Tag Archive for 'Email Management'

8
Jan

What’s it going to be? Chat or email? Why not both?

You may have read last month that Best Buy chose to ditch email support in favor of live chat. A brave move and, according to the article (on the STELLAService blog), it’s part of a strategy to overcome customer service problems that plagued the electronics retailer in the past.

So, as a live chat company we should be completely on board with a decision of this kind, right? Not necessarily. There are many factors at play that determine whether or not this would be a good idea. Consider the following.

What is your website visitors preferred way to contact you? It’s important to note  a large percentage of consumers still choose email as their preferred method of contacting customer service. (Even if etailers aren’t particularly good at answering them.) Find out how your visitors want to contact you and then do it! And maybe add live chat as a compliment to email.

Do you have an email problem? For this instance, an email problem would mean a backlog of emails making it impossible to answer customer support inquiries in 24 hours or less. If so, removing it as a channel of communication only promises to transfer the problem to another channel – a channel that may require a more immediate response. In this scenario, the best way to solve an email problem is to manage email, not to ditch it altogether. When our customer, Vornado, mentioned delaying a case study with us because they needed to catch up on emails, we wouldn’t have dreamed of recommending that they get rid of email, but we did ask them to try out our email management tool.

Continue reading ‘What’s it going to be? Chat or email? Why not both?’

8
Aug

5 Ways to Immediately Engage Website Visitors

I conducted a well-attended webinar in late June which you can watch in its entirety here. I thought I’d list all 5 Ways and then talk about one in particular – managing the Twitter® stream.

Here are the 5 Ways:

  1. Deploy a “no-thinking-required” chat button.
  2. Manage inbound emails and WOW customers.
  3. Invite visitors to talk to you without annoying them.
  4. Manage the Twitter stream to find conversation opportunities.
  5. Integrate with Google Analytics to learn about what keywords are most likely to create engagements.

Twitter boasts 140 million global users and processes over 300 million tweets a day according to CRM Magazine.  That’s an overwhelming amount of content and for brands, let’s face it, much of it is irrelevant.  But the tweets that are relevant are usually very relevant.  A brand mention is usually an opportunity to engage with a fan, or attempt a service recovery.  So, the people who are charged with servicing customers are faced with possibly the largest haystack ever in the history of haystacks.  It is oft said that the Internet is “a vast ocean…two inches deep.”  If that’s true then Twitter is a vast galaxy, of equal or lesser depth.

We’re a software brand so we actually enjoy these problems.  This notion of trying to find the real work on Twitter may seem daunting, but we tackled it with our newest feature.  We’re in Beta now with our Twitter Management service and you can try it out if you’d like.  One of the solutions inside this service is the “Search Sandbox.”  This allows users to iteratively create advanced Twitter searches in order to weed out the chaff.  Once a search is producing great results, you can save it and start engaging in meaningful conversations.  Here’s a video of the Twitter search in action.

24
May

Don’t Become An Email Management Statistic

email managementManaging email inquiries is a problem many companies simply don’t realize they have. An inability to manage inbound emails causes organizations to miss sales opportunities and deliver poor service to existing customers. How many inbound email messages does your company get daily and what is your response time?

One article stated that “…poor email handling often affects more than just the customer directly involved; in this era of rapid-fire electronic communication and the blog, perturbed customers have made a sport of sharing with the world their negative service experiences.” Unfortunately, the 51% of companies not responding to customer service inquiries that we noted here, is on a steady decline. A follow-up study, again by Hornstein Associates, reported that in 2009, just 45% of companies responded to customer service inquiries within 24 hours.

BoldChat customers effectively utilizing Email Management are able to simply and effectively route emails into the correct workflow. This post illustrates two typical customers who use Email Management in their daily operations.

Continue reading ‘Don’t Become An Email Management Statistic’

   
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