How to manage customer service e-mails?

Our business is starting to grow and we're trying to put in place a customer service system that will allow to scale relatively easily. It's also very important for us to be able to respond to inquiries quickly. Currently we have several different ways customer service inquiries come in (different e-mail addresses as well an offline message system for our live chat). Each of us in the company (currently four of us) is responsible for different e-mails and there isn't much coordination or communication on these between us. To be blunt, it's a bit of a mess.

What we would like to find is some way to manage incoming messages so that at any point in time any of us can log in and know what the new messages are that we've received and respond to them in a timely fashion. It should be a system that allows any of us to see responses to any messages at any time and something that is accessible to all of us at any time (probably a web-based system).

One thought that occured to me was forwarding all of our customer service mail to a shared GMail account. I'm pretty sure that with GMail you can set it up now so that outgoing messages appear to be coming from your domain (rather than gmail.com). This way all of us could access it and given the threaded nature of GMail it would be easy to track each individual communication.

It doesn't seem like the most elegant solution but I can't think of anything better at this point. We don't want to invest in a ton of expensive software right now.

Does anyone have any suggestions or advice here?

Thanks!

 

I would try a good online trouble ticket system. I use http://www.ActiveCampaign.com 's Support Trio and quite like it. Allows me to manage emails a lot easier.

 

Are you selling a product or a service?

 

I too need something like this. We sell products. I have looked at sugarcrm but it seems to be overkill for what I need.

 

Products (digital media). We're already using LivePerson on the site for live chat and it turns out that they have an upgrade that adds this functionality so we're going to test this out and see if it does the trick.

 

PaulJones,

Do you have url for this product?

 

Check out www.kayako.com and www.cerberusweb.com. Both are great products.

 

Do either of these offer an email parser or is it only for tickit submission.

 

I use www.osTicket.com on all my sites that need support centers. It is an open source free system that allows everything you are talking about needing. You can create different users and setup different support email sections so that emails are sent to the right departments. Also you can set the access levels of each admin to let them see and answer all emails from each department. There is alot more it can do. Just check out their website.

 

Yes but if the person uses Outlook it says From: sent on behalf of

 

Most will support email piping. We started with SmarterTicket for awhile but decided on building our own. Much easier to add things to it as needed.

A lot had their own KB which we did not want / need and most did not support a way to turn it off unfortunately.

 

I suggest you to try out Kayako Support Suite.

It's very professional !

 

I'm going to be trying http://www.sproutit.com for this very purpose very soon. It really looks like a good system, with access to history on any mail, and help assembling a response from previous similar emails.

 

sproutit looks great but it sure is pricey.

 

Activecampaign.com has some robust products such as support trio. Kayako is another good solution for email management, however, if you want a one in all solution for email, knowledgebase, live chat and phone support - nothing can beat the latest SMB option from www.liveperson.com/smb

 

I just spent three days installing and uninstalling every help desk system I could find that looked kind of suitable. I needed these things:

- open source ... so I can integrate it with my order system "someday"
- let customers open a ticket merely by emailng the desk ... didn't force them to register
- php / mysql
- reasonably tidy programming and not over-designed

This was a major chore. If you've tried to find a free or low-cost php helpdesk much less open source, you probably spent a lot of nonproductive hours on it too. Most of the free or cheap php help desk systems are a) a mess or b) require all users to go through a registration process or c) abandonware ... someone started them but never finished and never released the source code so that someone else could finish.

I did eventually find one that works, but it wasn't easy. For people looking for the same thing I suggest you look into exocrew's PHP helpdesk. Note: this program is essentially abandonware, it seems. HOWEVER, someone has graciously taken it, fixed the myriad bugs, added graceful email handling capabilities and an automatic email fetcher, and his "bugfix" version works beautifully. It can be downloaded in the exocrew's forums or you can go directly to his page at http://www.finexe.com/shop/shopping/?id=17. I suggest you check out it sooner rather than later because the forums have gone offline for periods and might go offline for good.

It is FREE. But for god's sake if you use the version he's fixed and made available to us at no charge, please offer him something. I just gave him a measly $10 which frankly I'm ashamed of and he said it was the first time someone had offered him a donation for his bugfix version. This was the only working php helpdesk I could find that met my rather basic needs and if he hadn't made a working version available, I'd be SOL.

 

@blakekr : I'm looking at helpdesk & billing solutions since July, at least 1/2 day per week... so I easily top your 3 days

= open source ... so I can integrate it with my order system "someday"
you don't need OS, you need APIs that work & good support

= let customers open a ticket merely by emailng the desk ... didn't force them to register

- that's what cereberus and activecampaign and probalby more support


- php / mysql

- well, many have this, cereberus and activecampaign are TWO

- reasonably tidy programming and not over-designed

- I dropped my requirement for OS ... I want to have a stable, good base for my business... and will pay people to maintain that stuff

 

I have realized that at the end you get what you pay for.

Liveperson, the market leader in live chat solution has been named by us the top editor's pick for customer support in 2007.

Look at what it can do:

1. Hosted - nothing to install.
2. Takes about 5 minutes to set up.
3. integrates your email, knowledgebase, chat support, PHONE support all in one so your customer tickets remain in one place.

So next time a customer sends an email, the agent has complete history in front of him, whether it was email, phone or chat.

While activecampaign has the best email support software out there, LivePerson's all in one integrated support is a complete solution and worth every penny.

 

Besides the good suggestions already made, why not outsource it to an offshore company that will handle all your email inquiries/chat inquiries on a 24/7 basis for you? Of course, this is assuming that you get at least 1000 inquiries a day (that's the minimum level I can see this option making sense at).

 

Right, oursourcing is a good option with chats because it does not involve accent problems, and training is much easier with canned responses.

Besides, LivePerson has almost become a standard on web with thousands of websites using it, so more and more users know what to expect when they click on the chat button.