How do you stay on top of your customer service queues? When your support team login and the first thing they see is a backlog of customer emails, it can be overwhelming, right? 

Today, it is more important than ever to provide excellent customer service.

Before responding to the email, ask the customer to clarify the problem. It’s much easier to create a win-win conversation when both sides understand exactly what the other is talking about.

1) Be Aware of Your Brand's Tone

This is a big one. One of the most important things you can do when it comes to customer service is to be consistent. The most important thing to keep in mind when communicating with customers is that you’re the brand and your tone will be reflected in your brand’s tone. 

If your brand's tone and messaging are uninspiring, customers will not be excited to spend their hard-earned money with you. 

Customers want all of your emails to be easy to understand and not cause stress or uncertainty. As a business owner or executive, make sure that all customer service emails are clear, concise, and consistent. 

If you’re trying to project an authoritative brand image, you need to be authoritative, and so on. 

2) Invest in the Customer Experience

People want to love your brand. They want to love your products.

They want to love the experience of doing business with you and the service that you provide. That’s why it’s important to invest in the customer experience. 

Your customers are talking to each other and sharing their experiences with you and with other people in their lives. If they have a great experience, then they’ll be talking about you and singing your praises.

If your customers aren’t having a positive experience, then you’re doing something wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a B2B business or a B2C business, you should be offering a quality experience to everyone.

3) Be Timely to built a great experience

If someone emails you or tweets you and you don’t reply, then they’re going to think that you don’t care. 

The best way to build customer loyalty is to resolve issues on time, then your customers will feel more valued and cared for.

If a customer has an issue with the product or service they received, it is your job to fix that problem and make sure they’re 100% satisfied. 

It's important to keep in mind that email response times are relative to the person who sent the email. 

In other words, if you send an email to someone and expect a response within 24 hours, but they live in a different time zone, then they may not see the email for 48 hours or more. 

4) Be Clear in your answer

The most important thing to remember when you’re writing a response to a customer email is that you need to be as clear as possible.

It’s so easy to be misunderstood online, so try to avoid using jargon or slang in your emails.

If they’ve taken the time to reach out to you, then you need to do everything in your power to make sure that you’re answering them quickly and clearly.

You can’t please all the people all the time.  But sometimes, you can end up trying to please all of them some of the time by responding to your customers with vague answers.

Each ambiguous response you send to a customer is one more opportunity for your brand to come off negatively.  Even if customers don't immediately change their opinion of your company, they're less likely to trust you in the future.

Confusing or vague customer service responses are more than a risk to your brand’s reputation.

Proofread all your emails and make sure that they’re crystal clear. For instance, don’t omit any details about the issue in an email. Make your customers feel understood. And take care not to bombard them with emails and messages.

5) Be Personal with the customer

Make sure the customer gets a personalized response. 

And also make sure to highlight that they are valued. 

It’s important to always be personable when you’re responding to customers. 

Whether you’re responding to a support ticket, responding to a tweet, or even responding to an email, always be yourself and be honest. 

What works for one person may not work for the next, so it’s important to know who your ideal customer is and to tailor your approach to fit them.

Customers don’t want to feel like they are just a number in a queue or that they are just another number in your database. 

When they are personally addressed, they feel that you care about their individual needs and problems. 

In today’s customer service landscape, it’s all about personalized response.

6) Be Helpful and solve the problem

Being helpful is an important part of customer service.

You shouldn't give the impression that their problem is not important. 

When you respond efficiently and help the customer in their time of need, you will increase their goodwill toward you and increase the amount of business you do

Your messages must give the impression that your primary mission is to solve their problem with the highest possible level of satisfaction.

Stay one step ahead of them and help them become experts on their problems. 

Even if you aren't sure what's wrong, showing empathy will help you solve the problem quickly without further escalating the situation. Also, don't be afraid to ask for more information or more time to process your customer's issue.

Help the customer find the solution to their problem. Give them the right advice by using for example a link to a knowledge base.

Be a coach and guide the client through the process of solving the product or service problem.

7) Close the ticket only after the problem is solved

Make sure you’re not closing the ticket before you’ve resolved the customer’s issue.

It’s very easy to hit the “close” button, but always make sure you follow up with the customers to make sure their problem is resolved. 

Before closing the ticket, always ask the customer if there’s anything else you can help them with. 

Then, if there’s something else, just open a new ticket for them. It’s important to ask people if the problem is now solved when they are done using your product or service. 

If they say that the problem is solved then you’ve done your job.

Conclusion

In this article, you learned a little bit about customer service and how to stay on top of customer emails. 

Customer support is the backbone of any business.

It is important to provide a positive customer service experience obviously for happy customers, but also unhappy customers.