Email is supposed to be a communication tool. The problem is that most people are poor communicators. Email bombardment and mass email is clogging your inbox. You get a bunch of emails each day and you can’t reply to each one with the quality it might deserve. This result in a problem you might not have thought of; the quick and easy forward function that makes you stupid and do you know why? My bet is that you could answer 80 % of all emails you forward. I recently wrote another post about email: How to Write Good Emails you should read it.

The Forwarding Phantom.

It is easy to forward and within minutes you have emptied your entire inbox. Some emails do require a bit effort to handle. If you are a leader it might be easy to forward as a delegation tool, this might be ok – BUT it might prevent you from learning. I have been working at call centers for some years now and I am a sinner too. I often see people forward emails to others because the email is difficult and requires some work. These emails are a learning opportunity and you should take your time to figure out the answer. You might end up with knowledge useful next time around.

Return to Sender Address Unknown

Some emails should have been sent to someone else. Of course some do send to people or departments like throwing darts blind folded and hope that it gets to the right people. This is because they don’t know your organization or your role within the company. And if you are not sure where it is supposed to go, what do you do? Do you forward it to someone else? What would be useful is to reply to the sender, explaining that you are not the correct person. In this way the sender will get a response and be taught that you are not the right place for such enquiries in the future. The worst thing you can do is to forward the email to a third person because the more forwards the more likely that some will ignore it. So do reply instead of forwarding.

Emails From Customers

Do not forward emails from customers! This is lack of respect. If you forward you release yourself from responsibility. A forward increase the chance for no response, and the customer will get back to you a bit angrier. What you should do is “own” the email – create a new email and ask others for help or knowledge to solve the case. When you get your response, compile an answer to the customer and return it with a good answer. And you will learn as you collect answers from others.

Time, Time, Time

You can probably spend an entire day responding to and sending emails. I know that I have replied to more than 100 emails in one day. This is more than 8 hours of work if you spend five minutes on average. How is this defending good prioritizing? There are a lot of time thieves in your inbox. This is why you should try to educate your organizations about email culture. Spend 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes around lunchtime and 30 minutes at the end of the day. Start by sorting emails. “Just for you”, “sent to you and others”, “copy to you”, “sent to a mail list or group” – Focus on the first two groups – These require actions. Some need quick response, some can wait. Sort them. The rest is FYI or just to read. But keep in mind, use your time wisely – you might make more progress doing other stuff than replying to emails. Think about this: What is your job? Are you hired to answer emails? If no, be a jerk and reply to important emails. The rest? I don’t know as it is not polite to not answer emails. I wish it would be ok to answer: WOT (Waste of Time) – this would give you a chance to reply, and the sender to reconsider the importance of their email.

Acceptable Quick Responses

I wish there would be an acceptance to these short and maybe rude answers.

• WOT – Waste of Time
• DNFT – Did not find time
• TMI – To Much Information
• NEI – Not Enough Information
• UM – Unclear Message
• WTD – What to do?
• IDU – I don’t understand
• AISTAT – Am I supposed to answer this?
• RTL – Read this link

But to be realistic and honest, I do not know what to do with emails I don’t find time to answer within a normal time frame. In order to get my job done, I should spend less time on emails and more time on planning, projects, employees, meetings, phones, solving problems and so on. How do you deal with a full inbox? And some emails deserve more time to really give a good answer.

Some food for thought at the end: If you spend all day replying to email, you will end up helping other people to do their job, and you don’t get time to do your job. Do you still want to reply to all?

Please share you knowledge about email challenges – did you solve some of these issues?

Promotes Good Employees into Great – Follow me on Twitter

Are you having trouble getting the message out when writing an email? You might be doing it wrong.
I receive large quantities of email each day, at work, and at home. I see a lot of faulty ways to write an email. Do you want to do a better job? Learn how to write a good email. I must admit that I have not yet found a good system on how to handle emails in a good way, and oh.. I have tried. But the best system for me is that you know how to write them. In this article I will show you how I prefer to receive an email, and you will get good advice on how to make sure it’s read and that the recipient take the right action.

How do I divide emails?

• Action emails – These emails require me to take action, I need to do something in order to be able to reply.
• Read emails – FYI – For Your Information – These emails need to be read, archived or deleted. I do not need to do more with these.
• Trash emails – My favorite – Emails I can delete at once. Uninteresting, not relevant, spam that made it through my filter, hush…! Old ones I’ve forgotten all about…

Let’s start with the basics: Who do you write to?

You need to think about who you write to. Who needs to take action, who needs the information and who DON’T need the email.

TO: This is to the people that needs to take actions. If I am in the “to”-field I expect that I need to take action. There are some exceptions, I’ll get back to that.
CC:Carbon Copy, I am on the copy field. This means that the information is FYI, I am just informed about what the “to-ers” got to do.
BCC:Blind Carbon Copy, as it says, “Blind” – the recipients don’t know that I get it. This article describes how BCC can harm your career. So be careful. This is for sure a FYI, just read email.

To be clear: If you want me to respond, take action or do something, put me in the to- field.

The promised exception: If I am the only recipient, use FYI in the subject line to indicate that I just need to read.

The subject line

Please do use keywords. And start with some hints. Like these:

• URGENT: Need you to do this fast, really do consider calling instead.
• DEADLINE: mm.dd.yyyy or in whatever date format your country use.
• FYI: Just read this email please
• RESPONSE EXPECTED: I need you to answer this
• NOT URGENT: Take your time

URGENT: Catfood project – please review project plan

What the ???? do I need to do?

I fellow wise co-worker said today, if there is no response, it’s because they either don’t know the answer or they don’t know what to do with it. I have been thinking about this today and I think it makes sense. Why don’t you reply to your emails?

Here is the solution: Write what you need people to do, summarize after all the blah blah with names and tasks:

• Gina; I need you to tweet about this post.
• Geoff: I need to comment and be amazed.
• Steve: FYI – just relax, you don’t need to do anything.

This creates a clear instruction. And all recipients will know what to do, and confusion issues are solved. I have received emails to me (customer service) with carbon copy to finance department, with a question to them. They should not reply, and I don’t know the answer.

How many emails do you receive each day?

Did you answer, way too many? Well so do I, and most other people at work. This is why it is important to consider these factors before you email like a like a drunken sailor spends money.

• Who needs to take action?
• Who needs to know?
• Who really don’t need this information?
• Should I call, or walk over instead?
• Do I really want to send this at all?

You should try to reduce the amount of emails you send. A good idea is to be a bit psychic and imagine what the next question will be and respond to it in the first email (This is actually an excellent customer service advice as well) – I’ll use an example from my days in telecom. We would get customers asking if they could get an email account with us. The short answer is: Yes. – The next question is how; so answer the how at once, and where, and how much, and technical stuff like POP3 and SMTP server.

Hot tip: Don’t send important emails right away, wait for a while, read it and make sure you have followed these advices and be a bit psychic – answer the next question, saves you another email. And DON’T send if you KNOW it will generate a new question.

Emotions in emails are impossible!

No I do not know if this line is sarcastic. I do not know if you are smiling when you write. I do not know if this was supposed to be funny, unless I really know you, and it is still hard. Smileys don’t help. I often write: Please read this email in a jolly and happy manner. If I do, I know that my email might sound harsh and angry, when it’s not supposed to be. I have seen emails that would shock your socks off between people who know each other. For them it was humor, for me, I thought they were sworn enemies with a lot of hate and was preparing to solve conflicts at work. So be careful.

TO: Loyal readers; All new readers
CC: Steve; Geoff; Gina
BCC: mom
Subject: URGENT: Please share and subscribe

Hi all!
I am a bit short of twitter followers due to limitations to prevent spam, and that is good, but it is preventing me from following more amazing people.

Loyal readers: Please to share this post on Facebook, Twitter, Digg, Stumbleupon or wherever you feel fit.
New readers: Please do find a way to subscribe to my blog, and follow me on twitter. And THEN share.

CC: Steve, Geoff and Gina, there is a message for you in the middle of this post, no further action is necessary.

Have a great day, and thank you for reading.

Best regards

Frode Heimen

Customer service is the backbone of any organization. Location might be important, your product might be important, your skills might be important, but without customers you’ll fail. In this article I am going to write about customer experience and how organizations should think to become customer centric.

Who contributes to customer experience?

Customer service is not a department. Your call center is not the customer service department. There is no such thing as a customer service department. Customer service is a companywide attitude. Everybody related to a company provides juice in the customer experience glass. I am not going to restrain myself to the company’s employees as partners and closely related services also contribute to the customer experience.

In-house departments

What does your customer value? Customer surveys show time and time again that a “perfect product” is the most important factor to customer satisfaction. Is a perfect product made by your customer service department? No. A perfect product is made from the research & development team working closely with the factory, marketing, sales, management and customer center. A good flawless product is important, because customers do not want to contact your excellent call center. This leaves a natural link to the second most important factor in great customer experience. Delivered on time..

Partners and 3.rd party connections

Unless you work at UPS chances are that you use a partner or a supplier of transport services. The SECOND most important factor for great customer experience is often handles by OTHERS than you; leaving you with a huge responsibility to find a good strategic partner that can WOW you and your customers.

Imagine a company providing technical support to computer related problems. You sell computers and makes a deal with geeksupport inc. to handle support questions for your customers. When your customers open their box they find a geeksupport pamphlet with contact numbers. If geeksupport mess up, you mess up. If you use UPS to deliver your goods, and UPS mess up, you mess up. Remember this when you select your partners. They become you in your customers’ eyes.

Why delivering the correct product on time is important

We have covered the two most important aspects of great customer experience. The bad news is that you control only 50 % of the first to important factors. The second bad news, you only control some of the third one as well, unless you have outsourced your warehouse then you control nothing what so ever… Getting the right amount of products and the right products delivered on time is the third most important factor. Delivered on time requires good logistics, customers do expect you to keep your promises.

Customer rescue and recovery

Your call center steps up to the rescue when there is a problem with the product or delivery. A good problem resolution routine is very important. This is the fourth most important factor in great customer experience. When things go wrong, fix it – easily. This is also a management issue, as they need to remove the obstacles for front line employees to provide great customer service. Unreasonable limitations will cause frustration not only with your customers, but also with your employees.

“we could not reduce the price unless we filled in a form for approval no matter the amount” – this is an actual quote from a frustrated employee. The form needed to be approved by middle management and it took days. Trust your employees and your customers to find good solutions.

What about price?

Price almost did not make it to the top ten. I am just covering the four most important factors in great customer experience here. If price where an athlete he would not qualify for the Olympics. If price where important would we have luxury items like hotels, cars, tv-sets and dog spas.

So back to who contributes to customer experience?

As you see, product and delivery is very important. But you must not forget marketing who kind of sets the expectations and sales who promise gold to the customers. Marketing and sales are the people that provides the image of your company, they do all they can to look good. And that is nice. But these two need to work together with the rest of the organization in order to oversell, overpromise or agree to deals impossible to achieve.

We all contribute to great customer experience

I was almost run over by a car once. Not long ago a few years back. The story is quite boring actually, I was crossing the road and a car decided to make it past the crossing before me. The special thing was that this car had a huge company logo on its side promoting a plumber. Imagine the coincidence as I had a clogged pipe at home that I was pondering about that very morning. If you drive a company car, follow the traffic rules. If you represent a company be polite and reach out even outside your field of expertise as you are branding a good experience. When you talk to your friends about your job, how do you promote your company? In a good or a bad way?

So this brings me back to why customer experience is a feeling

Customer service is something you experience. It is not something you get. Great customer treatment results in a warm and good feeling with the customer. You need to create a positive feeling and in return you might get a loyal customer.

Just think about it.

You drive a motorcycle – You drive a Harley

You work on your computer – You play with your iMac

You drive a car – You drive a Volvo

The first one creates an image of an action, the second sentence create an image of a certain type of people associated with the brand or in the end associated with a feeling.

Something extra.

You can download this article in PDF – 523KB

Read more great articles about customer service here, and make sure you follow me on twitter because of this limit…

PS! I know I left out accounting…

When I see an empty location I act like a kid outside the candy shop, I am sticking my face into the window and drool all over the place, imaging what it COULD have been. I think about all possible opportunities and my imagination runs wild. I picture myself running all kinds of businesses depending on size and location. People who walk with me in a city knows that I need to be dragged away from a “for rent” or “for sale” sign in front of an empty lot. So what is the perfect business idea?

The dream of self-employment

Since I was way to young I dreamt about running my own business. I did twice. The first time I was 20, and opened a music store selling all the latest hits. It worked as a charm and I spent about two years paying for my own salary before I closed up. The next thing was more on the side. I started making websites during nights when I was not working in the electronic store or bartending. Actually made a good income at the late 90’s coding HTML by night. (No, I had no kids back then…) But the HUGE dream is to come up with the best business idea ever. But times have changed, a safe job is important for me now, and my brain has created something called “fear” – and I love my job, so… no need to go ballistic.

But a lot of people dream of self-employment, so what is the perfect idea? I have figured out some factors. This might come with a twist at the end. I got Gina Abudi thinking, so it has something to it. Bear with me as I try to explain…

It’s not about products or services.

You are not guaranteed to do business if you have the best products. If you google “great brands that died” – you’ll get 33 000 000 hits! – So it does not help to have good brands either. The only thing you’ll need is CUSTOMERS. So this is giving me a seed about the perfect customer centric company. It is all about the customers. What is a customer? It is a relationship between two people. You and someone else willing to pay for what you offer…

So where am I going?

Social media…? am I talking about some new “hype” or web “full of air” idea? No… I am talking about the 100 % customer centric organization. Resulting in…

Another kind of business idea.

Why not start with building an online presence. Build a blog, engage readers, and build a huge twitter follower base. Interact, build a community. Then build a CRM system and support system. Then decide how to handle your customers. How should you interact with them? What services or products would they like? How are you going to have fun at work? Create a logistics plan that works. Make decisions on how to deliver your products or how to serve your services. And when all routines and systems are in place, interact with your customer to find out what to serve them? If you like to sell, does it matter what you sell? Build all services on optimal customer experience before deciding what to do.

How many do you reach?

I reach about 3000* people directly in my social media circles. I have about 120 unique readers to my blog each day. I do not sell or offer anything. Today I was mentioned to about 120.000 twitter users thanks to some good re-tweets. Your business should be global. Your services should be global. The products you would like to sell should be global. I on the other hand have been thinking way too much on the perfect business idea so (* yeah, I know, not much, so follow me on twitter)

I have a lot of requirements.

1. If it is a product it should be small and endure transportations. I wish I knew how to make mineral makeup.
2. Needs to have a good profit.
3. A digital copy for download would be awesome. Some kind of software. Wish I was a bit more hard core geek.
4. Music is a good idea but impossible for a “newcomer”
5. Needs to be something people are willing to pay for.
6. Customers and employees must have fun!
7. Customers must be impressed.

“Profit in business comes from repeat customers, customers that boast about your project or service, and that bring friends with them.” – W. Edwards Deming

But in the end, it is all about recruiting and retaining customers. Build an excellent customer handling routine and make the rest of your business plan according to making the best customer experience ever.

Oh sweet dreams of mine…I could offer my two cents on leadership? I do dream about being a professional coach or a paid public speaker. I even dream of running the perfect e-commerce store, my dreams are plenty… What is your dream? How about starting your business plan with customer services first?