Newton’s Third Law of Physics, as you well know, states that for every e-mail, there is an equal and opposite e-mail. And we live in the parallel universe where we get those equal and opposite e-mails. We also get to hear what’s really on politicians’ minds when they’re talking, we know how often girls actually wash their hair and we always get good parking places in midtown Manhattan.
It’s nice, yeah, but we wish we could get a decent cup of coffee from the Starbucks here, because Newton’s Fourth Law of Physics holds that for every cup of good coffee, there is an equal and opposite cup of abject swill.
We know you want to provide good customer service via e-mail, so you tell customers when they can expect a response — and you keep to that schedule. You actually respond when you say you will. This is because you know that response time depends a great deal on how quickly your automated routing gets the appropriate e-mail to the appropriate respondent in your organization.
You never write in all caps, you have a punchy, relevant subject line, and you even include the recipient’s name in the response. Your agents have access to all the customer information they need to write an intelligent, useful response, they understand what the customer is talking about and they have the reporting and analysis capability to track trends.
You’ve analyzed the most common customer queries and have developed responses with highly effective habits. You’ve done such a good job with your FAQ list that your agents are only getting the complicated questions, but because you’ve prepped your agents so well, they don’t have any trouble.
Remember that confirmation e-mail you sent last week to Elmer Schlumpkin of Rusty Gulch, New Jersey, confirming shipment of his order of…