In business, there are few things as disastrous as a lost email. Imagine: you are a customer and you place an order by email. You then follow up by e-mail. That e-mail, rather than reaching the correct person, languishes in an inbox belonging to a team member was out sick or who simply has no time to respond to the e-mail. Your order does not arrive and you get increasingly angry with the company. After all, you did send the e-mail. You call the company and wait on the phone for a long time, awaiting a representative. You eventually get through to the representative, who tells you that he or she cannot find your order or the e-mail. You hang up in frustration, vowing to never do business with that company again.
Obviously, lost e-mails can cost your company a lot of business. Customers often rely on e-mails as a quick way to get in touch with your company. When e-mails get lost, you simply cannot respond to them and you cannot provide excellent service. Unfortunately, e-mails get lost for lots of reasons. One of the most common reasons is that in most companies, e-mails are sent to individual inboxes. If the individual who receives the email does not respond to the email, or loses track of the e-mail, the customer does not get serviced, and no one is wiser as to the source of the problem.
Lost emails are a major annoyance to customers, and customers often get very frustrated when no one responds to their e-mails for a long time. You can help provide outstanding customer service as well as fast e-mail replies by using a customer relationship management program such as Relenta CRM. Relenta CRM virtually eliminates the phenomena of the lost e-mail by:
1) Making every team member equally accountable. Relenta CRM allows everyone in a specific department to see every e-mail sent to that department. This means that e-mails never get clogged in one person’s inbox, never to be seen again. Instead, everyone can see relevant e-mails that have been sent by clients, and everyone can respond to any e-mails. Plus, every team member can see which emails have not yet been responded to, so that each team member can take it upon themselves to reply to clients in a timely fashion.
2) Making e-mails transparent. Relenta CRM allows you and your team members to see at a glance which e-mails have been sent, which ones are awaiting a response, and which ones have already been answered. This allows you to ensure that no emails will be lost in a deluge of electronic communication. No e-mail is easily overlooked, since Relenta CRM makes it very easy to see incoming e-mails and unanswered e-mails.
3) Tying e-mails specifically to customer accounts. In the Relenta CRM environment, each time that a customer sends an e-mail, that e-mail is connected with the customer’s contact information, and previous communications. This means that when a team member opens a customer’s latest e-mail, that team member can see that customer’s past orders, previous emails, and order history. In fact, the team member has everything he or she needs to respond to the e-mail in a timely and accurate fashion. This helps ensure that no e-mails are lost simply because team members are overwhelmed about what to do with a specific e-mail. With the Relenta CRM environment, team members always have all the information they need at their fingertips to reply to customers promptly.
