Customer Service Email Templates

When a customer creates a new account or subscribes for a newsletter, it’s natural to check their inbox for a confirmation email. But, that doesn’t mean you have to go with the same boring template. A confirmation email is where you can test a new approach.

Don’t go overboard with messaging: The minute a customer gets a confirmation email, their instinct is to click that verification link. So, it’s best to maintain a friendly tone and keep it brief.

Ditch that plain text email: While plain text emails save a lot of time and require minimum effort, they don’t create a great first impression. Here’s where involving a bit of design in the email helps bring out your company’s theme. 

Include your support info: Along with your brand details and FAQs, add your support info so that they can contact you when they need help. The FAQs also come in handy when a customer is unable to verify the email.

Here’s an example of Transwire, getting their welcome message right.

Letting the customer know that the support team has received their query saves a lot of frustration. While autoresponders can be used to acknowledge customer requests, it is important to ensure that you don’t sound robotic.

Keep the message short and crisp: Keep your acknowledgement mail as short as possible. customers don’t want to read a long email, only to find that there’s no solution yet. 

Don’t make it sound automated:  A message sounding like it came straight out of a machine is bound to put people off. Make sure you add a human touch to your auto-reply. Start the response with a warm greeting. Thank your customer for reaching out to you, or apologize if there was a delay from your end.

What sets apart Heap’s email from the rest, is their unique use case and the way they automated it. Whenever their customer sync took more than an hour, their auto-reply acknowledged that there was a delay. This answered the customer’s issue even before they enquired, thus bringing down the number of such queries.

Getting a new customer is great. But unless you create a seamless purchase journey, your customer might not return to do business with you. An order confirmation email is a great way to show how much you care about your customers. 

Get your design team ready: Order confirmation emails have a high open rate, which is why it’s important to show off your design efforts there. Take the help of your design team and come up with a customized template. And yes, don’t forget that you have to present great content as  it sets the tone.

Information is wealth: Every customer would want to know complete details of his/her order, especially when it’s being shipped. Be it the item name, price, tracking code, support info, or customer address, don’t leave out any detail in the email. This will help the customer notify you in advance if there’s an error.

Be strategic: Order confirmation emails can turn out to be a powerful upselling opportunity if utilized properly. This is where you can make customers check out your other products through suggestions. 

Take a look at how Fitbit strategically placed their store icon in this email to nudge customers to explore their product.

Customer feedback is invaluable to companies — it helps you understand your brand’s strengths and weaknesses, and also influences the product roadmap. Drafting a survey is an easy task to do, if you’re clear about the objective of collecting the feedback. Getting customers to fill the survey is the challenge. To help you increase the number of customers filling the survey, we’ve listed two points that you can include in the email: 

State the objective: A customer is more likely to fill in a survey when they know that their response will be put to some productive use. You might be collecting feedback to improve the customer experience or the product, but don’t forget to mention the objective for collecting feedback. This can go a long way in getting your customers to respond.  

Explain the importance: By spelling out the value your customers' words hold to your brand, you’re sure to get more responses to your survey.

Here’s how CLEAR drafted their message. 

It’s not every day you bump into a customer who wants to make your product better. So, if you see a customer suggesting an innovative improvement, never forget to appreciate the effort. 

Don’t take forever to reply: A quick reply from your side would mean a lot to the customer and make them feel that they have contributed meaningfully. It will also encourage them to suggest more improvements in the future.

Thank them: Go beyond the formal ‘thank you’. Tell them how good their idea is, and talk of the positive impact it will have on the product/service. Also add that you are grateful to them for taking the time to contribute a great idea.

Give something in return (optional): If you feel that an email apology won’t suffice, give something in return as a token of appreciation. In fact, it need not even be a voucher or a gift card. A simple, yet creative reward would work wonders.

When a customer suggested that Buffer could notify users whenever they were mentioned online, this is what Buffer had to say.

While your customer’s brain might be an amazing source for feature enhancements, sometimes, customers have demands that can’t be met. There might be many reasons backing your decision of not acting on the request, however, letting your customers know that is hard. We’ve listed a few points below that you can use to write your response:  

Be direct, but not rude: Rather than beating around the bush, tell your customers that you do not plan on picking up their feature right away. If there’s a solid reason why, state it. It could be because your developers don’t have enough bandwidth, or your roadmap has already been fixed.Whatever be it, let your customers know. If there’s a possibility that you might pick it up later, or an affordable workaround, add that too. 

Try to understand their needs better: If you are getting repeat requests for a particular feature, try to hear the customers' reasoning behind it. It might change your perspective about the feature request. Moreover, with a clear understanding of where the customer is coming from, you should be able to suggest appropriate workarounds. 

For example, here’s an agent from the Freshdesk support team responding to a customer who wanted the Freshdesk mobile app to have multiple accounts logged in at once. 

When you’ve delivered a poor customer service experience, maneuvering through the predicament can seem challenging. To ensure that your brand does not become infamous for delivering bad customer service, you need to apologize, fix the issue, and make up for it right away.  

Here’s a detailed look at how to go about doing that:

Always acknowledge your mistake: The first and most important step when you’ve delivered an unsatisfactory experience is to acknowledge it. If the situation calls for an apology from your end, then you must apologize right away.

Fix the issue in hand: The next step is to address or fix the customer's issue immediately. We’ve discussed different ways to tackle each example of bad customer service. Work on implementing the right solutions with immediate effect.

Make up for the poor customer experience: To fully redeem your actions, you can take things a step further by offering a discount, sending a gift, or upgrading to a higher plan for free. This can help in making up for the poor customer experience delivered.

Downtime means trouble. While teams are scurrying to get the issue fixed, tickets are already pouring into your team’s inbox. The customers are frustrated and all it takes is just one misplaced word to ruin a sincere justification.

Play no blame games: Think twice before blaming another team in your apology mail. Your customers are waiting for an explanation and broadcasting your inner conflicts only makes it worse. Center the email around the problem.

Explain what went wrong: Most customer-facing teams expect their users to understand the situation but end up keeping them in the dark. That’s why it is important to give them a context of what really caused the network outage. By explaining the what and why of the issue and how it will be fixed, you can regain their trust. Make sure to stick to easy-to-understand language while going over the technical details. 

Pro tip: Customers tend to get concerned over whether there has been any data breach. So, make sure you add a status about it in the email.

Here’s how GoDaddy got their apology email right.

Your team might face an issue of the wrong deployment – be it with emails or product/ feature releases. While these are one-off cases, when they occur, the support team might see a flurry of tickets reporting the issue. To make up for your ‘oops moment’, the message you craft needs to sound strong and sincere.

Offer antidotes: After communicating the mistake, find ways to remedy it. For example, if a feature was scheduled for release in the future, you can tell your customers that you’re rolling it back to polish the finer details. Also, make sure you give them an estimate on when they can expect the feature.

Give your customers some love: Before you end your email, let your customers know how much they mean to you. Spell out the value they hold to your team and your brand. This is also a good time to reassure your customers that another mistake like this won't occur again. eBags did a neat job tackling this situation. Take a look: 

Price increase can turn even your loyal customers against you. That’s why you need to be extra careful while communicating a price increase. 

Inform in advance: Each customer would have an allocated budget for your product/service. And, a price increase means changing the current arrangement. So, don’t wait till the last minute to inform your customer of the price increase. This would bring down your reputation, leading to customer churn. 

Quote solid reasons: No customer is going to accept the price increase easily and an email with no explanation can only make it worse. As an organization, it is your duty to tell the what, why and how behind the price increase. It’s also important to remind them of the value they are getting from the product/service. This way, the price increase will be received in a better way at least by one portion of your customers.

Here's an example of Amazon's crisp and clear price increase email.

Nothing is more painful than losing customers by a whisker. With so many products out there, it’s easy for customers to lose their way. Customers might either decide, at the last minute, not to try your product, or might accidentally close the tab before purchasing the product. Such customers who arrive till the checkout stage are those with high potential to turn into a paying customer, and all it takes is just a small push to bring them back on track. Here are the items you need to add to your cart abandonment email: 
– Cart items along with price
– Direct purchase link
– Limited period discount
– Survey 
– Support information

And a sense of urgency.

Look how Talking Shop has squeezed all these into one email in a compact manner.

If your business offers a free trial, getting the customer to convert into a paid customer is a crucial task. While there might be many things you’d want to say to your customers, your message needs to hit the right chord as it will make or break a potential paid customer. Here are a few points for you to include in your message:

Provide details: A customer who is trying your product might not actively keep track of the duration of the trial period. As a service representative, it’s on you to keep them informed. Clearly mention the date and time of expiry along with the price of the plan they’re trying out. Also, include any changes that might occur once they do/don’t convert. 

Capture the best of your features: The customer probably knows the worth of your product. However, this is a good chance for you to showcase the highlights of your product. It’s important not to overdo it as it might irk the customer. Squarespace has succinctly captured the best of their features (see image below).

Offer help: Your customers might have questions about the subscription, plans, billing, and more. To make your customers feel more comfortable reaching out to you for questions, mention it in your message. You can also redirect your customers to your self-service portal.

That’s how Grammarly used new year’s day to give out their limited period upgrade offer.

There are various reasons for a customer to withdraw from a product/service– product usage, budget, change of plans, anything. But, letting go of them doesn’t mean you won’t cross paths again. If there’s something important happening with your product/service, giving your former customers a heads up is a great chance to bring them back.

Don’t be desperate: The customer left you for a reason and an email from your side is just another spam in his/her inbox. Even if they open your email, a pushy tone is the last thing they would want to see. Think from their perspective when structuring such emails. Being desperate is never going to help. Keep the tone subtle and elegant. 

Show them what you have to offer: Things have changed and your product now has additional capabilities. Let your former customers know what your product now has to offer, as the lack of the feature might be the reason the customer discontinued using your product.