Customers interact with brands every day of every hour for a plethora of reasons, such as inquiring about a service or product, requesting assistance, reporting an issue, or providing feedback. Some of these interactions could wait a few hours to complete or address. Others need to be resolved in a few minutes. To communicate with customers as efficiently and effectively as possible, it is absolutely necessary to provide various multi-channel options like voice and chat support, email support, and social media support to cater to a wide range of their needs.
The fact of the matter is that customers can be both impatient and demanding, expecting prompt and accurate responsiveness to their inquiries, requests, and especially their complaints, one hundred percent of the time – being quite vicious at times if they don't get it. This expectation applies to chat support, even email support, and everything in between. Therefore, it is imperative for BPO solutions to provide the highest level of support that both meets and exceeds their expectations. According to Hubspot’s research, 90% of customers really appreciate an immediate response when contacting a brand,1 and a failure to respond in a timely manner would cost a significant opportunity as they will have to move to another brand that responds faster.
Email support is one of the many channels under omnichannel support. Interestingly, in the same Hubspot study, email support comes in as the second most preferred channel after phone. 62% of customers have been engaged through email support, and depending on the frequency, they can engage in other supplementary channels.1
However, like any other customer support channel, email support can be swamped with queries, concerns, and other miscellaneous messages with varying levels of depth, concern types, customer-expected reply times, and many more. How should companies implement an agile, accurate, and all-encompassing email support system?
Outsourcing Email Support Services
Outsourcing business operations, including email support services, could enable your business to perform at an optimized level as you scale, especially from a customer-facing standpoint. Outsourcing email support services is the process of delegating your email support to a third party, often specialized service provider. It is a common practice particularly useful as your business grows and the volume of email messages increases. By outsourcing your email support services, you will be able to amp up your customer service capabilities in terms of timeliness, scope, and quality.
Here are some more key reasons why companies outsource email support:
- Availability to users
Email is a common, reliable, accessible, and straightforward communication channel for people 15 years old and up.2 It is readily available to whoever owns a smartphone, desktop computer, or tablet. By outsourcing email support to customer service specialists, all your inquiries, issues, and feedback will be attended to regardless of the volume of emails received.
- Save time and money
It is more expensive to build a full-time team to attend to your emails than to outsource email support. Additionally, hiring, training, and managing your teams can be time-consuming, with performance becoming sub-par for teams that have to juggle multiple tasks and daily deliverables. Outsourcing email support can save you money and time that you can put towards other aspects of your business.
- Comprehensive communication
Some customers hesitate to use other channels such as voice calls, but would still like to discuss their issues. Email is their preferred medium because it allows them to express their concerns in detail, taking the time to organize their thoughts, points, and yes, complaints. In the same vein, email support representatives can also reply to customers with detailed solutions.
Emails are also easy to track with ticket numbers and histories of conversations that will help record repeating concerns. File attachments for documents and photos are also doable, sometimes highly encouraged, through email.
- Asynchronous messaging
Given the long queues in some customer support channels, not all customers have the time to make calls or chat and wait for a customer representative.
Asynchronous messaging is a type of communication in which both participants can begin, pause, and resume conversations on their terms. It removes the pressure for live discussions, especially when customers are busy and unable to stay on the line long enough to communicate.
Even when done dynamically, you can always collaborate with your outsourcer to develop an email support service that is timely, thorough, and valuable for your customers.
- Improved customer service
No matter how large the volume of emails you receive, your customer service specialists will handle each query and concern with utmost care, creating a better, more personalized customer experience that will give your brand a positive reputation.
Every customer interaction is an opportunity for your business to provide the best care and most meaningful connections. While chats can be spontaneous, email messages can be composed in a more organized manner. Just make sure to acknowledge your customer’s efforts in sending you an email and personalize your response to your customer’s concerns.
Outsource Email Support Services with Us
More than just providing good customer service, the ultimate goal is to deliver an exceptional customer experience—an area in which TaskUs excels.
A leading eCommerce platform partnered with Us to help build a hassle-free platform while remaining customer-centric. The client mandated every teammate to service voice, chat and email support channels, handle complex billing inquiries, and exceed sales expectations.
To measure this, our client set a target CSAT of 90%. They valued resolution over handling time. The ultimate goal was to not escalate any issue until they absolutely could not solve the customer’s issue themselves.
One of the three critical areas of development included Individual Empowerment, wherein Teammates were trained to give proactive solutions to ensure the customer is set up for success. As a result:
Backed by our knowledge and expertise in Digital Customer Experience, Ridiculously talented Teammates, our people-first principles, and over a decade of experience, we continue to offer world-class solutions to help our clients scale, improve customer care, and increase brand reputation.
- 1^Live Chat Exposes a Fatal Flaw in Your Go-to-Market
- 2^Percentage of internet users in the United States who use e-mail as of November 2021, by age group
