Answering customer email: who writes the reply while you're busy?
It's Tuesday morning, you're in the middle of a file and your inbox shows nine unread messages. You've answered three of them before: when will the invoice arrive, has my application been received, can you send this document again. You know the reply won't go out until after lunch, or tomorrow.
This is work nobody plans and everybody does. It isn't difficult. It just keeps interrupting the work that does need your attention.
How customer email usually goes now
An email comes in. You read it, look in the file or the schedule for the answer, type a reply, read it over and send it. With a simple question, the searching and proofreading take more time than the typing.
A worked example, not a measurement: if you answer twelve of these emails a day and each takes six minutes, you lose well over an hour a day. That is five to six hours a week, spread across odd moments when you were actually doing something else. Fill in your own numbers. It's the sum that matters.
What an agent takes over
The Customer Service role drafts replies for customer conversations and triages incoming requests. Those are two steps you now do one after the other yourself: deciding what counts as a standard question, and writing a draft for it in your tone, with the details in it that you would otherwise look up yourself.
The agent prepares a reply. It does not decide in your place. A complaint, a sensitive message or a question with a decision behind it is for you.
To read your email, the agent needs a connection. There are getting-started guides for Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. For this you register your own app with the provider, so expect a short one-time setup.
Approving an outcome, not an intention
Many services have you set a rule in advance, for example: automatically send a confirmation when an email mentions an invoice. You are then approving a rule. What that rule does with a tricky email on a Tuesday morning, you only see afterwards.
At Stilops it works the other way round. First a test run happens on real messages. For each email you see what the agent would reply, in what tone and with which details. That is an outcome: a concrete reply you can read, adjust or reject, the way you would proofread a colleague's draft. Only after your approval does anything happen. If you don't approve, nothing has changed.
What you check in the test run
Take a quarter of an hour for the first test run and watch for four things:
- Is the content right: are amounts, dates and names correct?
- Is the tone right: is this how you write, or does it sound like a form letter?
- Is the sorting right: do the emails you want to read yourself stay with you?
- Is anything missing: a question the agent didn't recognise as a question?
The approval moment doesn't get lighter the longer the agent works with you. It sometimes takes a few minutes, and that is a deliberate choice. A customer email is your company's calling card.
What it can deliver
The gain isn't in the typing but in the searching and the switching. If the draft is already waiting, a six-minute email probably becomes a check of one or two minutes. That is an assumption. How much of your email consists of standard questions is something the test run will show.
What it costs
Customer Service costs 229 euros per month excluding VAT, with 100 tasks included. With your first employee you get 4 free tasks, enough to see the test run on your own email before anything is deducted from your quota.
Who it suits
For offices and businesses that receive a recurring stream of similar questions and have no IT department. Less so for a practice where every email calls for its own judgement: it helps there too, but you will rewrite more often.
How much of today's email is a question you have answered before?