We have been talking to a lot of businesses about their customer support over the years and they all seem to have one thing in common. They are trapped in email hell. Their customer communications are all over the place and they are not afraid to tell us about it. It’s a cry for help and I can hear the frustration in their voices as they describe the insanity that is their workflow. Many still use shared email inboxes and move emails into various folders by agent name in an effort to better organize the support emails.
While customers are looking for multiple channels to reach their vendors, email is still up there on the popularity scale. So how do you handle all of the support emails that come in the door and route them to the right people?
We have had the pleasure of helping many of these businesses solve this with our simple, yet powerful email integration within TeamSupport. As a result, our customers are able to be more focused and productive with less time and headache. How’s that for a sales pitch? 
How are we able to do this? For starters, each TeamSupport customer is given a special email address – and when emails are received, they are converted into a ticket. The sender gets a confirmation email and the TeamSupport users are notified. All that is required to make this work is a simple email forward from support@yourcompany.com (example) to your TeamSupport email address. It is that simple!
But what about businesses that have many departments and email addresses? We solved this problem with a feature we call Alternate Emails (creative naming – I know). While the name of this feature may not be flashy, the feature is a life saver for businesses with many departments. As mentioned above, this too is very simple to accomplish by allowing you to generate multiple addresses that can do some pretty smart things with very little effort.
For example, if your customer finds a bug and needs to report it to you, if you have an address such as bugs@mycompany.com, you can setup an email forward to your alternate email address in TeamSupport and we will convert that email into a bug ticket, assign it to the team that handles bugs, and can even auto associate the ticket to a specific product.
It could be that you have a piece of hardware that can generate emails when it senses a failure, you can have that hardware forward to an alternate email in your TeamSupport account and create a “failure” ticket and alert your team. In some cases, your customers equipment may have had an issue and your team resolved it before the customer even knew anything happened. Pretty cool stuff and this was accomplished with a simple email forward.
The alternative? Send emails back and forth and play phone tag with the customer until everyone is stressed out. What all this boils down to is a straight forward, simple solution to a very frustrating and difficult problem – and it is solved in a matter of minutes with TeamSupport.
If you find yourself in email hell – or know someone who is struggling with these issues, it’s time to cool off and free up some hours in the week for personal time! Those emails will get to the right place and everyone will be on the same page in no time!
