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Writing Support Emails: A Style Guide

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Vaishali Gopi

Before delving deeper into this topic, it is of utmost importance that we first understand why these support emails are important and what kind of value it adds to the customer’s life.

Why are support emails important?

Support emails are almost like the backbone of your customer support calls and they are a very essential part of keeping the customer satisfied and happy. On an average the customer should be sent an email of confirmation, a welcome email or a feedback email every time the customer has bought something or decided to switch to competition. These emails are a very big tool when it comes to establishing a rapport or communication with the customer. It is the only way that you get to document some events relating to purchase, delivery or feedback. Hence these support emails should not be taken very lightly.

What kind of value does it add to the customer’s life and what does it say about your brand?

These emails might be routine to a person who works on them day in and day out but adds immense value to the customer. Every time the customer gets a welcome email it shows that you care as a brand for your customer and want to open up the channel of communication between you and the consumer. These emails also have important details such as whom they should contact if there is a problem or if they have any suggestions. Similarly each time a customer leaves you and no longer buys from you, an email asking them what changes they would like to see in the future, makes them feel wanted and they might consider getting back to you when the time is right. Being responsive is the biggest favor that you can do to your brand and customer support emails will help you do just that.

 

How should you write support emails?

  1. The first rule here is to send emails within the first 24 hours. If you are not fast you have lost the attention of the customer and given them a chance to complain. Hence writing to them during the first 24 hours is of utmost importance. It would be superb if they receive an email from you within the first hour of buying from you. It just goes on to show that you as a brand believe in prompt and sincere customer service training and value your customers to a great extent.
  2. Keep your emails personalized. This is the age of personalization, and you need to keep the emails personal. Emails meant for mass consumption do not work with the customers anymore and they are completely outdated. If the customer has given you her name and email address it is of utmost importance that you send them emails which are personal in nature and addresses their problems, queries, feedback or any communication piece in a very personal and intimate manner.
  3. Another thing that you should do before hitting the send button is fact checking. Before sending a piece of communication to your consumers, fact checking is very important. You need to check your facts and confirm if the details are in place. Wrong and distorted facts will simply put your brand in a false position and you will be dubbed as irresponsible. These kinds of things are absolutely not desirable and should be avoided. There should be a team in place which will check facts and figures and will make the necessary additions to embellish the email with the correct details. Writing personalized and accurate emails can be quite daunting when you need to churn out hundreds of them, but the work load should be well balanced as you cannot take any chances.
  4. Every piece of communication should be in alignment to the brand style guideline. Every brand has a particular style guideline. They have some colors that they use and some fonts that they would always stick to. These need to be uniform in all pieces of communication that goes out to the customer. Uniformity and consistency speaks volumes about your brand and you need to keep in mind that these need to be kept uniform in all the emails that go out. The logo and the tagline are positioned in a certain manner and there is a reason why they are kept like that. It is a message that you send to your customer every time they hear from you on mail and adds value to your brand on a very subconscious level.

Thus these are some guidelines that you need to keep in mind while writing to your customer. The last thing that you need to keep in mind is the fact that a hygiene check pertaining to grammar is of utmost importance and is something that cannot be compromised upon. The mail should be well drafted and needs to be grammatically and structurally correct. The message that you want to convey should be conveyed in short crisp sentences and you need to keep in mind that the customer would not lime to read long emails.

 

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Vaishali Gopi
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