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How To Avoid Death by E-Mail and Centralize Your Customer Communications
Services like Gmail provide more flexibility than ever for users. Contacts and calendars can be synced and shared and e-mails can be categorized into folders for easy organization. Everything from e-mails from co-workers to customer service requests can be funneled through Gmail, if a business chooses to provide that option on its website. But with so many tools available to help automate and organize issues in a business, complete reliance on
Freshdesk director of marketing Vikram Bhaskaran was surprised to find many small businesses were handling customer service through free e-mail services. These businesses were scribbling notes on Post-Its and relying on scrap paper to track issue requests. Business owners quickly realized that this scattered method of tracking customer requests led to embarrassing mistakes. Not only did this create more work for employees, but it can be dangerous to a company’s bottom line, potentially costing them valuable customers.
“Customer death by e-mail is the result of businesses deciding to make do with just their mailboxes,” Bhaskaran explains. “Even when conversations are hardly trickling in, customers are bombarded with unpredictable response times, multiple replies and dropped conversations. For the business, pretty soon it can be a struggle just to dig up what the customer was even talking about in the first place. The eventual result is always the same – frustrated customers and attrition.”
Freshdesk’s solution puts all customer e-mails in one inbox, allowing multiple team members to work together to resolve issues. The software automatically converts each customer support e-mail into a ticket, which can then be assigned to various team members, who can then add comments as they work on the issue. Freshdesk even works with social media, converting Tweets and Facebook mentions into tickets alongside e-mail communications. Customers can even create their own tickets, using Freshdesk’s self-service portal.
Through Freshdesk’s new Free Forever for Three plan, shops of three employees or less can have access to the company’s software for free. Once a business begins adding employees, that business can choose to either pay $15 for each additional employee or upgrade to one of Freshdesk’s small business plans, which start at $16 per agent per month. The paid plans include the ability to send customer satisfaction surveys at the resolution of a ticket, advanced reporting, and ticket time-tracking, among other features. But the free plan includes everything a small shop needs to automate its customer help desk, including ticketing and a separate knowledge base.
In recent years, Freshdesk has attracted the attention of some of the top businesses in the country. Clients include big names like Toshiba, Cheezburger, Rallybus, Indiamart, and many more. Companies have been able to automate and streamline their customer support desks, providing top-notch support to customers that helps them build a positive reputation in the industry. Clients have raved about Freshdesk’s own high level of customer support and the fact that the company is constantly evolving to provide new services.
All of Freshdesk’s plans are free for 30 days, so businesses are free to try Freshdesk out for a month with no obligation. For more information on Freshdesk, visit http://freshdesk.com/.
The post How To Avoid Death by E-Mail and Centralize Your Customer Communications appeared first on Small Business Technology.
Ramon Ray, Editor & Technology Evangelist, Smallbiztechnology.com
http://www.twitter.com/ramonray | http://www.facebook.com/smallbiztechnology
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Small Business Technology Tour (Fall 2011)
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2013-02-22 12:46:36
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