Better customer support with dynamic footers, email templates and autoreplies

Although the sight of an overflowing inbox might make you think otherwise, it's neither wise nor possbile to fully automate your customer relationships. Still, it's a good idea to try and find a middle ground between automation and pure handiwork. We recommend using several simple tools which help you save time on the repetitive parts of email support.

Let's focus on a common, yet hard to handle case - the shared company inbox that looks something like [email protected]. The idea is that customers send their questions to this shared address and your customer support team, small or large, answer them. So, how can Sugester help you streamline this process?

The first few steps are very simple - register a Sugester account, set up an email redirect and invite your co-workers to start using Sugester. We describe all of those in detail in our knowledge base, but you'll probably manage this in a couple of minutes without any help. Even if you come across some issues, don't fret - we're happy to assist you over email ([email protected]) or our live chat. After you've completed the basic setup, it's time to move on to the cool part.

Let's start by creating your first dynamic footer. A dynamic footer is especially helpful when you have multiple people writing emails from the same address, but you want to give every message a personal touch. So, instead of having your agents type out a signature manually everytime, just create a short snippet of code that looks something like this:

And it will automatically be transformed into a professional email signature that looks like this:

The example above is very basic - you can customize the look and feel of your dynamic footer by using HTML and CSS markup. This means that your dynamic footer can include text formatting, images and pretty much anything else you can think of. Intrigued? Read more about this feature in this knowledge base post.

Another - and perhaps the most interesting - time-saving feature in Sugester is the ability to create multiple email templates/canned replies. While you might occasionaly fantasize about complete automation of your more repetitive duties, this is the next best (and actually possible) thing. Canned replies let you deal with frequently asked customer questions extremely quickly without risking sending out irrelevant replies. Just pick a template when you're replying to an email, add a small personal touch and hit 'send'. The customer's satisfied, and you can move on to your next task. Read more about canned replies here.

The last feature we're going to talk about in this post is the autoreply. Although we strongly discourage you from relying on autoreplies as your main of interacting with customers, there are some use cases where this tool really shines. Our recommendation is to set up an autoreply that lets your customers know that you've received their questions and are going to answer it within a defined timeframe - this way they know that their email has gotten through and is being worked on, but are not frustrated by an irrelevant boilerplate reply to their issue. Click here to read more about creating an autoreply in Sugester.

These three simple tools - the dynamic footer, the email template and the canned reply - will help you save time and increase customer satisfaction with just a minimal investment of time and resources. Intrigued? Start a free, unlimited Sugester trial today and test them out yourself!