Email is a powerful communication tool in business. Less intrusive than a phone call, asynchronous and fast. It empowers people working from around the world.

Email allows you to communicate with customers, share information over teams internally and build from the ground up important decisions.

The thing is the world isn't perfect, and email is now hindering productivity. In 2012, more than one-quarter of a workers' day on average spent answering and reading emails.

Business leaders and influencers receive hundreds or thousands of emails each day, affecting their business life.

A cluttered email inbox is a problem for everyone within the company, especially quality and customer feedback.

At Crisp, it's been a long time since we've been able to improve the email management strategy and work on a better relationship with our customers.

What are the common mistakes when doing email customer service?

Email mistakes are numerous, and not only when doing customer service. There are two kinds of errors:

Team-wide mistakes
Individual mistakes

Both of those issues have different outcomes but also different solutions. Let's cover some of them so you can project yourself on resolving internal problems within your company.

We took the time to list them so you can be aware of it.

Team-wide issues

Missed conversations
Lack of product knowledge
Lack of dedication (agents are choosing what they prefer handling)
No clear ownership
Bad internal resources

Individual issues

Lack of knowledge
lack of confidence
Unclear request
Problem with fast writing

It's always better to improve something that you understand, being able to know what affects email management is vital for your company.

Here are some tips you can use now to improve email management. As for the preview problems, we could have listed individual solutions & team-wide solutions.

We've preferred to go over the team-wide solutions as each individual is different.

Take Action immediately

It is proven that response time affects customer satisfaction. 77% of customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to bring the best customer experience.

Answering emails instantly is a way to tackle a heavy load of email in your team inbox.

Even though you don't have the immediate answer, simply set expectations so the customer knows the time he should have to wait before getting a response.

It will prevent your business from missing conversations. A simple quick win: use the power of reminders to bring back conversations to life when needed.

Organize your inbox

Email management is all about organization. In another article about email overload, we saw that routing rules and autoresponders were key features to set up.

Using features such as segments, that allow you to tag a conversation, or using custom data, from your back-office are killer features too.

Use them to create specific filters and display conversations you're concerned.

Build routing rules

Routing rules are one of the most powerful tools you can ever imagine in terms of email management.

Combined with an autoresponder, the routing rules will show all of its power.

Routing rules will let you create rules that will define, based on different criteria, to which team should the message be sent to.

Using that killer feature will allow you to earn a lot of time in terms of qualifications.

It's also one great to fight the lack of dedication, conversations are assigned automatically to the right reps within your team.

Ownership is also improved through this feature, because the conversation will be clearly assigned to the right reps inside the dedicated team.

Add a live chat

Live chat widgets are one of the most underestimated tools in terms of email management.

Now you're wondering why live chat has an impact on email management.

Thanks to a website chat widget, you can decrease the total amount of emails that you receive every day. That's the trick!

While people are browsing your website, they can interact with your team instead of sending repetitive emails.

It's a massive productivity win, both for customers and teams.

Combine it with a knowledge base

Using a knowledge base is a must-have in 2020. For each company.

Combining a knowledge base with a live chat software will make your customer support even more efficient.

Thanks to semi-automated answers, agents can look for articles, straight from their inbox.

It will also benefit the team because it will prevent any product knowledge issues, because the content is available.

Whether it's for the agent of the customer, it's available 24/7.

Social media is an inevitable channel that you must be using as of today!

Customers and leads are browsing social media pages all day and every day so missing to communicate on these channels might increase the total amount of emails you receive every day.

To prevent you from this email overload. Share information on your social media and don't forget to get the right tooling.

You can use Swello which is a scheduling tool for social media to help you publish the right content on every channel.

There are many more things that could be built upon your company to improve email management.

Using those features will be a good starting point.