Why does email remain so popular?
Over the past decades email has grown into one of the most important channels between companies and consumers. Receiving post on paper is increasingly no longer an option. Where customers are sometimes still given the choice to receive their correspondence by post, plenty of companies offer email as the only channel. For immediate contact the telephone remains most popular, with digital alternatives such as WhatsApp or chat close behind. But for shorter or quicker questions, many consumers happily send an email. Even at CodeCast, incoming emails with a one-sentence question are nothing unusual. Sometimes they are empty emails with the question in the subject line. Sound familiar?
The certainty of email
The convenience, accessibility and speed of email make it a much-loved medium. It allows people and companies to communicate quickly, precisely and directly. They need not worry the message will fail to arrive, and they need not stay on the line waiting for an available agent. Email has the advantages of the telephone and the letter without the drawbacks. It brings consumers and companies closer together, because the exchange feels more like a conversation than a one-way announcement. That builds a relationship. And every marketer will probably agree that having a relationship with your customers is the best thing a company can wish for.
Managing expectations in email communication
Communicating by email creates more than a connection. It creates expectations. Someone who quickly types and sends an email automatically expects an answer, preferably as soon as possible. Many companies have a guideline to answer email within two to three working days. Generally that is a perfectly reasonable window.
Unfortunately recent years brought considerable upheaval: a pandemic, rising energy prices and inflation. As a result, companies such as parcel services, care institutions and energy suppliers suddenly saw such growth in customer questions that a reply could take a week or more. Not only does that create dissatisfaction, the effect reinforces itself: someone sends an email that goes unanswered because the inbox is overflowing. That person then sends another email asking why it is taking so long. Those actions only increase the number of emails to answer and make the backlog worse.
Using automation to save time on email
We are not talking about newsletters or marketing campaigns here, but about information that is crucial to a specific customer. It might concern finances or changing legislation. A topical example is the unprecedented stream of changes in the energy sector this year. Energy suppliers have to communicate their own tariff changes, which in 2022 happened more often than usual. They also have to communicate changes in legislation and subsidy schemes themselves — VAT changes, say, or the price cap planned for January 2023. Some of those changes come with statutory deadlines, which means customers have to be informed in time. That can be difficult to plan when a supplier is expected to communicate tariffs promptly that, at the moment of communication, still have to be provided by another party such as the government.
As a company you therefore want your email handling processes in good order at all times. Nobody can predict what the coming years will bring: you want to be prepared for the possibility that your business faces large volumes of customer questions or a volatile market. Your organisation may suddenly become the designated entity for first-line communication. Every minute saved and every efficiency gained is then valuable. Saving a minute on answering an email does not sound like much, but if your company receives 250 emails a week you have quickly saved half an FTE. That is crucial in an economy where finding staff is hard.
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The danger of email templates
An obvious — and widely used — solution is email templates: pre-written texts that are already 95 per cent finished. All that remains is filling in the customer-specific details, such as the salutation and everything related to the specific subject. It lets a company have the bulk of its copy written by communication specialists. That way you make sure every text has the right tone, you reduce the chance of spelling mistakes, and customer service staff only have to fill in the relevant information. Or better still, the customer system adds the relevant information, after which an agent only has to look at the emails that genuinely need a human reply.
The concept of email templates is not new; many companies have a shared folder or server holding the texts to be used for email correspondence. They are usually written and formatted in Word, and employees copy and paste them into their emails. It works, but it is far from ideal: in practice you often see people copy the templates to their own computer, so they can reach the file when the network has problems or when they need to add a paragraph of their own.
Another irritation is that email systems cannot handle Word styling and tables; the moment you copy something across, the content appears in five different font sizes with the columns jumbled. Perhaps there has been an important legal change and templates have been updated or added. The shared folder has not been updated yet, or the new version has been emailed to all staff. Unfortunately a spelling mistake or awkward paragraph slipped through after all: everyone receives “template_text_v2.doc” in their inbox, the next day “template_text_v2_final.doc”, and not long after “template_text_v2_final_v2.doc”. It gets harder still when the new template applies only to one half of the customers and the old one to the other.
The gap between mass and one-to-one communication
Digitising the management of email templates can take away a lot of worry. Putting the templates in a cloud solution is a first step, for instance, but it does not solve the copying problem mentioned above. It also only works for templates used by people; automated systems cannot reach them. A dedicated system for managing and sending is everyday practice in marketing above all. Most marketers, customer service agents and product or account managers will be familiar with the systems available for building email campaigns. They are fantastic tools that give the marketer plenty of control and possibilities.
Unfortunately those systems are not well suited to ordinary, individual customer communication. They are too focused on newsletters and campaigns. Good customer communication needs customer-specific information such as the balance, order history, the current complaint or bank details. So we are looking for something that combines the content of the customer system with the convenience of a campaign tool. There are certainly customer systems able to send email, but that is not always straightforward — those systems are usually built to track customers and payments, not to send email well and fast. The mass-mail systems, in turn, offer limited options for integrating with the best-known customer systems.
Preventing noise
The solution
At CodeCast the strategy is always to avoid burdening one specialist with another’s work. So we focus entirely on pulling templates and other content out of the mail system itself. Give a select group of users access to one place to manage templates. Make sure the system can pick those templates up whenever needed, independent of the running version, and offer them through the necessary screens to service desk staff, marketers or the automated email processes. It gives the specialists control, prevents people from keeping their own versions, and can pull all the information it needs straight from your customer system.
Taking work off employees’ hands, preventing noise and safeguarding the quality of your email all save time. And as every business owner knows, time saved means gains in many other areas too.
