain insightful data on workload distribution.
Gmelius also offers unique two-way integration architecture which combines emails, Slack pings, Trello board tasks, and more into one easy-to-manage interface. The integration features implemented with other collaborative tools keep employees organized and on task.
Delivering excellent customer service should be at the heart of any organization. Obtaining the best possible email management software can help your team achieve excellence and guarantee an organized and productive workflow that will last.
Ready to get started? Install Gmelius and turn your Gmail inbox into a powerful customer service tool. Sign up today!
