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Setting Up Accounts, Groups and Rules
- Designing Effective Email Templates
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Email Responder
v1.23 |
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Efficient Customer Service With Email Responder: Setting Up Accounts, Groups,
and Automatic Assignment Rules |
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Email Responder is a sophisticated Email Response Management System, which ensures accurate, fast responses to customer email by automating the process. One thing that is automated is the assignment of incoming messages to a person or group for processing. By properly setting up Email Responder's user accounts, groups, and assignment rules, you will shorten the response cycle for customer email while reducing labor costs. |
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| | Background |
| | When a new email message is delivered, Email Responder follows a multi-step process:
- Check the email address of the sender against Email Responder's database. If the message is from someone who has written before, Email Responder automatically assigns it to the person who answered this customer last.
- Analyze the message, and extract the customer's Full Name if present and the name of the product the message is about.
- Check the Rules defined in Email Responder Manager, and assign the message to a person or group.
A user account is designed to be used by a single person. Joe in Sales and Ellen in Tech Support will each have their own accounts. An Email Responder Group is a set of people who are all assigned to answer customer email in a particular category. For instance, in a company that sells both software and computer equipment, “Software Sales” would be a logical group.
The purpose of this article is to help you create a coherent set of Groups and Rules that will make your use of Email Responder more efficient, and thus faster and less expensive.
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| | Why Use Groups? | | |
What is the advantage of creating Groups in Email Responder? The answer is that they provide greater flexibility and faster response times.
Let's suppose that an auto dealership has a repairs/parts department, a used car department, and a new car department. There are four people who answer email for Parts And Repairs. If parts-related email is automatically assigned only to Faye, then she will have to manually assign some of them to Dora, Steve, and Penelope. By creating the “Parts Group” all of them can be included in a single, simple-to-write Rule.
Also, if a message is assigned to a group, it speeds up response time. Because it appears in the Email Responder listings for every member of the group, the first one to have an opportunity will answer it. Messages assigned to a single person will wait until that specific person has time, which may be hours (or days if they are away from the job).
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| | Finally, a person can be a member of several groups. If an online clothing seller has departments for Foundations, Outerwear, and Casual, they might have three Groups to handle mail for these product lines. If Mike is an expert in all three areas, he could be a member of all three groups, which would let him contribute to all departments.
Generally, a Rule should always assign messages to a Group, not an individual account. Even if only one person can answer a certain type of email, it is a good idea to create a Group of only one person and use that in the rule. This way, if a second person is later added, the Rule doesn't have to change—just add the new person to the Group.
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Creating Groups | | |
A key point about Groups in Email Responder is that they are for first responders. There is no need to add anyone who doesn't handle first-time messages from customers in a Group. For instance, many companies have “second tier” and “third tier” tech support. Questions and problems too difficult for the “first tier” staff are forwarded to higher tiers for disposal. Members of Tiers 2 and especially 3 probably shouldn't be in the “Support Requests” Group. Their time is to be spent on advanced problems, and there is no benefit to having all new messages shown in their Email Responder listings.
In general, an Email Responder Group lists all the people who will answer initial customer inquiries about a particular topic. Its purpose is very specific: to allow Rules to assign messages to more than one person.
With this in mind, you can create groups to optimize your email customer communications. Email Responder doesn't restrict the number of groups you create, so feel free to make very specific ones if that will help you. For instance, a garden store could have a Rule like this: |
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If the word “lawnmower” appears in the body of the message
AND
If the word “repair” appears in the body of the message
AND
If the word “Landscapemaster” appears in the body of the message
THEN
Assign the message to the “Landscapemaster repair” Group
This lets you have a very specialized group of representatives who are qualified to handle repair requests for Landscapemaster brand lawnmowers. In the example above, you might have a set of rules, each of which assigns messages to “Landscapemaster repair.” For instance, they might include the word “fix” instead of “repair” or “tractor” instead of “lawnmower”. How specific to make the rules will depend on the needs of your organization.
This example leads us into the subject of ... | |
| | | | | | Creating Rules
| | | | A major advantage of Email Responder's automatic assignment system is speed. Messages are assigned within seconds of their arrival. If a person was required to manually assign each message, it could introduce a delay of hours before anyone could reply to the message. In order to maximize this advantage, you should create rules to handle as much of the incoming message traffic as possible without human intervention.
All rules use a very simple, logical system, that looks like this:
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IF [some condition about the message] THEN assign it to [some person or group]
It is possible to combine rules (as in the example above) to create more specific rules.
IF [“blender” is in the body of the message]
AND
IF [“VortexBlaster” is NOT in the body of the message]
THEN
Assign the message to the “Small Appliances” Group.
To make the process of creating rules easier, it helps to start with very general rules. If you have a department in your company that handles all refund requests, a rule that reads:
IF [“refund” is in the body]
OR
IF [“credit my account” is in the body]
THEN
Assign the message to the “Returns and Refunds” Group
may be all that's needed. Notice that by using OR, you can combine several conditions, and tell Email Responder that if any of them is correct, the message should go to a particular Group. In the above example, you might add
OR
IF [“refund” is in the subject line]
to the rule. You could instead make three separate rules, but that would be more complex and harder to change later.
If your organization has separate groups to handle different products, a rule can be written to assign mail on that basis, for instance:
IF [Product/Service is one of:
Model 12
Model 13
Model 20
Model 32
Model 50
THEN
Assign the message to the “Models” group.
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| | One important rule is the “catchall”. You can set a condition of “For all new unassigned messages.” This Rule will assign every message which has not already been assigned by a Rule higher in the list (see below). The person or Group you assign these messages to should be generalists, able to reassign messages after reading them.
Rules are processed in the order that they are listed in the Rules and Actions for incoming mails window: | | | |
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For instance, if you have a rule that assigns all messages about Product “A” to the Service Group, and another one on the next line that assigns all messages containing the word “Refund” to the Financial Group, a message with the subject “Product A: Please Refund My Money” will be assigned to the Service Group.
Once you have created Groups and Rules, you should send several test messages to be sure the system works as you intended.
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Conclusion | |
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| | Email Responder makes answering large volumes of email fast, simple, and pleasant. By creating logical Groups and Rules, you can make Email Responder even more efficient, and the process of Email Response Management even faster. | |
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