5 Message Management Housecleaning Tips for 2015

The Holidays are over and returns have been processed. You finally have time to breath before the next big sales rush hits. Now's a great time to step back and take a look at your message management strategy and do a little housekeeping to prepare for the rest of the year. Here are 5 tips that can help get you ready for 2015 and improve your organization and response times.

This segment was aired on eBay Radio on February 10th. Click here to listen.

• Update the users in your system. If you've had temporary staff or holiday help that no longer answers messages on your behalf, don't forget to suspend or remove their access from the system. It's also a good time to be sure you've done the same for any employees that are no longer with the company.

• Create new and refresh existing auto-responders and standard replies. Policies may have changed, shipping times decreased or perhaps you found you received the same question about that Hot Pink Widget you just started carrying. Now's the time to review your auto-responders and standard replies to make sure they are up-to-date. Remove responses that are no longer used and add new ones that reflect trends from the previous season.

• Run reports to determine the health of your response rates. The Average Response Times report for users or folders shows how long it takes to respond to a message over a period of time. Average Resolve Time shows how long it took to close out a message (changing the status to closed). Reply Time Summary by folder gives you a breakdown of folders and average response times in groups (e.g. 50% were responded to in less than 4 hours, 30% in under 12 hours, etc.). All of these reports can help determine how efficient a staff member is performing or whether a particular response for a store or category was better than others.

• Archive your emails. If issues have been resolved, make sure their status is changed to closed. Export messages for storage outside of ReplyManager to save space. 

• Check and clean your recycle bin. You may have deleted unwanted messages, but don't forget to also purge the recycle bin. As a fail-safe, deleted messages are stored in the Recycle Bin until purged. You can also set automated purges to empty the recycle bin after a specific number of days. An additional space saving tip is to remove attachments in bulk, without deleting the actual email. 

No-one really looks forward to "cleaning house," but once it's done, we think you'll find answering messages easier and more efficient.