If you’re going to allow customers and suppliers to reach you by email then you’re going to need to set up some form of automated email response system to manage the many emails your company will receive. It is estimated that over 85 percent of customers who send in emails with questions about products and services expect to get a response within 24 hours

Many potential customers will not even consider doing business with a company unless they receive a response within one hour of their initial inquiry. So it is paramount that your business has a reliable and automated system for responding to emails from potential customers.

The most common email product out there is Microsoft Outlook and most corporate users have used it at one time or another. Sending and receiving emails with Outlook is very easy to understand and most users are comfortable with it within a week or so. Personal management of emails is very easy to perform by creating folders for different categories of emails which you save as needed.

But when the number of emails your company receives each day begins to number in the thousands – or even hundreds if you’re a small business – then the response time and quality of the email responses goes down. Business revenue can be lost if your customer support personnel or inside sales are not getting their emails from customers in a timely manner. You know you have a problem if your customer support and sales personnel begin to receive “forwarded” messages from other departments in your company. So it is important to track and ensure the proper routing of emails so that your customers are taken care of.

It is also important to measure your company’s response time to incoming emails. Without this capability then it is difficult to determine the effectiveness of your customer support, your ad campaigns, your marketing tools and your sales initiatives.

Automatically sending alerts to the appropriate personnel and their managers when emails have not been responded to within a specified time frame can also be used to ensure a high level of responsiveness and over customer satisfaction.

Criteria for routing incoming email and internal alerts can include email to and from addresses, date, time, cc fields and subject fields. In addition, routing and alerting can be based on possible email designations such as High Importance, Return Receipt Required, Signed, Encrypted, Confidential or other designations relevant to your organization. Having an automated email reply system can give your representatives more time to focus on the critical customer issues and also on the higher revenue generating customers with SLA agreements.

It is important when setting up your email system to also define your policy and procedures for automatically routing emails to the correct departments and personnel. The result will be a high level of customer satisfaction, faster communications and the potential for increased revenue.