More about customer support automation and killing spam... by Richard Grady

Hi Folks!

More about customer support automation and killing spam...

A few weeks ago I wrote about how I had set up a Customer Support Helpdesk in an attempt to automate the handling of at least some of the emails that I receive from my customers. If you missed the article, you can read it here.

Anyway, I have been monitoring the effectiveness of the helpdesk and although I knew it would make a big difference I have been absolutely amazed at how well this new system has worked. So much so that I can't stress strongly enough that if you have an online business and receive emails from your customers, I am now almost 100% certain that a similar helpdesk will save you a huge amount of time (and give your customers a much better service too).

Over the past few weeks I have gradually linked all of my websites to the helpdesk and I immediately noticed a drop off in the number of emails I was receiving. The main reason for this is that the helpdesk incorporates a knowledgebase which has the answers to the most commonly asked questions so customers can find the answer to their query without the need to contact me. Better for me, better for the customer.

Let me share some numbers with you:

Before launching the helpdesk, I was receiving, on average, 20 customer support emails per day. Not a huge amount but probably an hours work to answer them all. Therefore, in a normal week I would answer in the region of 140 support emails - maybe 7 hours work - basically a full working day.

During the past month, I have received an average of just 9 customer support emails PER WEEK!!! Barely more than 1 email per day! It also means that the customers that would have sent me the other 130 emails have received an answer to their question instantly rather than having to wait for me to reply to them. A great result all round.

Just to take the above figures a little further, if we assume that it takes one hour to answer 20 emails, then by cutting out 130 emails a week, I have saved myself around 6.5 hours of work a week. Over a year that works out to 338 hours. If an average working day has 8 hours, then this number of hours equates to 42 working days!!

Bottom line - installing the helpdesk may have just given me nearly a month and a half of extra time each year.

So with the above result under my belt I am now going to tackle one of the biggest timewasters on the Internet - spam/junk mail. Even though my helpdesk has cut out the vast majority of support emails, I am still getting around 1000 junk emails everyday. Despite the fact that I have filters in place to delete most of these emails, many still get through and even if I only spend 10 minutes a day deleting them, it is still a wasted ten minutes.

I have given a huge amount of thought as to how best to tackle the spam problem and whilst it would be easy to just 'turn off' my main email addresses and rely solely on the helpdesk, I know that many customers still use these addresses for contact and as such this is not an ideal solution.

Therefore I have decided to use a service called Spam Arrest to tackle my spam problem once and for all.

Spam Arrest works by automatically replying to all emails that are sent to you with a request that the sender visit a web page and type a word into a box on that page. Once the sender has completed this task, their email is forwarded to you and their email address is added to an 'accepted sender' list so that they don't have to complete this task again - all future emails will be directed straight to you. Obviously a spammer or junk emailer is not going to go through the above process and therefore these emails are not forwarded to you so you don't ever have to see them (although you can review them if you wish to ensure that nothing important has been overlooked).

I will be implementing Spam Arrest across my various email addresses over the next week or so and I am confident that my 1000 daily junk emails will be reduced to 0 overnight :-)

If you click the link below you can watch a short video that explains exactly how this simple but effective service works....