With Proactive Outreach in Freshdesk, your support teams can identify, understand, and reach out proactively to customers the moment they run into trouble, in turn creating a memorable brand experience for them.
Email Outreach
With Email outreach you can now send out emails proactively to let customers know about a current issue/problem. Let’s say you are an e-commerce business and one of your servers are down, your customers in that region may not be able to complete a purchase or a payment. Before customers encounter the issue and start complaining, send out a quick email to customers in that region, informing them about the server outage and when they can start shopping again on your website.
A quick guide to setting up an outreach:
Log in as an admin
Go to Admin > Workflows > Proactive Outreach
If you are looking to reach out via email, click on 'Setup outreach' from the ‘Email outreach’ grid.
In 4 simple steps, you will be able to set up an email outreach:
Import contacts: Click on the import contacts grid and choose the csv file with details such as name, email, company, phone, etc. Click 'Proceed'.
Note:
1. If you are in the 'Enterprise/Forest' plan you can do up to 50 email outreaches per month
2. If you are in the 'Pro/Estate' plan, you can do up to 30 email outreaches per month
3. If you are in the 'Garden' plan you can do up to 5 email outreaches per month
4. You can import up to 1500 contacts for an email outreach
Click ‘Upload a file’ and choose the file from your storage. The columns in the csv file are mapped to the relevant contact fields in your Freshdesk account. Review if the columns have been mapped correctly before proceeding with the outreach.
Note: The contact export for Proactive outreach is essentially the same as the contact export you perform to update customer data. When importing contacts with the company column, ensure that you set the "view all ticket" value according to your requirement. If it is left empty or set to False or if the column is not added at all, contacts associated with a particular company will not be able to view all tickets related to their company. Only when it is set to True the contacts will have access to view all tickets of their company. Therefore, please ensure that you set this value based on the requirements of the contact profile.
Compose Email: Choose the support email address from which the outreach email is to be sent.
Compose the subject line and the body of the email that will be sent to the list of contacts in the uploaded csv file. You can also add placeholders from the bottom of the editor to dynamically populate values and add a touch of personalization. Read more about placeholders here.
Once you have composed the email, you can format it, add a solution article or a canned response from the toolbar at the bottom of the editor.
You can also preview your email by clicking 'Preview' and send yourself a test email by clicking 'Send test email' on the following pop up window.
Choose a time: Once the email is drafted, choose the time at which the outreach is to be triggered. You can choose to trigger the outreach right away or schedule it to be sent at a particular date and time. Clicking on the tile that displays the date and time will let you choose when the outreach is to be triggered.
Give the email outreach a name and description and click ‘Proceed’.
Note that the name of the outreach is different from the subject line of the email and will not be displayed in the email.
Confirmation: Review your outreach and click 'Finish' to complete the set up.
Saved or scheduled outreaches can be deleted or altered to suit the requirement.
Note: The proactive outreach emails will not automatically be converted into tickets