Nine Tips for World-Class E-Mail Management
Companies everywhere are experiencing an avalanche of e-mails. This has
created an environment that requires fairly tight controls and processes.
Here are nine ways to ensure you're e-mail management is world-class.
- Develop at least a six-month, preferably a 12-month, forecast with your
marketing group to ensure proper contact center staff.
- Respond to all e-mails within 24 hours or less.
- Create priority queues based on origin or business rules that read the
content of the e-mail, looking for key words that indicate escalation.
- Create a plethora of standard responses that your company's legal and
marketing groups have approved.
- Ensure your CSRs have access to the customer's data, regardless of which
communication vehicle they've chosen.
- Establish and maintain a "quality check" process on e-mails before
sending out a reply.
- Create a system to allow broadcast messages to quickly and accurately
manage mass communication to customers with similar questions.
- Maintain an e-mail archive for at least 12 months -- longer for escalated
issues.
- Combine the marketing intelligence you're receiving from customer calls
with the same intelligence you're receiving from customer e-mails.
Read more about how to handle customer e-mails in the CRM article "The
Avalanche of E-Mail: How to Manage and 'Mine' Customer E-Mails," which is
available in the CRM Article Index.
