E-Mail support suggestion

As communication with a customer is often done by e-mail it is very hard to keep the right people notified without sending everybody in the company e-mails.

The RadiMation^® support team has got the same problems as to how do you manage this? This page contains suggestions of how you can structure the e-mail flow into the right direction.

1. Create one e-mail address and give this a clear name like Support or RadiMationSupport. By doing so you can direct the e-mail flow in to one direction. Your customer can bookmark this address, and use this in future communication.
2. Use the support e-mail account for sending e-mails to customers. Customers often reply to the e-mail you send from, 99.9% of e-mail users use the reply button. The e-mail comes back into your support box.
3. Keep your support inbox clean. If the inbox not clean then it is unclear what needs to be handled and what is handled. A good way of cleaning the inbox is creating folders in the inbox. Give the folders the same name as your customer, and store every e-mail conversation in this folder. Your support inbox may look something like this
   1. Inbox
      1. customer A
      2. customer B
      3. customer C
      4. customer D
4. Store all the e-mail send related to a customer in the customer folder. When there is a discussion about who send which e-mails, just open the customer folder and see the time line of e-mails. This makes it very easy to communicate with the customer because there is no need to spend hours figuring out the e-mail history.
5. Be consistent in your work. If an e-mail comes in and needs to be handled by the sales department, forward the e-mail and take the following actions:
   1. Store the original e-mail in the customer folder, because this is handle as it is delivered to the right person.
   2. Store the forwarded e-mail in the customer folder, by doing this your have recorded the action taken on this e-mail.
6. Give more then one person access to the e-mail account. The customer expects response in a reasonable time, if the person who is normally responsible is handling the e-mails is unavailable for a week. The support response time is then delayed to that week. If all persons work in the same way, it is very easy the read the e-mail history and give the customer the correct response.