Situation

:You are constantly losing track of your customer feedback inside your email, but you don’t have the time to move it somewhere else to organize it.

OR

:You do have a main tool for organizing your customer feedback and testimonials, but you want some way to tag your emails as you get them so you can come back and find them easily when you have time.

 

Your Tools

You’re an Outlook user. Go here for the Gmail Edition and the eMClient Edition (both coming soon!).

 

The Solution

Quickly categorizing (tagging) your emails when you get them allows you to keep customer feedback easy to find when you need it. Either as your main container, or as a quick stop gap solution when you don’t have the time to move the content to your main organizing tools like Evernote or Airtable, etc.

 

The How

I’ve got written steps for readers and a short walk-through video if you need to see the HOW in action.

 

The Steps:

 

1. Find the Categories Menu it on the Home view in Outlook.

 

2. Select it and choose All Categories from the drop down menu.

This is where you can enter your preferred categories/labels that you want to use for your customer feedback. (Need help deciding what categories to use? Read this.)

The ones I show in the example are:

• Challenges Questions & Problems
• General Room for Improvement
• Results Feedback
• Quotables
• Product X-wing Positive Feedback
• Product X-wing Room for Improvement
• Program A Positive Feedback
• Program A Room for Improvement

 

You can change these in the All Categories menu and select colors and change the label names at any time. 

 

3. Tagging Your Emails

Once you’ve got your categories entered, you can begin labeling emails as they come in. To label an email, select the email and then click the Categories menu item and select the category you want. 

You CAN label an email with as many categories as you would like, but you have to do it one at a time.

 

4. Find Emails When You Need Them

Once you have some emails labeled, you can find them by category by changing the Sort By selection and selecting Categories, directly above the email list.

Then you can see all the emails within each category quickly, and find what you need. 

 

5. Un-tagging Emails

If you make a mistake and incorrectly tag an email, select the email you want to fix, and go to Categories in the menu and select Clear All Categories. This will clear all the categories for that email. If you just want to remove one category, then select the undesired category instead of Clear All Categories.

That’s It! You now have a simple system for tagging your emails that contain customer feedback.

 

A Little More About Categories

 I’ve offered some suggested categories to get you started, but I want to emphasize that the best categories are the ones that you will USE, and the ones that make sense to you and will still make sense the next time you need to tag an email. The goal here is to avoid making up tags on the fly and coming up with a simple system that you can use to your advantage to save you time when you need this information. 

If you want to read more about using categories and “containers” to organize your customer feedback, check out this post over at True North Management.

I’m always up for hearing YOUR feedback, so send it my way if you have questions or have a unique way of organizing your feedback that you would like to share!