Shared team inbox for happy customers

Your customers’ happiness is directly proportional to the level of customer service you provide. And the features you give to them in return for their investment.

Unhappy customers don’t just leave your business, they opt for your competitors.

Today, the marketing department balances its efforts on delighting existing customers as well as attracting new ones.

Businesses have to ensure the customers enjoy their journey with you and have an exceptional experience while using the product or service.

This way, you can count on increasing your loyal customers and be assured that they will become your natural advocates.

“Loyalty is when people are willing to turn down a better product or price to continue doing business with you.” – Simon Sinek

The existing customer base has unlimited access to social media and with their connections, you must stay in their good books. Achieving immense customer loyalty from the existing customer base must be the ultimate goal of every business.

In this article, we will be discussing some of the essential rules for keeping your customers happy.

Before jumping into these essentials, let’s go through some important statistics and facts that will help highlight the perspective of customer happiness.

Customer relationship and happiness statistics

1. Attracting new customers will cost businesses 5x times the amount. Source: seohosting.com
2. Businesses lose $75 billion because of poor customer service. Source: forbes
3. On average, your loyal customers are worth up to 10 times as much as their first purchase. Source: Martech
4. Shared value is the primary reason for a strong brand relationship as per 64% of customers. Source: Corporate Executive Board
5. Over 80% of customer service related tweets are negative or critical to the brand in question. Source: CustomerGuru
6. 78% of customers opted out of an intended transaction because of a poor experience. Source: Signal
7. Around 12 positive experiences are required to make up for one unresolved negative experience. Source: Ruby Newell-Legner, “Understanding Customers“
8. 68% of customers quit because of the indifference owners, managers or any employee show towards them. Source: Michael LeBoeuf, “How to Win Customers and Keep them for Life“
9. 59% of Americans would try a new brand or company for experiencing better customer service. Source: Cloudcherry
10. 70% of customer buying experiences are based on how they get treated. Source: rati-fi
11. Customers engaging with companies over social media spend 20-40% more money. Source: Bain & Company
12. 89% of consumers diverted their business to the competitor due to one poor customer experience. Source: CustomerThermometer
13. A 5% increase in customer retention leads to a 25-100% increase in profits for any business. Source: Fred Reichheld, author of the Loyalty Effect

Customer relationship and happiness facts

Major reasons for customer loss

1. Customers feel poorly treated
2. Failure to solve a problem in a timely manner

What your customers never want to hear

1. We’re unable to answer your question. Please call xxx-xxx-xxx to speak to a representative from X team.
2. We’re sorry, but we’re experiencing unusually heavy call volumes. You can hold or try back at another time.

According QuickSprout, “a 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 25%.“

Customer retention rate acts as a great indicator of customer’s happiness and forecasts your future with them.

Less hassle, increased win rates

A smart CRM designed for modern sales teams

Try Salesmate for Free

Metrics businesses must track for improving their customer retention

Apart from these two, we are sharing more key performance indicators that influence your retention rate.

Customer feedback

Many teams that handle generic emails such as sales@domain.com or support@domain.com find it difficult to manage customer communication.

Asking for customer feedback is one of the most valuable input. It might be regarding the standard of your customer service, the quality of your product or service.

For many small businesses, taking advantage of expensive and time-consuming market research is not an option. They can simply opt for asking questions to their customers via email.

Important note:

Don’t bug your customers regarding feedback with untimely emails. Instead, you can apply an automated email sequence for getting the job done.

Connecting with them on social media also offers valuable insight into what’s working for your brand.

“Customer loyalty increases also based on how mistakes are being handled. Studies show that up to 70 percent of unhappy customers transform into loyal customers if the mistake has been fixed by exceeding their expectations.” Rocco Baldassarre.

When your customers know you are constantly listening to their feedback, they become more loyal to your brand.

But, when you make the changes that the majority of them suggest, it pushes them towards becoming your brand’s advocate.

What’s more important than asking for customer feedback?

Sharing feedback with your entire organization.

Many businesses are stuck in a loop of CC’s, BCC’s and Forwards. These traditional customer communication methods hamper email communication.

If you are working with your sales team, you will be creating many conversations with your contacts. Using emails to discover upsell or cross-sell opportunities amongst your contacts or sending out special offers and discounts to selected contacts.

You will agree that whenever an email pops in your inbox, you can easily reply to some of them or archive them, depending on the nature of the email.

Sometimes, things are not as simple as that

Certain emails require you to investigate some points on your own.

Other times, you desperately need the help of your colleague or manager for them. Such situations outpace you and result in a string of unmanaged email messages.

Customer-facing teams read and respond to customer feedback regularly. However, are other teams allowed to have a look at the customer feedback?

No matter which team you belong to, customer feedback can be shared using a shared team inbox. You don’t need to rely on traditional emails for coordinating with your team using a shared inbox.

What a team inbox does is helps you loop in your team members. This comes in handy in case of an emergency where you or your team member can resolve the customer’s issue. A collaborative inbox that allows you to loop in team members via notes and a smart system that helps you avoid sending duplicate replies to the same contact.

• With the collected data, product teams can find out what’s working and what’s not.
• They can also use this feedback to make their product roadmap.
• Sales and marketing teams will get a better idea about customers like and dislike.
• They can also use positive feedback to approach the customers for testimonials and case study interviews.
• Executive teams can quickly discover customer needs using customer feedback and plan out their approach.

Manage your sales seamlessly

View and keep track of your sales deals with Salesmate CRM

Try Salesmate for Free

Difference between private inbox and shared inbox for team

A well-designed shared team inbox enhances productivity and infuses collaboration amongst members throughout the organization.

It is not an individual department that is stuck in a loop of CCs and Forwards.

Team inbox brings individuals from different departments together so that they can see the entire process that goes into replying to customer’s queries.

Let’s explain this to you with individual situations.

1. Emails differ

Being an employee of an organization, you come in contact with numerous individuals. Some people have similar traits while others might show different characteristics.

The same rule applies to your emails, the emails that come into your inbox might be similar or might differ from each other.

Private inbox

You can categorize your emails by labeling them. This helps prioritize the emails you want to deal with first.

Shared team inbox

Shared team inbox allows team members to use tags for categorizing emails; the only difference is your entire team can see the ongoing conversation in real-time.

You can work together as a team in a shared inbox instead of dealing with the emails individually the inbox instead of dealing with the emails individually.

2. Time is limited

Whether you are in the product development team, customer success team or the sales & marketing team, your daily work time has a limit to it.

Private inbox

With filters, you can easily get the spam and non-urgent emails out of your inbox.

Shared team inbox

You can easily assign the email messages to the right person and unassign the email messages with a simple set of rules.

Let’s discuss the features within a shared inbox that enhance your team’s productivity in clearing the inbox.

Email tagging

Use tags to create batches of emails and assign them to the right team member. You can also move these tagged emails to another shared folder. You can also highlight a tag using multiple colors and once you highlight a tag it will appear in your conversation list.

Reminders

Tags can help you with one part of the job. What about the CC’s, the support requests and the numerous questions lying in your to-do list of emails. You can choose to snooze an email message and reply to the most urgent emails that require your immediate attention. Every snoozed email will appear in your inbox at a later time.

3. Average response time

Tracking the time your team is taking to respond back to your customers’ inquiries plays a huge part in customer satisfaction.

Being available for the customers or prospects and following up against their queries without much delay is really important.

You are not a business without your customers. It becomes imperative to make them feel appreciated and provide them with quality service at all times.

“Be genuinely committed to providing more customer service excellence than anyone else in your industry. This commitment must be so powerful that every one of your customers can sense it.” Ameen Khawaja

U.S. consumers prefer to resolve their customer service issues using (Source: American Express):

We would suggest breaking down the response time into the most popular channels, i.e., phone, email, and live chat.

Phone

About 53% of customers believe three minutes is an acceptable response time while waiting for customer service agents. Find out how much time your customers are spending in the queue to get in touch with a service agent.

Email

Responding to customer emails is not rocket science.

However, many companies fail to respond in a reasonable amount of time.

Simply because of the distributed individual emails that don’t reach the sales and service department in time.

24-48 hours was the email response time, but consumers today expect a quicker response; within a working day.

With the pace technology is moving, it won’t come as a surprise the email response time moves closer to one hour.

This can easily be achieved using a shared team inbox.

Get rid of those generic and individual email addresses and successfully set up your team inbox. We are sure your team will never lose the customer’s emails through the cracks.

• Real-time notification that tells if more than one person is replying to the same email. 
• Secure data that can be accessed from any device at any place without delaying customer response.
• Auto-assignment on reply and easy notification to fellow team members using notes.
• Calendar integration, communication using call, text or email by visiting customer profile.

With all such features, businesses can easily increase their response time and keep their customers happy.

Live chat

Today, many businesses understand the value of live chat support and are providing the same on their website.

On email or call you can handle one client at a time, but with live chat support, you can extend your help to many multiple customers at once.

Chats are also the best medium for asking a real-time question to the customers and troubleshoot.

The current vendors also provide you with built-in analytics that can track your response time and log all customer interactions.

Close deals faster with Salesmate CRM

Feature-rich sales solution with advanced capabilities

Try Salesmate for Free

4. Referrals

Start tracking your successful customer referral because your happiest customers are also your company’s best salespeople.

When you are keeping a customer happy, you will receive more testimonials, more positive reviews, and, more ratings.

In addition to all this, you also get referrals to their friends, family, and co-workers.

High customer referral will always mean that your customers are truly satisfied with your services and are extremely happy with you.

If your customers are not referring your product to their inner circle it means there is still room for improvement.

Affiliate programs or refer-a-friend incentive programs come in really handy in such situations.

Not only do such programs reward customers for bringing in new business, they also provide valuable insights into your services.

5. Repeat customers

If you are a SaaS-based business, customer retention gets measured by the duration customer stays subscribed to your service.

Those who are sales-oriented businesses have a hard time measuring the same.

To stay competitive, you must be aware of whether your customers are churning or not. This can be calculated using repeat purchases data inside your sales CRM system.

Read more on Customer churn

6. Post-conversion process

Maintaining your current customer base and creating a new customer base must be balanced by businesses.

Engage your customers with upselling or cross-sell content.

Sending an email with the best deals and offers can be easily automated with the help of CRM software.

You just set some rules such as, send emails to recipients who have not connected or replied in the past month.

With insightful reports, you can easily track how many customers engaged with your customers and who need more attention.

7. Every customer is different

Customer feedback is often subjective; however, numbers never lie.

The number of views, click-through rates, time spent on a particular screen, or conversion rates help businesses understand the customer psyche and make data-driven decisions.

Generate reports of your daily sales, marketing, and support activities.

This gives your entire organization insight into the ways they can improve their customer satisfaction.

Conclusion – Introduce your business to a team inbox

Capitalizing on customer feedback makes sure that your company can keep enhancing their customer service, product quality and much more.

With a shared team inbox in Salesmate, it is possible to avoid any kind of delay in your customer response time so that their feedback is never affected. No more messy email inboxes, no more email communication slipping through the cracks.