One of the hallmarks of a well run site is being able to reduce or, preferably, eliminate repetitive tasks. For an active site, one of the most repetitive tasks is customer support via email. Maybe you’ll receive just a few emails each day, but the amount of time you’ll spend answering them manually is really going to add up.
So how best to reduce or eliminate this problem? Fortunately, there is a very simple, very effective solution and it’s called an autoresponder. An autoresponder is an email account that responds to emails sent to it – even customer service inquiries - with a canned reply. Do you find yourself answering the same five questions over and over again via email? Once you’ve anwered the questions in your autoreponse you’ll never have to manually answer them again, freeing you up to do other things or respond to those inquiries which are truly out of the ordinary.
The key success factor for an autoresponder is that it must answer only the most frequently asked questions precisely and thoroughly without being long-winded; if you make it too long, users will find it more of hindrance than a help.
Of course, no document can answer all possible questions, so there are times when the canned reply is going to fall short. How can we still provide direct access to a human without having to screen all the emails sent to the autoresponder? Simple: at the tail end of the message, be sure to include the email address for another account that is monitored by a real person. By doing so, you’ve given the user the answer to the most frequently asked questions, including how to speak to a human if you have NOT answered their question.
By applying this technique, you can reduce by 95% or more the amount of support inquiries that must be handled by a human.
Would you like to try this for yourself? If your email server has Vacation Auto-Reply you can create a poor man’s version of an autoresponder right now. Here is how it’s done using Google Apps for Domains. (I heartily recommend Google Apps for domains for handling all of your email, but that’s a subject for another post.) This technique works on other mail servers, too. Check the documentation for yours to see how it’s done.
1) Using Google Apps control panel, create a new email address that you’ll use for handling autoresponses.
2) Login to that account, click Settings
3) Scroll down to the Vacation responder section of the settings.
4) Check ‘Vacation Responder on.
5) Enter the subject and text of the response. IMPORTANT: Be sure to include the email address of the REAL customer support at the end of the message. In this way, people will still be able to communicate with a human.
6) Click Save Changes
7) Test your autoresponder by sending an email to the new address.
Want to see a live autoresponder in action? Send an email to: testsupport@thewellrunsite.com
Almost immediately, you’ll receive something back that looks like:
A word of warning needs to be said. Using Gmail in this way probably stretches the limits of what the Vacation responder was really meant to do. There are some key limitations, the biggest of which is that Gmail will only respond once every 4 days to a given sender; if they send a second inquiry to the same address, they’ll receive no response. So, whether you use Gmail, your own mail server, or some other service, you’ll want to ensure that autoresponses work reliably.
To find more options, just search ‘autoresponders’ on Google.
