How should I provide email-based premium customer support?

[Nomnom]

Our website provides a service for premium customers. We assign an account manager to each customer. To get support, our customers prefer to contact their account manager directly via email.

We employ several account managers, for example John and Mary. Each has an email account in gmail - john@mywebsite.com & mary@mywebsite.com. They use this email account for both customer support (answer requests or approach customers), and internal company communication.

Our problem is that if CustomerA emails John, the email arrives only to John's inbox. So, if the email is urgent, and John is not available for whatever reason (temporarily unavailable, out of office, asleep, on a sick leave, etc.), no other account manager can jump in and assist.

Can you recommend a procedure that will:

1. Let all of the account managers see all customers communication.
2. Let customers email their account manager directly, as they do now --
   not a general support@mywebsite.com.
3. Keep emails that are not customer-related private (i.e. not
   share them with the other account managers).
4. Allow managing customer requests as "tickets".

Thank you

[MFrankJohnson · Accepted solution]

Q: How should I provide email-based premium customer support??

Short A: n/a

Longer A:

Your choices are ...

-1- Use a robust PREMIUM service and support ticketing system (e.g., Zendesk) -- works fine for some of the world's largest and most successful support organizations!
Encourage customers to use this AND provide faster service when they do.
This is your most scalable solution. (recommended)

-OR-

-2- Use an email group support@mywebsite.com to which both John and Mary belong.
This is scalable, but clunky and there is not inherent 'ticketing' per se.

-OR- (complicate things)

-3- Have John and Mary set their email to Out-of-Office (OOO) when not available. Their OOO message should refer clients to whomever is covering for them.
This only really works for VERY small shops and is sort of an amateurish support solution. (not recommended)

-OR- (overcomplicate things)

-3- Have John and Mary use a modified email address for support -- e.g., John+support@mywebsite.com, Mary+support@mywebsite.com.
Then filter (auto-forward John+support to Mary and auto-forward Mary+support to John)
Then expect customers to remember to email John+support or Mary+support just for support, and to email John or Mary for everything else.
Obviously, this solution is clunky, overcomplicates customer compliance, and is not scalable. (not recommended)

Hope that helps.

Best,
Frank

Remote  B2B Digital Marketing Manager

---

MFrankJohnson.com | Connect on LinkedIn

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[Nomnom]

Thank you for detailing!

We'll probably be implementing all first three options.

1. Zendesk etc. - we're now trying it out, indeed considering.

2. support@ - yes, we do that in addition to having the personal account managers emails.

3. OOO - yes, it's helpful.

4. + in email address - indeed overcomplicates and bound to eventually fail.

We're also seriously considering setting up automatic email forwarding from the account managers emails to a new special inbox, either in a white-list approach (only a set of customers emails) or a black-list (anything other than @mywebsite.com). The new email inbox will either be monitored by all, or be used to create automatic tickets.