Don't get me wrong, I don't like Email! (see previous post), but it is a necessary evil in some cases. There are two types of Email that need to come out of the service desk to customers
- Pre-canned "status update" type Emails
- Ad-hoc communication from service desk consultants to customers, other staff, etc.
The focus of this post is on the content of these Emails, not on recording and reporting, should you use email, etc, etc, just on the content.
The reason why I want to focus on the content is because generally it is not very good. Quite often it is poorly written, with hard to follow instructions, or ambiguous information, the tone of these emails are also in most cases not very customer focused.
So what to do? Firstly, we need to use Email, customers have Email, they want to use it in communicating with us, so moving off Email all together is not an option. The service desk needs Email in order to communicate efficiently with customers, and reduce phone call volumes, so lets get it right and make it work for us.
Get your marketing department or customer communications people involved in drafting your pre-canned Email. Make sure it makes sense, is easy to follow, is written for the customer, and is not going to generate another call to the service desk asking what your Email means. Oh, and make sure when you are using a pre-canned response, you use it for the right question asked! No point in using one that "kind of" suites the situation.
Where your team are writing ad-hoc responses, have them trained in business communication or work with the client communication people, after all, this is client facing communication and we need to get it right. Where possible send screen shots, or recorded screen sessions to show the customer what is happening, a picture tells a thousand words!
Dont forget, we are using Email to get a message across to our customers, we need to ensure that the message is clear and that they can understand what is happening, otherwise we are wasting our own time and out customers, and increasing our workloads.
