Guest Post: How to Nail Automated Customer Service Email Writing

This week we feature an article from Jessica Fender, head of the content team at Alltopreviews.com. She provides tips and examples of how to improve the customer experience with automated support emails.

Email automation is a way to keep your customers happy. With automation, you improve the quality of communication and keep customers updated in a timely manner. This saves time and helps to reduce support team workload.

Sounds like everybody should use automation, right? Not exactly. Many businesses aren’t doing a great job with that. The emails for customers are often unclear and sound super generic and impersonal. This is not a good way to do business. Especially at times when personalized customer experience-focused companies win.

That’s why improving communication in automated support emails is a big opportunity. In this post, you’ll find tips on how to write personalized, positive, clear, and unique emails your customers will love.

Problem with Automated Emails for Customer Support

“Email automation” means using a special tool to store and send emails automatically. This strategy is common in eCommerce and can greatly speed up customer service operations.

By having an email tool send messages to customers, you can:

• Save tons of time. No need to write emails every time and send them – the tool saves templates and sends them at predefined times or triggers.
• Increase support team effectiveness. Have your team focused on more complex cases while the automation takes care of repetitive, simple processes.
• Improve the customer experience. Customer experience is the best marketing; thanks to better support, your business can get more positive reviews and recommendations.

The process is very simple: you pre-write emails and set up the tool to share them in specific situations, e.g., a customer submits a new support request via email.

But there’s a small problem.

Companies make the mistake of writing very impersonal and generic emails. That’s like adding the same generic product description when you create product pages: people will notice them everywhere. They won’t like that because they want a personalized experience.

Here’s an example of a typical generic email.

“Dear customer,

Your support request #438975 has been received. We will try to respond as soon as possible.

If you require a response, please resend your message in 3 days.

Best Regards,”

Doesn’t sound so great, right? Just another message for which email automation gets a bad rap. Besides, such emails have absolutely nothing to do with promoting a positive and unique brand experience.

Find tips to fix that in the next section.

Related: How to Create a Very Personalized Customer Experience.

How to Write Automated Customer Support Emails

Here’s how to write emails that sound personal and don’t come across as cold.

1. Write in a Natural and Positive Language

A major reason why automated emails get a bad rap is generic, boring writing. The best way to fix that is to make your emails more engaging by combining natural and positive languages.

How to do that, exactly? Well, imagine having a real conversation with your customer. The way you’d speak with them should closely resemble this style.

Here’s an example. Let’s use the generic email and improve it.

Which one do you find better? The one on the right is surely easier to read and brings some positivity to the conversation, compared to the “generic” one.

Should your support team need some training with writing emails better, Ratedbystudents is a place where people rate online writing help services, so you can find writing and editing professionals to help you with this.

Pro tip: Assign a special person in your support team to write and update email templates. This will ensure the consistency of language style and accuracy.

2. Shorten the Copy

“But we need to be specific and clear. Cutting the length means sacrificing clarity!”

This was a response of a customer support team leader from an academic writing services company when asked to shorten email texts. Have the same doubts? Keep reading.

Cutting the text doesn’t necessarily mean clarity. Here’s a great example (and some proof that almost every auto email you have should be shortened).

A typical lengthy email:

“In order to access your account, please go to our home page www.example.com. Click the “Log in” button in the top right corner of the page. You will be redirected to the login page www.example.com/login once you click.”

Here’s how you can shorten it:

“To log in to your account, please visit www.example.com/login.”

Just like that, three lines became one! This is a much more customer-friendly response – it’s clear, simple, and summarizes the first version.

3. Use a Name and Signature

Using the name of a real person from customer support is a great practice to make emails more natural. Treat every customer support ticket like a conversation.

Even though they’re automatic emails, staying anonymous is not a good idea. People connect with other people, not companies.

Also, add the email signature. It might include a person’s name, email, and other contact data that a customer might use in the future. By doing so, you’re demonstrating empathy and readiness to go the extra mile to make customers happy.

Over to You

If you want to improve your customer experience, start changing the way you write automated customer support emails. Generic, impersonal, and wordy emails are becoming a thing of the past. Avoid them with these tips and you’ll make a big step toward better relationships with your customers!

Jessica Fender is a professional writer with a background in marketing. Currently, Jessica is leading the content team at Alltopreviews.com, an educational website for students. Her aim is to improve user experience by sharing guides and reviews that make learning fun and easy.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: The Business Word of the Year