Better ways to communicate with customers?

[onlinesource]

Looking for suggestions on ticket systems or better ways to communicate with customers. Email is kind of a mess because customers will write me five or six emails at midnight because I don't respond til the next day and I have to delete them and new emails will start up back up old conversations and then I need to combine different discussions. Not to mention I have several people checking emails from the same IMAP.

Is there a better way to do this? I would love a ticket system that works directly with a shopping cart like Magento, allowing me to go to a customer's order and see a constant thread of communications that have happened between us and them.

[keyplyr]

... customers will write me five or six emails at midnight because I don't respond til the next day...

Have you tried an auto-responder?

Maybe include a statement:
"We have received your inquiry and will get back to you shortly... sending additional emails will slow the response time."

[onlinesource]

I've tried that and they still respond to the auto responded. Just makes a mess with emails. I just see big corporations, all the time, that they "email us at [e-mail] and you know that [e-mail] gets thousands of emails every day and maybe 20-30 employees check [e-mail]. Are they just different employee each using their own signature or is there more advanced email clients out there? Cause right now I'm using Outlook and the organization limitation is driving me nuts.

[keyplyr]

For the responder, I use a specific email address: [e-mail].

That seems to help a lot, but I also get a few impatient customers wondering if/when/why.. etc even though my responder answers all that. Comes with the territory.

Large companies usually farm out the CS. [e-mail] typically goes to a queue where CS people draw from.

[piatkow]

There will always be customers who seem to go out of their way to inconvenience themselves.

Certainly many never grasp the idea of an unattended mailbox. The first day that I used a "donotreply" address (I had decided to check the first mailout, just in case) one customer promptly saved that as our new contact address and sent an important order to it.

[keyplyr]

The customers I get annoyed with are the ones that keep using the same email, appending new messages on-and-on for months.

[dpd1]

My favorites are the people that say something like... "Hi... I think I'm going to go with what we talked about a couple months ago... can I order that?"... with no other info included in the email. As if they are the one and only customer you've had in two months.

[ChanandlerBong]

Email convo from today:

Him: I want product XYZ, give me your bank info
Me: we don't do that, I think you're getting us confused with another site.
Him: no, I'm not. You do have it.