4 Logistics Best Practices For Maximizing Help Scout
While chatting with different customers, we see a few ways folks in the logistics space use various portions of Help Scout. With every business being a bit different this doesn’t get into specifics, but it can be used as a guide to spark ideas on what might work the best for your exact needs.
Tags
If you need emails to stand out in your inbox, or need to categorize certain kinds of emails, tags are a great resource. Tags can be added automatically to emails via workflows, or manually on individual emails. You can also search for all emails with a particular tag, and report on all emails that have a specific tag.
Examples:
- Billing question
- [Shipping vendor]
- Tracking number needed
- Order processed
- Follow up
- [Product/service type]
Further reading: Create and manage tags / Categorize incoming email
Workflows
If you find yourself doing a lot of busy work when dealing with customer emails, so much of that can be automated. In Help Scout we call automations workflows, and they can be set up to either run automatically when certain conditions are met in Help Scout, or manually on individual emails.
Manual workflows are especially helpful to use after reading an individual email, they can take many actions for you (e.g. add a tag, add a note, reply to the customer, change the status) all with one click.
Examples:
- Assign emails sent from specific people to a Team (check out Teams in Help Scout!)
- Automatically close out emails that do not need an action on them, but need to be kept for historical purposes
- Move email from one inbox to another (e.g. from Shipping to Billing)
- Follow up with customers automatically after a certain period of time
- If a custom field is set, that can trigger an assignment to a specific user or Team.
Further reading: Get started with workflows / Automate your inbox
Reporting
Using either tags or custom fields, you can create reporting views that allow you to get an accurate understanding of the types of issues you are seeing weekly/monthly/quarterly. We see logistics customers setting up these kinds of reporting views:
- Freight line or shipping vendor
- Order statuses
- Defects/Order issues
- Fulfillment
- Individual product inquires
Further reading: Understanding reports / Use views to filter reports