Today’s comment came from a busy professional and an entrepreneur:
How are you handling hundreds of emails a day?
As a business owner, I am constantly getting emails from either customers, employees, cc alerts, etc. If I am out of the office for part of the day or in meetings, I come back to dozens of emails that I spend the rest of the day responding too. Any tips for managing and keeping your inbox organized? I think one of my company’s value points is that we get back to our customers and partners almost right away.
There are a few things you can do:
1) Make use of the auto-responders to answer the frequently asked questions. Responding to your clients “right away” doesn’t always mean that you need to give them the final answer right away. Responding that you have received their request and will have a response before the day’s end – is also good. In the meantime, recommend that they review your FAQ for additional information. Your FAQs are published on your website and newsletters as well – to help eliminate those level of calls.
2) Use the your emailer’s Message Rules to automatically file the newsletters, status reports, employee’s questions and important-but-non-urgent mail into properly labeled folders (and out of inbox). Then schedule/block a separate time to review those folders. This leaves your inbox with the emails that you want to be responding to on a more immediate basis. Those folder-based emails can be reviewed at a later time.
3) Put in a Help-desk priority system such that all customer emails go to a different email address which are handled by a Level 1 support or help desk. If the help desk cannot answer those questions they respond to the client with an update; then the email is passed to the next Level of support.
4) Decide what your SLA (Service Level Agreement) will be. Should “free-mium” clients (clients that only participate in your free offers) get the same level of support that a premium client (someone truly supporting your products and company)? If not, limit the “free-mium” support to online FAQ and 2-day response times. Use the more immediate response times for the higher-paying clients. Give the higher-paying clients your “private email addresses” – and your “free-mium” clients your general “info level” email addresses. Have someone else handle the “info-level” client email. You handle the “high-profile” clients.
5) Short-daily meetings (15 minutes) with your employees to recap the day’s goals and status. Then have weekly one-on-one meetings with each individually. Setting these meetings in place will eliminate much of the employee’s email correspondence BECAUSE a) they know they will talk to you in person daily, b) you will have answered their questions in person.
Have someone document those meetings so you will have the minutes as reference. Have that person send out (or post on internal website) the minutes to everyone that was supposed to be at those meetings.
6) Ask yourself if you should actually be the one responding to this type of email. Just because you “can” doesn’t mean you “should” be answering that type of email. Setup of procedure to off-load some of the typical emails and requests that you receive. Delegate team leaders to handle various types of employee requests and emails. Hand-off employee administration issues to HR or your office admin person.
Anything that repeats can be managed – but it doesn’t mean that you have to be the one that actually answers it. Once you take the time to categorize and label the types of email that you are receiving, then you can create a systematic approach or process to start off-loading those tasks.
Conclusion:
If your “response time” to customers is your undeniable benefit and differential – make that a value-add service. All your customers and employees deserve a response. But not everyone needs the same level of service.
For help on how to process your email, please contact LauraRose@RoseCoaching.info
Or sign up for a complementary one-on-one coaching call, just use this link https://www.timetrade.com/book/WFSFQ